South Dakota recently passed a bill outlawing most abortions. Now of course such a bill is almost certainly unconstitutional according to court precedent from Roe vs Wade, and the bill is likely to be immediately challenged and prevented from taking effect.

But that's the idea.

See the same people who whine and complain about black-robe-wearing judicial activist judges who legislate from the bench are the very people who want to get their law in front of a sufficient number of black-robe-wearing judicial activist judges who they hope will legislate from the bench in their favor. Right-wing anti-choice conservatives have picked this fight in South Dakota because they're hoping that from that district they will find judges who are sympathetic to their cause. What they're doing is basically judge shopping.

They've picked this fight because they're hoping to get their law challenged all the way to the Supreme Court, where they hope that the now-conservative-slanted court will uphold the law rather than overturn it. Or better still, they'd love to see the Supreme Court uphold their law and reverse the Roe vs Wade decision.

What the anti-choice crowd may not be counting on is that even conservative judges aren't always as obsessively political as they are. They may take a very dim view of this obvious attempt to manipulate the courts. And even if the judges personally have a sympathetic ear, they may still yield to judicial precedent-- the idea of stare decisis, standing by a decision.

Mind you, stare decisis isn't always for the best. Bowers vs Hardwick, which allowed states to criminalize private sexual acts by consenting adults, was overturned by Lawrence vs Texas, and rightly so. Brown vs Board of Education overturned Plessy v. Ferguson by invalidating the doctrine of "separate but equal." In both of these cases, however, overturning stare decisis led to greater freedom and more equality. Overturning Roe vs Wade would have the opposite effect.

If the right-wing anti-choice crowd is to be believed, women have unprotected sex so they can joyfully skip to the abortion clinic, where people inside dance and sing and serve hors d'overs. Curiously enough the anti-choice people, though they love the fetus, don't seem to care much about actual children; they often oppose education, health care, and other social programs for kids. Even more strangely, these same people, who chant about the sanctity of life, also support the death penalty. So fetuses are great, but actual people... not so much.

Even if you're not interested in the emotional issue of abortion (and honestly, I'm really not personally that interested), you should take notice. If the right wingers manage to get their way on this issue by shopping around for the right judges and installing others to slant the courts in their favor, do you really think that they'll stop at overturning abortion rights?

---Nick

vote FOR this article vote AGAINST this article flag as spam/abuse
Log in if you are spatula for more options. 
Find similar articles