The headline is Digby's ending, summarizing paragraph, here. Bless Alito for his limitations, else the draft opinion would have been even more dreadful. The intent was there. Yet, he could only write so meanly, even assisted by assiduous and capable like-minded law clerks. His opining confederates might also have been something of a limitation. However, as a draft, the final could be worse rather than better.
___________UPDATE__________
That Alito's tortured "abortion is not mentioned in the Constitution" hocus pocus, is in the above linked items, noted in the context that, in fact, women are never expressly mentioned in the Constitution's original document.
Indeed, passage of the Nineteenth Amendment was without explicit mention of "women." Instead that amendment bans discrimination against any citizen's right to vote based upon sex.
The suggestion here is not only that abortion should be legalized, but that it is time to resurrect The Equal Rights Amendment, and to enlarge a text, officially, to cover multiple aspects of gender rights. I.e., while correcting things, a text could be written including the right to practice contraception, and to medically alter one's body in line with one's gender identification or in any other manner (which would include embryo/fetal removal as well as enshrining beyond later attack the option of permanent contraception via vasectomy or Fallopian tube tying, as well as IUD usage where reversibility is desired). Some rights exist now, but with the current packed, biased Court now gutting Roe v. Wade, we see how Constitutional amendment is the safest form of permanent protective law.
The aim - Get modern and decent in all degrees, by expressly expanding a singular Constitutional gender-neutral voting right to other needed permanent aspects of reform.
Support for such an approach should be widespread and compelling. A political party backing such a methodology should prosper in balloting, long-term, for the effort.
FURTHER: Ruth Bader Ginsberg, then a federal appeals court judge, wrote a twelve page essay, SOME THOUGHTS ON AUTONOMY AND EQUALITY IN RELATION TO ROE V WADE, 63 North Carolina Law Review, 375 (1985). Her concluding paragraph summarized:
Overall, the Court's Roe position is weakened, I believe, by the opinion's concentration on a medically approved autonomy idea, to the exclusion of a constitutionally based sex-equality perspective. I understand the view that for political reasons the reproductive autonomy controversy should be isolated from the general debate on equal rights, responsibilities, and opportunities for women and men. I expect, however, that organized and determined opposing efforts to inform and persuade the public on the abortion issue will continue through the 1980s. In that process there will be opportunities for elaborating in public forums the equal-regard conception of women's claims to reproductive choice uncoerced and unsteered by government.
Surely
the thinking within the full essay, as so summarized, is parallel to
although not congruent with the suggestion that it is time to dust off
and polish the Equal Rights Amendment approach, revised in a way to
cover body autonomy generically, i.e., tattoo, piercing, plastic
surgery. dressing, removals or additions, or other ways an individual
may want to assert and exercise a free body autonomy right; one enacted
into the Constitution as a part wholly immune from any Court's will to
declare it "unconstitutional."
The process of amending the document is burdensome, as past advocates of amending the Constitution to override Roe have discovered; but the aim is flawless.
Moreover,
there can be argument that aggressively and affirmatively moving in
that direction will move the needle from abortion hating vs. abortion as
a right, "The Abortion Issue," to a fuller perspective on humane
body autonomy norms our civilized nation, at this time, should pursue.
Opinions can differ, but choosing the battle grounds and positioning
favorably has been a precursor to military success, and should not be
ill-respected as a way to best pose a current question of policy.
Finally, rereading the headline to this post, language taken from Digby, shows the conclusive ideas of Hullabaloo posting square well with an all-States-wide consistent approach as would apply in seeking unequivocal amendment of the Constitution.
LAST: "States Rights" divisiveness as per the Alito draft opinion is a throwback to worse times, not cognizant of federal jurisdiction over interstate commerce and the mail, (where travel to other states might be necessitated along with assaults against mailed first trimester medications can be forestalled) but those problems arise in a States Rights dressing of the issue rather than under federalism norms.
Of course, abortion haters will be active trying to twist Roe's exit into a Draconian federal abortion hating norm. But the fight for uniformity is best posed federally and not by burdensome state by state warfare. The problem will be whose federal aims win, if things are not done state by state. Currently Minnesota has its own Constitution, with abortion legal per judicial Minnesota precedent. Strategy and tactics will vary with the majority legislative moods in differing States.
