New York Times: America Is Not Ready For The End of Roe v. Wade

Bring it on.

New York Times:

“Imagine that every state were free to choose whether to allow Black people and white people to marry. Some states would permit such marriages; others probably wouldn’t. The laws would be a mishmash, and interracial couples would suffer, legally consigned to second-class status depending on where they lived.

It seems an unthinkable scenario in 2022. That’s because in 1967 the Supreme Court unanimously ruled that barring interracial marriage, as 16 states still did, violates the 14th Amendment’s guarantee of equal protection. “Under our Constitution, the freedom to marry, or not marry, a person of another race resides with the individual, and cannot be infringed by the state,” the court stated in Loving v. Virginia.

More than half a century on, Loving is considered one of the court’s great rulings, and yet it was not universally admired at the time. Southern states complied only grudgingly; Alabama didn’t repeal its miscegenation law until 2000. That’s the point of having a federal Constitution that is supreme; the guarantees and rights in that document apply to all Americans equally, wherever they live. The court system — and the Supreme Court in particular — exists to protect those rights when state and local authorities refuse to.

Many who oppose Roe v. Wade today, and even some who support it, argue that the 1973 ruling short-circuited a running debate over abortion, a debate that should have been allowed to play out in the states, many of which had long banned abortion. This is one of the main justifications in the leaked draft opinion in which a majority of Supreme Court justices appear ready to overturn Roe and Planned Parenthood v. Casey, the 1992 decision that preserved Roe’s central holding with certain restrictions.

The problem with this reasoning is that, as in Loving, leaving the matter to individual states and the political process means that millions of Americans will be denied their fundamental rights — in this case, the right of women to decide what happens inside their own bodies. …”