Justice Alito’s reasoning is stuck in the 1600s - Literally

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K Graham
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Justice Alito’s reasoning is stuck in the 1600s - Literally

Post by K Graham »

I blame Republicans and the Religious Right for giving us unqualified justices who want to do nothing but legislate from the bench. But when you look at the arguments for banning Roe.... HFS!! This idiot wants to rely on a Puritan type mentality to justify subjugating women.

The Supreme Court's Leaked Draft Is Full Of Mystifying Arguments Against Abortion Rights
The 98-page draft, which Chief Justice John Roberts confirmed was legitimate but not final, was authored by Justice Samuel Alito, one of the panel’s most conservative jurists. Here are some of the most confounding passages in the leaked text.

It’s obsessed with keeping women in the past.

Alito repeatedly argued throughout the draft that Roe v. Wade was a mistake because, up until the 1973 ruling, banning abortion was simply the American way.

“Until the latter part of the 20th century, there was no support in American law for a constitutional right to obtain an abortion. Zero. None. No state constitutional provision had recognized such a right. Until a few years before Roe was handed down, no federal or state court had recognized such a right.”

Alito is right: Abortion was widely banned throughout the centuries of U.S. history when women were legally regarded as second-class citizens, kept out of medical institutions and public office and banned from owning property. They didn’t gain the right to vote until 1920, and Black women faced barriers to voting until Congress passed the Voting Rights Act in 1965 ― just eight years before the court decided Roe.

It wouldn’t be until after the Roe decision that all women in the U.S. gained the rights to apply for a credit card without a man’s permission, demand protection from being fired over a pregnancy, and sue workplace sexual harassers. Up until the 1990s, several states did not recognize marital rape as a crime.

Legal progress on female bodily autonomy was made after women fought their way into the decision-making spaces men had long excluded them from. But here’s what Alito had to say:

“The inescapable conclusion is that a right to abortion is not deeply rooted in the nation’s history and traditions,” he wrote. “On the contrary, an unbroken tradition of prohibiting abortion on pain of criminal punishment persisted from the earliest days of the common law until 1973.”

It repeatedly cites a misogynist from the 1600s who had women executed for “witchcraft.”
Most Americans have probably never heard of Sir Matthew Hale, an English jurist who was born in 1609. But Alito cites him a half-dozen times throughout his draft as proof that abortion bans are an indispensable part of our country’s heritage.

“Hale wrote that if a physician gave a woman ‘with child’ a ‘potion’ to cause an abortion, and the woman died, it was ‘murder’ because the potion was given ‘unlawfully to destroy her child within her,’” Alito wrote in defense of outlawing abortion in 2022.

It’s not surprising that Hale was opposed to abortion, given what else reporters recently dug up about him. His legacy includes having two women executed for “witchcraft” and writing in defense of marital rape.

Though Alito holds him up as the authority on the criminality of aborting a fetus, Hale also advocated for the death penalty for children as young as 14.

If all medical standards from Hale’s life were applied today, we wouldn’t know about the existence of germs, medicinal ingredients would include the ground-up skulls of executed criminals and live worms, and doctors would cover ailing patients in leeches to suck our their blood. For most of Hale’s lifetime, doctors didn’t even have a scientific understanding of where babies came from.

It ignores major barriers to voting on abortion.

Alito wrote throughout his draft that abortion should be a matter of state law. If people want access to it, he wrote, they simply need to elect people who support it.

“Our decision returns the issue of abortion to those legislative bodies, and it allows women on both sides of the abortion issue to seek to affect the legislative process by influencing public opinion, lobbying legislators, voting, and running for office,” he wrote in one passage. “Women are not without electoral or political power.”

Yet voting rights are under siege like never before, with many conservatives using the myth of widespread voter fraud to justify policies that make it harder for working-class people and ethnic minorities to cast votes. State legislatures that have recently passed such laws ― which include crackdowns on voter identification, early voting and voter registration windows ― are the same ones that plan to outlaw abortion as soon as possible.

Despite those issues, the Supreme Court made it clear last year that it will not act to stop voter suppression laws.

Furthermore, the will of the voters does not always determine the makeup of our country’s highest political and legal bodies. Alito himself was nominated to the high court by a man who became president without winning the popular vote. So were three of the other four justices who apparently want to strike down Roe: Brett Kavanaugh, Amy Coney Barrett and Neil Gorsuch.

It repeats “fetal heartbeat” myths.

The recent wave of abortion bans tied to the presence of “fetal heartbeats” is not based on real science, doctors have said for years. But Alito repeats the myths written those laws anyway, calling them “factual findings.”

The Mississippi legislature “found that at five or six weeks’ gestational age an ‘unborn human beings heart begins beating,’” Alito wrote in one passage.

But doctors say it’s wrong to call that a heartbeat, and doing so is just an attempt to manipulate people’s emotions. At six weeks of gestation, the cardiac activity in an embryo ― which is not yet called a fetus ― “doesn’t at all resemble what would eventually become a functioning human adult heart,” Dr. Colleen McNicholas, an obstetrician-gynecologist who performs abortions, told HuffPost in 2019.

“At that point, it really is just these two tubes with a couple of layers of cardiac or heart cells that can vibrate or cause some sort of movement that we use colloquially to talk about a ‘fetal heartbeat.’”

It treats pregnancy and motherhood like no big deal.

Without offering any pushback, Alito summarizes a hollow argument by the anti-abortion movement: that being pregnant and being a mother aren’t as difficult as they used to be.

“Attitudes about the pregnancy of unmarried women have changed drastically; that federal and state laws ban discrimination on the basis of pregnancy, that leave for pregnancy and childbirth are now guaranteed by law in many cases, that the costs of medical care associated with pregnancy are covered by insurance or government assistance,” Alito wrote.

It would be an appropriate spot to note that the U.S. is one of only six countries in the world without national paid family leave. The rest of the world averages 29 paid weeks. It’s also generous to say that pregnancy-related leave from work is promised “in many cases,” as only 10 states and Washington, D.C., have made their own laws mandating paid family leave.

Contrary to Alito’s characterization, pregnancy and childbirth are not free. The average cost to have a baby in the U.S. is nearly $11,000 ― and that’s without any complications. Accounting for care needed before and after delivery can raise the bill to $30,000. Those costs also vary wildly from state to state.

It claims Roe has made Americans more divided.

Alito also harped on how much the decisions in Roe and Planned Parenthood v. Casey ― a 1992 Supreme Court decision that upheld the former ― have divided the country.

“Roe was egregiously wrong from the start,” Alito wrote. “Its reasoning was exceptionally weak, and the decision has had damaging consequences. And far from bringing about a national settlement of the abortion issue, Roe and Casey have enflamed debate and deepened division.”

But extensive polling shows that public opinion on abortion has been largely stable in recent decades. While many Americans favor some restrictions on who can perform abortions and when, 6 in 10 Americans today oppose overturning Roe. Young adults are also more supportive of abortion access, polling shows, indicating that support for protecting the procedure may increase over time.
"I am not an American ... In my view premarital sex should be illegal" - Ajax18
K Graham
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Re: Justice Alito’s reasoning is stuck in the 1600s - Literally

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Re: Justice Alito’s reasoning is stuck in the 1600s - Literally

Post by Gunnar »

K Graham wrote:
Thu May 05, 2022 2:16 pm
I blame Republicans and the Religious Right for giving us unqualified justices who want to do nothing but legislate from the bench. But when you look at the arguments for banning Roe.... HFS!! This idiot wants to rely on a Puritan type mentality to justify subjugating women.

The Supreme Court's Leaked Draft Is Full Of Mystifying Arguments Against Abortion Rights

I fully agree with your and that article's assessment of Alito's reasoning. I think it is disgraceful and tragic that anyone with that level of irrational and medieval thinking could have been elevated to the highest court in what is touted as a democratic republic with a government supposed to be of, by and for the people, as famously and brilliantly stated by Abraham Lincoln in his Gettysburg address. It has become increasingly clear that the last thing the current hard core of the GOP really wants is a "government of, by and for the people." What they really seem to want is an authoritarian autocracy, perhaps even a theocracy, that aspires to severely suppress the independent thoughts and right to vote of all who disagree with them, even if they constitute an overwhelming majority.

They seem to regard the 2nd Amendment as the most important amendment, to be used as a check on reliance on the 1st Amendment by any who disagree with them.
Last edited by Gunnar on Fri May 06, 2022 6:38 pm, edited 2 times in total.
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Re: Justice Alito’s reasoning is stuck in the 1600s - Literally

Post by Gunnar »

K Graham wrote:
Fri May 06, 2022 1:39 pm
img_1_1651844348825.jpg
Yes! For that they deserve impeachment (which is, unfortunately impossible in today's political environment) and should never have been confirmed as Supreme Court Justices in the first place. The only one of the current conservatives on the court, in my opinion, who deserves any significant amount of respect is John Roberts.
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Re: Justice Alito’s reasoning is stuck in the 1600s - Literally

Post by Manetho »

Gunnar wrote:
Fri May 06, 2022 6:24 pm
The only one of the current conservatives on the court, in my opinion, who deserves any significant amount of respect is John Roberts.
I want to note here that Roberts has been a lifelong enemy of the Voting Rights Act, trying to weaken it back when he was a staffer in Reagan's Justice Department and effectively gutting it in Shelby County v. Holder in 2013.
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Re: Justice Alito’s reasoning is stuck in the 1600s - Literally

Post by Gunnar »

Manetho wrote:
Fri May 06, 2022 6:55 pm
Gunnar wrote:
Fri May 06, 2022 6:24 pm
The only one of the current conservatives on the court, in my opinion, who deserves any significant amount of respect is John Roberts.
I want to note here that Roberts has been a lifelong enemy of the Voting Rights Act, trying to weaken it back when he was a staffer in Reagan's Justice Department and effectively gutting it in Shelby County v. Holder in 2013.

Yes, I realize that, and that he fully deserves criticism for some horrible decisions, but not all of his decisions have sided with his more extreme conservative colleagues. With pivotal votes, Chief Justice John Roberts confounds conservatives and liberals He occasionally gets it at least somewhat right.
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Re: Justice Alito’s reasoning is stuck in the 1600s - Literally

Post by Gunnar »

As Lawrence O'Donnell clearly articulated, Samuel Alito's Lies Did Not Stop In His Confirmation Hearing In fact, as he also made clear, at least 5 of the 6 conservative justices on the Supreme Court lied under oath in their confirmation hearings in order to get installed on the court. Why are not more people as livid with rage over this as O'Donnell is? This overturn of the right of women to have control over their bodies and choose abortion rather than be forced to carry an unwanted pregnancy to term, whether because of rape, incest, her own health, and even to save her life is highly discriminatory and will hit the poorest of us the hardest. Does anyone actually believe that the majority of top GOP leaders would not want their own daughters, wives or other important and well loved female relatives in their lives should be forcibly denied that option in such cases?

Another thing that ought to be considered is what affect will universal banning of abortion have on crime" As Michael Smerconish pointed out, there is strong evidence that banning of all abortions will lead to higher crime rates as the unwanted babies that their mothers are forced to carry to term are far more likely to lack nurturing environments in which to grow up and be protected, thus far more likely to feel unloved and lack opportunities for good educations and job opportunities. After Roe vs. Wade was passed, crime rates dropped dramatically, about 15 years or so afterwards -- the time it would take for children resulting from mothers denied abortion to grow up to be problem delinquents. States with higher abortion rates tend to have crime rates as much as 50% lower than states with the lowest abortion rates. This can, of course, be partially attributable to the fact that states with the lowest abortion rates also tend to have the highest poverty rates.
No precept or claim is more suspect or more likely to be false than one that can only be supported by invoking the claim of Divine authority for it--no matter who or what claims such authority.
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