I thought I had steeled myself for the moment of Roe being overturned, but it turns out I'm really, really angry right now. Not that my emotional state is of particular interest to anyone, but there it is.
I’m not the only one who figured that the best that could possibly happen would be that Chief Justice Rogers would persuade his fellow Justices that it would be sufficient to allow states to make it practically impossible to terminate a pregnancy safely and legally, without explicitly overturning Roe v. Wade. That would have increased the actual suffering in the lives of many, many women (and non-women), and would have been outrageous and terrible and very bad, but might not have opened the door to further radical activism quite so wide.
I can’t remember if I’ve posted this before, but I believe there is no other topic, certainly not in my lifetime, in which the ability to accumulate votes on the Supreme Court to reverse a decision has been a campaign issue in the Presidential Election. Presidents have campaigned generally on the sort of person they would nominate, but only on the right to terminate a pregnancy has the accumulation of five votes to change the status quo been a campaign issue. It seems in retrospect that the legal theory, in the end, was always going to be we have the votes. I don’t know if there will be other such issues in the future—I don’t even know if we’re going to have Presidential elections in the future, honestly—but it sure seems like we have the votes has become the guiding principle in the Courts, as it has in the Senate.
Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.