Leaked Supreme Court Decision signals majority set to overturn Roe v. Wade

[BrianSoddingBoru4]

You said it yourself - a whopping great majority of American voters favour access to abortion. There are enough independent voters furious enough over this to vote not-Republican in the fall and shift things towards Democrats (not a guarantee, of course, but a likely scenario). It is certainly going to motivate Democrats to get out and vote.

Codifying Roe v Wade would have nothing at all to keep it from being overturned.

Boru

What we're looking at here is a nationwide version of "The Boy Who Cried Wolf." Democrats have been running on protecting abortion rights for eons, but have not done anything about it other than hope the Supreme Court did not overturn that right. So voters will suddenly be more motivated on abortion now? Under what pretense? The idea that now, after decades, Dems might actually do something about it? Fool me once...

You can absolutely pass legislation that protects abortion rights without using the legal logic (right to privacy) used in Roe v. Wade. That's the whole point of passing such a law, so that the law remains if Roe is overturned. If the Women's Health Protection Act was already passed into law, for example, the SCOTUS decision on Roe would not matter. What would matter after that point is states rights and federal reach. So I suppose you could be right in that SCOTUS could say - in a new case brought by GOP AGs in response to the new law - that the government was overreaching by telling states they could not pass their own laws restricting abortions. But I'm not familiar with the legality of all that so I couldn't comment further.

As I said earlier, any law can be challenged in the courts. If the Supremes can overturn Roe v Wade, why couldn’t they overturn a federal law guaranteeing abortion rights?

I suppose I’m asking, what could Democrats have done differently that would have kept this particular court at the particular time from weakening abortion rights?

Boru