Roe v. Wade - Overturned?

Fifty | Garden | Ninety | Twenty-Five

4 May 2022

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This week a rare leak from the supreme court of the US appeared to show what many who held their noses and voted for Trump hoped would happen: an overturning of the Roe v. Wade decision from the 1970's which invalidated state laws protecting children from being aborted in the womb. Conservative christians will no doubt sleep better at night with their Trump vote now that it looks like his three appointees played a critical role in this major reversal. It will probably not silence the people who say that the court is not and should not be a political body but, in the face of the US Congress being unable to pass much meaningful legislation beyond graft-filled spending bills, much of the power to legislate has passed to the bench and to the executive. This is shown every four years when the conversation is largely about the presidency and how many supreme court justices that person might get to replace, with congress being almost an afterthought. In polls the majority of Americans disapprove of the job congress is doing, but every two years they still vote most of them back into office. Congress could have protected or prohibited abortion by law, but haven't been able to do either in the decades before or after the Roe v. Wade decision. And so the question is decided by who sits on the bench rather than the law.

Humanity has a very long, very ambivalent history with murder. Conflict has led to it throughout recorded history and probably before that, as the interaction of chimpanzees with eachother shows. The Ukrainians have a lot of cameras and we've seen pictures of their bodies and heard the stories of the Russian army's violence and war crimes. That's a funny idea - "war crimes" - as if humans hadn't recognized that killing someone is the greatest crime of all millenia ago. But murder sure is convenient sometimes. Vladimir Putin's desire for Russian greatness is served by it just as certainly as a knocked up teenager's desire for an easy life is. Over 63 million babies have been killed just in the United States since the Roe v. Wade decision. How is that not genocide? Human beings are great rationalizers. I've seen Auschwitz and we are capable of a lot. There may never be a Wiesel or Borowski among the survivors of this genocide, but some still survive their attempted murder and live to tell a tale they themselves cannot remember. Maybe those are the voices we should be listening to.