Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization Overturns Roe v. Wade
Last summer, in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, the Supreme Court of the United States took away women’s reproductive health rights — the rights of your daughter, your daughter-in-law, your granddaughter, your sister, your sister-in-law, every mother, every daughter, every granddaughter, every son, every grandson.
They created a culture of terrorism against women and a nightmare of medical, financial, psychological, political, spiritual, religious, and emotional warfare — a nightmare where legislatures and extremist ‘White Christian Nationalists’ control your body and your decisions based upon lies, deliberate misinformation, propaganda, ignorance, the illusion of knowledge, and oppressive, regressive, repressive, backward-thinking belief systems …
… a nightmare where doctors, hospitals, pharmacists, and family members alike risk death or imprisonment as felons for helping a small child who is raped or helping a mother-to-be who will die if her pregnancy continues …
… a nightmare placing the decision about your reproductive health in the hands of individual states and individual legislatures ready to pull the trigger on ‘trigger laws’ already in place to ban abortion, making it a crime to be a woman. That means decisions about your health are predominantly in the hands of a minority of extremist white men and women – most often with little education on the political ‘right’ who know nothing about reproductive health, pregnancy, or women’s health in general.
… a nightmare leading the way to robbing women and marginalized communities of ALL the rights progressive women have fought and died for. Even though they are supposed to be the most brilliant legal minds in the country and the Supreme Court traditionally has been a sacred institution, this Court reminds me of the Stephen Hawking quote “the greatest enemy of knowledge is not ignorance, it is the illusion of knowledge.”
In Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, the Supreme Court of the United States overturned Roe v. Wade, a landmark 1973 Supreme Court decision ruling that the Due Process Clause of 14th Amendment to the Constitution of the United States provides a right to privacy that protects a woman’s right to choose to have an abortion.
Justice Harry Blackmun wrote the majority opinion in Roe v. Wade, holding that the right to abortion is not absolute and must be balanced against the government’s interests in protecting both the woman and the fetus. Declaring a woman’s right to abortion to be a ‘fundamental’ right, the Court court held that the constitutionality of abortion laws must be analyzed under the most stringent level of judicial review in the United States – – the strict scrutiny standard. To balance the woman’s rights to privacy against states’ interests, the Court created the ‘trimester’ test, allowing states to prohibit abortion from the beginning of the third trimester except where necessary to protect the mother’s life.
Chief Justice Warren Burger and Justices Potter Stewart, William J. Brennan Jr., William O. Douglas, Thurgood Marshall, and Lewis F. Powell, Jr. all joined in Justice Blackmun’s opinion.
In June, 2022, with a clear view toward the rear and the past, the Dobbs Court simply decided the right no longer exists. Justice Sam Alito, writing for the majority, cited the 17th-Century English jurist Matthew Hale, who sentenced women to death as witches.
Justice Alito’s reliance on the misogynistic jurist is disturbing. Justice Alito is a constitutional originalist – – meaning if it did not exist when the Constitution was written, it does not exist now, effectively making our Constitution a dead instrument rather than acknowledging it as a living, breathing document able to adapt to the elegant flow, change, rhythms, transitions, expansion, complexity, and movements inherent in the art and heart of the dance of evolution and change.
Justice Alito wrote in Dobbs that abortion is not mentioned in the Constitution. Neither are women.
Based in part upon Hale’s beliefs, the highest Court in the United States took away your rights and freedoms, jeopardized your life, and jeopardized the life of every woman you love, which, in essence, impacts the life of every single person you love and every person who loves a woman.
With Dobbs, the Supreme Court had a clear path to reaffirm the constitutionality, sanctity, and dignity of a woman’s reproductive freedoms and to uphold the long-established rules of stare decisis and the precedent set forth in Roe vs. Wade. Stare decisis is a legal doctrine meaning the court will adhere to precedent in making its decisions. It means to ‘stand by things decided’.
Instead, the Dobbs Court took a different path, choosing to overturn Roe v. Wade, doing away with its own established criteria for overruling decisions, doing away with federal protection of women’s Constitutional rights, and allowing every state to create its own rules. The reality and nightmare is that Dobbs also jeopardized every single right emanating from Roe v. Wade and its progeny allowing Hale’s beliefs to stand as bedrocks of American law.
A World Created by Sir Matthew Hale + 6 Members of a Trump-Stacked Court
You are now living in a world co-created by Matthew Hale and 6 extremist Republican Supreme Court Justices … Chief Justice John Roberts and Justices Samuel Alito, Thomas Gorsuch, Clarence Thomas, Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett.
Gorsuch, Kavanaugh, and Coney Barrett are all Trump-appointed Justices loyal to the extremist Trump agenda, chief among which was overturning Roe.
Obama had nominated Merrick Garland to fill the 2016 vacancy on the Supreme Court created by the death of Justice Antonin Scalia. Scalia died in February of 2016. Obama nominated Garland on March 16, 2016. The election was November 8, 2016.
Despite Mitch McConnell’s refusal to allow the nomination of Garland 8 months before the 2016 election declaring it was too close to the election, one week after Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg died, on September 26, 2020, Trump nominated Amy Coney Barrett to fill Ginsburg’s seat. On October 26, 2020, just days before the November 2020 Presidential Election, the Senate confirmed her nomination, and she was seated that same day. Her selection was extremely contentious, in large part because of the hypocritical push by Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell to confirm her just before the election despite having refused to hold a hearing four years earlier on President Obama’s Supreme Court nominee, Merrick Garland, eight months before the 2016 election.
Amy Coney Barrett was sworn in by Justice Clarence Thomas who now faces ethics complaints and whose wife played a major role in the January 6, 2021 insurrection to overturn the United States government.
Trump also appointed Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court after Justice Anthony Kennedy unexpectedly resigned.
Kavanaugh had been credibly accused of rape; however, the FBI failed to interview witnesses who could corroborate the victim’s testimony.
Justice Kennedy had established himself as a proponent of individual rights when he co-authored the majority opinion in Planned Parenthood of Southeastern Pennsylvania v. Casey, which held that restrictions on access to abortion cannot place an “undue burden” on a woman’s free exercise of her right to abortion under Roe v. Wade.
Kennedy also authored the opinions in Romer v. Evans, holding that Amendment 2 of the Colorado State Constitution violated the equal protection clause. It singled out homosexual and bisexual persons, denying them the right to legal protection from discrimination. Justice Kennedy wrote, “If the constitutional conception of ‘equal protection of the laws’ means anything, it must at the very least mean that a bare desire to harm a politically unpopular group cannot constitute a legitimate governmental interest.” He also wrote the opinion in Boumediene v. Bush, holding that Guantanamo Bay prisoners have a right to relief from unlawful imprisonment and that the Military Commissions Act of 2006 violated the constitutional right of habeas corpus.
Kennedy’s vote was key to guarantee the right to same-sex marriage in the 5-4 decision Obergefell v. Hodges. Kennedy wrote: “No union is more profound than marriage, for it embodies the highest ideals of love, fidelity devotion sacrifice, and family . . . [These petitioners] ask for equal dignity in the eyes of the law. The Constitution grants them that right.”
Justice Kennedy also advocated prison reform.
On July 31, 2018, Justice Kennedy retired unexpectedly from the Supreme Court, leading to Trump’s appointment of Justice Kavanaugh.
The New York Times reported the announcement was the result of a carefully- orchestrated 17-month campaign by the Trump administration to remake the Supreme Court before the 2018 midterms. They wanted to stack the court with their appointees even though the Supreme Court is supposed to be non-political. Trump and his fellow Republicans were afraid of losing their majority.
To Trump and his fellow Republicans, Kennedy’s seat was the keys to overturning Roe v. Wade.
Trump then nominated three of Kennedy’s former clerks judicial posts and developed a relationship with Justice Kennedy’s son, Deutsche Bank’s global head of real-estate capital markets, who worked with the Trump Organization.
All three Trump-appointed Justices, Gorsuch, Kavanaugh, and Coney Barrett, used basically the same words in hearings, declaring that Roe vs. Wade was established law under the principle of stare decisis without mentioning their intention to vanquish the principle of stare decisis and replace it with the Make America Great Again (MAGA) Agenda. Once they were seated and Dobbs came before them, they ripped apart the long-established principle of stare decisis and its guidance to expand, not take away, constitutional rights and they overturned Roe vs. Wade.
Dobbs was already in the queue when Kennedy resigned unexpectedly.
Trump’s plan from the start had been to overturn Roe and the Constitutional rights it granted and preserved. Trump, in alliance with and under the guidance of and upon the advice and counsel of the right-wing, white supremacist, fundamentalist Evangelical Christians, stacked the court with his loyalists who would do away with women’s reproductive rights. As they did during confirmation hearings, Gorsuch, Kavanaugh, and Coney Barrett ensured that Dobbs was narrowly written and would not impact other rights; however, that too was not true.
All Rights Granted Under Roe and Its Progeny Are At Risk
All rights granted under Roe and its progeny are at risk, and the process of criminalizing previously-granted rights has begun.
Roe’s progeny include cases deciding same sex marriage, interracial marriage, the right to use birth control, and other rights.
Republican lawmakers had created laws triggering restrictive abortion laws with no exceptions for rape or incest from the moment Dobbs was decided.
They put a bounty on anyone who gives aide to a woman, allowed private citizens to be sued for helping a woman obtain an abortion. They criminalized abortion, criminalized your actions in helping a woman you love, restricted travel for the women you love, made your daughters and your doctors murderers, allowed your daughters to die in the name of preserving the fetus. They have taken away the rights of LGBTQ community. They people with different sexual preferences. They inspect the genitals of your children who play sports.
They want to do away with women’s reproductive rights and to embrace and force the Trump + MAGA agenda, to restrict and criminalize women’s reproductive rights, to expand 2nd Amendment rights, to restrict and contract 1st Amendment rights, to overturn our government, to con the American citizenry through lies, more lies, misinformation, and propaganda, and to implant and install extremist, fundamentalist, white-supremacist, racist, misogynistic, fundamentalist, Evangelical nationalist ‘Christians’ and self-proclaimed prophets,’ as governmental ‘leaders,’ representatives, senators, cabinet members, school-board members, and in every other facet of our democracy, revising history and imposing the fundamentalist ideation into our sacred governmental institutions.
On Good Friday, A Single Rogue Judge in a Single Federal District Unilaterally Took Away The Rights of the Federal Drug Administration, which is a Federal Agency and the Rights of Every Single Woman in the United States
On Good Friday, April 7, 2023, a single rogue federal judge in a single federal district in a single federal courthouse took away the right of every person in the United States based on his religious beliefs. Less than an hour after his order banning the abortion drug for the entire United States, a second federal district judge issued a conflicting order. Following a brief stay issued by the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals, the Justice Department appealed the order banning the abortion drug.
Justice Alito issued another temporary stay; however, with this radical extremist Trump Court, no one is safe.
A Constitutional Crisis
The Good Friday opinion was an unprecedented abuse of power and an opinion not founded in law.
In his opinion, U.S. District Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk of Texas not only banned mifepristone, he also withdrew the FDA’s approval of the drug, first used in medication abortion 23 years after ago.
His order applies nationwide, marking the first time a court has single-handedly pulled a drug from the market in a distinctly lawless power grab.
Courts do not have that power, creating fear that courts will go further to unilaterally impose a “fetal personhood,” standard, which holds that every state must ban abortion because it is murder.
The decision also spurred a constitutional crisis because a second federal judge in Washington immediately issued a conflicting order in a separate lawsuit compelling the FDA to continue allowing mifepristone in 17 states and District of Columbia.
The 5th Circuit Court of Appeals had issued a brief stay of the lawless order. The Justice Department appealed to the Supreme Court. Justice Alito issued another brief stay; however, with the composition of this court, nothing is sacred, and no one can trust that integrity will prevail over fundamentalist backward-thinking beliefs.
Only the Supreme Court can resolve this crisis.
