Chief Justice John Roberts Had It Right! If Only He Could Have Secured a Fifth Vote

  

Any prospect that the Supreme Court’s 6-3 decision on Roe will remove the debate on abortion from the judiciary and courts will quickly go up in flames.  The legal suits are emerging as I write this on such pregnant issues as, can pills/medication inducing abortion be mailed to or taken in states banning abortion?; who is accountable for an abortion in a state banning it when a women decides to use medication to induce an abortion?; what takes precedence:  the FDA’s approval of a medication (which now exits) or a state’s outlawing an abortion that could be induced by such medication? What about local DA's who refuse to enforce bans in states banning abortion? What about a clinic located in a state authorizing abortion promoting its availability in that state to women in a state not permitting abortion? 

 

These and many other legal issues are already boiling to the surface.  They are going to be the subject for appeals, suits and judicial proceedings galore.

 

There really is no intellectual basis in my opinion for failing to establish a national standard defining what constitutes a legally permitted abortion.  Deciding the case before the Supreme Court as it was originally launched by Mississippi was the correct course.  This is what Chief Justice John Roberts advocated.  It would have substituted the hard-to-define parameter of viability (the basis for Roe) with a 15-week permissible threshold.  It is true, as Justice Alito asserted in his opinion, that doing this would result in continued litigation, with some states arguing that the limitation on abortion should be tighter, i.e., fewer weeks.  But the Court shouldn’t have flinched from that reality.  What it has brought on the country through its ruling will result in far more chaos and litigation than we even had before--not to mention the risk, uncertainty and harm brought to countless women's lives. 

 

Think of it this way.  What if we still had in this country the condition that existed before the Supreme Court provided a national ruling on the right for individuals of the same sex or of different races to be married?  We know what it would look like.  People would still be going from state-to-state to achieve the condition of living which they desired and were entitled to.  So it will be now with abortion, magnified because of the ability to easily secure abortion-inducing medication through the mail, across state lines.

 

It’s only a question of time before this issue will be back before the Supreme Court facing the need for the decision which the Court failed to make this time around, i.e., establishing a national standard.

 

Chief Justice Roberts had it right.  He worked for months to secure the fifth vote he needed to achieve the ruling which the State of Mississippi originally wanted.  Only later, as they saw an

opening produced by Trump's court appointments, did Mississippi  change its plea to call for the total elimination of Roe. That perversely is what the Court has decided. It will not stand.