Opinion of Roe vs Wade

[True Federalist (진정한 연방 주의자)]

I mean, the outcome was a good outcome but I waffle on whether or not it was a good decision. I guess in a vacuum, its totally a made up law and that the democratic process would have done better but if you accept the argument that aborting a fetus in the first trimester isn't killing a person (Blackmun relied on the fact society never truly has come to a consensus of this as proof that it wasn't) AND if you see preventing the use of birth control is more constitutionally suspect than preventing other vices, it totally makes sense. I'm not too sure how good this is. For example, there was a case where they tried to overturn anti-gay laws in the 80s based on the right to privacy and those laws were upheld based on the fact the SCOTUS didn't think being gay was a reasonable exercise of privacy.

It's not the court's role to decide what society thinks, but what the law is.  Making the law be based upon what society thinks is up to the Constitution (as amended), or if the Constitution is silent, then is up to Congress and/or the State legislatures.

The best that can be said about Roe is that it probably came close to what Congress would have enacted at the time had it passed a law concerning abortion, tho probably more permissive because the Court saw that abortion laws at the State level had been becoming more permissive of the practice and decided to get ahead of the curve.

[True Federalist (진정한 연방 주의자)]

Although the court’s reasoning could have been better, I believe that Roe was correctly decided. Making abortion illegal both deprives women of liberty without due process of law and does not offer them the equal protection of the laws.

One can argue about whether the decision made America more polarised, but judges do not and should not make such considerations in their decisions.

Your position assumes that the unborn are unworthy of due process or the equal protection of the law. There's nothing in the Constitution to either make that assumption or make the opposite assumption that the unborn are worthy of due process and the equal protection of the law. Without a textual basis to make that decision, the Court should have left the decision to the legislative branch to make.

[True Federalist (진정한 연방 주의자)]

Your position assumes that the unborn are unworthy of due process or the equal protection of the law. There's nothing in the Constitution to either make that assumption or make the opposite assumption that the unborn are worthy of due process and the equal protection of the law. Without a textual basis to make that decision, the Court should have left the decision to the legislative branch to make.

The suggestion that there is a plausible reading of the 14th that includes "unborn persons" in the category of persons entitled to due process and equal protection is absurd. Nowhere in the 14th is the word "persons" interpreted to include fetuses — pregnant women are not counted as two people when apportioning representatives by "counting the whole number of persons in each State," and the Citizenship Clause explicitly reserves citizenship to persons born in the US.

There is also nothing in the historical record to suggest that the authors of the 14th intended it to extend to "unborn persons," and there is certainly no precedent supporting that reading. Positioning those as as two equally valid (or even remotely comparable) readings of the document requires a particularly blinkered textualism, in the process producing a far more expansive interpretation of the 14th than what is relied on in Blackmun's opinion in Roe (to say nothing of the even more restrictive view advocated by White in dissent).

Nowhere in the Constitution is the term person defined, indeed under the law as interpreted today, you don't even have to be human being to be a person. While "corporations are people too" is bad politics, it is good law.

By your argument, Ginsburg was wrong in her briefs in cases such as Reed v. Reed. After all, there's nothing in the historical record to suggest that the authors of the 14th Amendment intended it to extend to women. Indeed, when Congress was discussing the Reconstruction Amendments, there was discussion about explicitly addressing women's rights, and doing so was flatly rejected.

Your argument about the Citizenship Clause is nonsense. The Citizenship Clause only establishes a minimum standard, which Congress can extend to others using its Article I Section 8 powers, for who is a citizen and thus by extension a person. While all citizens are persons, it is definitely not the case that only citizens are persons. If that were the case, then noncitizens would have no Constitutional rights. I doubt that anyone on here other a few trolls would argue that noncitizens should be denied Constitutional rights. Moreover, even if one were to accept your Citizenship Clause argument, then the Federal government could enact nationwide restrictions against abortion by using its power over naturalization in Article I Section 8 to extend citizenship to the unborn.

[True Federalist (진정한 연방 주의자)]

In the years leading up to Roe, approximately 1 million women each year had an illegal abortion. The vast majority of those women had to resort either to dangerous self-induced abortions or to the dark & often forbidding underworld of untrained & unreliable back-alley abortionists. As a result, many thousands suffered serious illness or permanent injury, not to mention those who died in the course of illegal abortions.

The realities of that world alone makes Roe a freedom decision.

One million women getting abortions each year didn't occur until after Roe v. Wade.  When abortion is illegal, less women get abortions.

Seriously, Democrats avoiding the central moral issue of this is obvious bullsh**t.

As I said in another thread:

Incidentally, the Constitution is a legal document, not a moral one. While ideally, we want all moral laws to be Constitutional and vice versa, it is quite possible for a law to be Constitutional and immoral or for a law to be moral and unconstitutional. Courts should leave morality to the legislative branch to decide. Courts intruding into moral issues inherently makes courts political which is undesirable.