America’s Talibanisation on abortion may go beyond the Taliban

Photo by Lona on Unsplash

My husband, who trained as a lawyer and served as a criminal prosecutor in Wisconsin, always says that Roe v. Wade was taught in law school as a poorly argued law. The landmark 1973 US Supreme Court decision that established a constitutional right to abortion was badly structured, he says.

In the years since, I’ve read over and over in newspapers and magazines about the inherent instability in Roe v. Wade.

Most important of all, of course, was the late Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s warning in 1992 that Roe v. Wade is vulnerable because it makes the wrong argument for abortion. It argues that restricting access to abortion violates a woman’s privacy when it should have argued that restricting access impedes gender equality.

A New York Times piece (paywall) quotes law professor and Ginsberg biographer Mary Hartnett as follows: Justice Ginsberg “believed it would have been better to approach it under the equal protection clause” because that would have made Roe v. Wade less vulnerable to attacks in the years after it was decided.

Well, it wasn’t and now it’s vulnerable.

Uniquely vulnerable, with the Supreme Court indicating it might uphold an abortion ban in Mississippi.

Those who study such things say it’s a sign of the times that various state abortion laws in the US are become more strict about what to allow. Now, there may not always be exceptions for rape or incest. That’s pretty hardline, a Talibanisation that even the Afghan Taliban may not always require of a woman?