Abortion is a Right protest Activists supporting legal access to abortions protest during a demonstration outside the Supreme Court on March 4, 2020. Saul Loeb / AFP via Getty Images file
Pray to end abortionProtesters display their signs outside a Planned Parenthood health center in Los Angeles on Saturday, Dec. 4, 2021. Together with protesters in other cities across the U.S., they gathered to demand the organization be stripped of its federal funding. Richard Vogel/AP

On the PBS show Amanpour & Co. on 12/8/21, Reagan’s 86-year-old former Solicitor General Charles Fried, said the John Roberts’ Court “was guilty of constitutional vandalism.” The Harvard law professor was speaking about their rulings gutting the Voting Rights Act of 1965, their silence on the spread of gerrymandering of federal and local elections, and McConnell’s stacking of the court with extreme right partisans. He even claimed that this court is busy tearing up basic rights that have been declared as established law over a long period of time. He presented the long view going back to Prague in 1935, when that nation, which was democratic at that time, was overrun by the demons from hell that stripped it of democracy for more than 50 years.

He expanded on how human rights cases before the Supreme Court have evolved into precedents in established case law that is now being overturned based solely on partisan politics. Ultimately this could evolve in the US become a theocracy like that in Iran. The current case before the court involving abortion is not about personal privacy; it is about the minority view of protecting the rights of an unborn child. The Casey case in 1992 established that it was a fundamental right of women to be able to protect their reproductive processes. It became firmly established as the law in many other cases involving human rights.

The stacking of the Supreme Court with justices with extremist views will prevent them from protecting us from authoritarian Presidents because they hold partisan opinions that override legal principles. Katie Roiphe, Director of Cultural Reporting, NYU, said that we must be careful not to engage in reactionary tribalism in attacking those with opposing views. Name-calling is an issue on both the right and the left.

We can be assured of seeing continuing demonstrations on the National Mall in DC of both pro and con advocates on the issue of abortion. The question is, to what extend do they advance the debates on the issue? Do they merely raise the noise level and the potential for violence?

by John Suddath This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.