bywandandsword:

What would happen if Roe v. Wade is overturned? Would it essentially be a return to the 60′s or different somehow?

Okay, so from the perspective of a law student who studied Roe and its impact in my Constitutional Law class earlier this year:

The thing to bear in mind about Roe is that it is not wholesale granting a right to abortion. The court, in that case, was essentially deciding how much interest a state had in regulating abortion, and how that interest weighed against the right to privacy mentioned in the 14th Amendment (which is s slightly nebulous right to begin with). Roe is not a stand alone case, in the sense that each Supreme Court case is part of a canon of cases that all build off each other. When the Court decided Roe, they applied the basic formula of “is this a fundamental right? If yes, apply strict scrutiny.” Strict scrutiny is a method of judging a state action, and essentially requires that the state show why it be allowed to infringe on a constitutional right. As one might imagine, this is a difficult barrier to overcome. What the Court did when applying scrutiny in Roe was develop the trimester system. During the first trimester, the Court concluded that the states had no interest in regulating abortion because the fetus is not viable and there is no risk of harm to the mother. During the second trimester, there is a larger state interest because of increased fetal viability. During the third trimester, the state has developed a compelling interest in the potential life and is free to regulate at will.

So essentially, Roe finds a right based on viability of the “potential life” at risk. Arguably, this holding has already be undone. Although Casey v. Planned Parenthood claimed to uphold the viability holding from Roe, but actually adopted an undue burden standard. Under Casey, a state can regulate abortion so long as it does not place an undue burden (substantial obstacle) in the way of a woman seeking a pre-viability abortion (yes, viability still comes into play, but Casey removes the trimester system and the strict scrutiny requirement; undue burden is a lesser hurdle for states to clear).

What is troubling about the Supreme Court canon of abortion cases is that they base the right to abortion on the viability of the fetus, not the rights of the mother. A narrow over-turning of Roe that only targeted abortion, would mean that states could freely regulate abortion as they chose. Likely some states would continue to provide suitable access to abortion while others would outlaw it entirely. So in some states, we would see a return to the 60s, and in other states, we may seen increased access to abortion. That said, the hardest hit will be poor women, particularly poor women of color. And in many states, the access to abortion is already so restrictive (because of the undue burden standard) that Roe might as well already be gone.

I’m only a law student, and I’m sure that there are people better able to answer this question, but this is my two cents (with help from my roommate who is also a law student).

amarguerite:

Oh my God I’m not sure of the accuracy of this scale but I made one anyways.

1: Jane Austen. Theoretically Romantic, mostly a clever satirist more interested in the novel as the perfect vehicle for social commentary than in poetry for capturing emotion. Very little chance of swooning and/or dramatic death. A very safe spot on the Romanticism scale.

2: Dorothy Wordsworth: Actually a Romantic, though not excessively so! Enjoy your long walks in the country. Keep those diaries. Your brother can mine them for publishable material until people consider them finally worthy of academic interest a century or two later.

3: Wordsworth. May result in later becoming annoyingly conservative but mostly harmless. Go ahead and wander lonely as a cloud. Gaze upon that ruined abbey.

4: Charlotte Turner Smith. Recover that English sonnet and transform it into a medium that mostly expresses sorrow! Help establish Gothic conventions! Have what Wordsworth called a true feeling for rural England! Die in penury and be forgotten by the middle of the nineteenth century.!

5: Blake. ?? Who even knows man. Talk to angels. Create your own goddamn religion. Confuse all of your contemporaries.

6: Mary Shelly. Go ahead and run off with that unhappily married poet who took you on dates at your mother’s grave, but this may result in carrying your husband’s calcified heart around in a fragment of his last manuscript the rest of your life. But also, arguably inventing sci-fi as a genre… so that’s some consolation.

7: John Keats: listen to that nightingale but be forewarned: you will die of TB in Rome and everyone will mock you for dying of bad criticism instead of, you know, infectious disease.

8: Coleridge. May result in never finishing a poem and a severe opium addiction.

9: Percy Shelly. May result in being expelled from Oxford and in premonitions of your own death by drowning.

10: Full Byron. Never go full Byron.