Abortion has long been one of the most reliably contentious issues in American society. For five decades, a woman's right to access an abortion has been upheld via Supreme Court ruling in the 1973 case of Roe V. Wade. Since that time, access to abortion has been reliably upheld time and again, year after year, by justices from both the "left" and the "right", and despite the desire by some more conservative groups to overturn that decision, had largely been considered "settled" and "precedential", as newly appointed Supreme Court justice Ketanji Brown Jackson stated during her nomination process. The reason for this assumption is because the U.S. legal system is built up the concept of precedent, or "stare decisis", a Latin term which means to "stand on decided cases". What this means is that U.S. courts, including the Supreme Court, is beholden to consider not only previous decision by the court, but also the length of time, and the number/veracity of those challenges over the years. As previously mentioned, Roe had been reaffirmed time and again by both liberal and conservative justices, but we now know that the court, driven largely by the new conservative majority within, has rendered an opinion that goes against previous precedent by citing that the original decision was arrived at via poor legal reasoning, and which has effectively overturned federal guarantees of the right to access an abortion at will.
The reasoning given for this massive shift is that abortion was not part of the American legal fabric created by the constitution, but rather by improper interpretations of the rights conferred by the document by the court at the time the case was heard. It should be noted that the Supreme Court ruling does not mean that all access will be denied, it only means that individual states will be allowed to determine how wide to grant access and under what conditions. For some women in more liberal states, they will likely find themselves less affected personally, while women living in states like Texas, Oklahoma, Florida, etc. will see their access significantly curbed to the point where some would consider it to be nonexistent, since the restrictions put into place often require the services to be sought out often before a woman may know she's even pregnant, and also by not providing for exceptions on issues of rape, incest, or other medical conditions which would result in a nonviable birth but which may not be life-threatening to the woman. This landmark opinion by the court also reverberates beyond simply the issue of abortion itself, given that it was overturned on the basis that there is no tradition of this practice being part of the fabric of American life at the time the constitution was written. This begs the question, and concern by many, as to which other Supreme Court decisions are at risk, such as the court's decision regarding same-sex marriage rights, access to contraception, and inter-racial marriages since none of those had a legal basis or tradition within the U.S. at the time that the Constitution was written.
Ultimately the court is not required to consider the general public's feelings or opinions on such matters as they are purposely insulated by the U.S. Constitution via lifetime appointment, not election, and yet, they do still have to live in the society that they help shape, so perhaps maybe they should consider public opinion to some extent. Interestingly, there is no right to protest the members of the court personally, as we do with our elected politicians, though there have been instances of the public confronting the justices in public in the wake of overturning Roe, and even credible threats of targeted assassination of members of the court. What do you think about this issue and the court’s ruling that overturns Roe v. Wade? Is the court going too far by asserting that a majority on this court, which is 5 or 6 justices, understand the law better than five decades of justices from both sides of the aisle who came before them? Are they abusing their power and inserting politics into a private medical issue between a woman and her doctor, and which politicians should stay out of? Should there perhaps be term limits applied in order allow new blood to move in and out of the court more frequently, or is it important to have justices with a lifetime of legal experience who are not necessarily motivated by the current political headwinds of the day?