Roe v Wade: A Letter to Chief Justice Roberts on Legal Issues

There are aspects regarding Roe v Wade that are legal and not included in Justice Alito’s draft. I wrote to Chief Justice Roberts and the other Justices in a lengthy letter. Justice Alito’s draft had 66 pages of argument, so actually mine is short. The link below is the full letter. Share it as you see fit.

Here are a few key points.

  1. The recently retired Chief Medical Examiner for a large North Carolina county noted that doing autopsies on deaths from illegal abortions was common enough to be in her medical school curriculum. She wasn’t involved in a single death from abortion over her entire 35-year career. The word “Welfare” is in the first sentence of the Constitution — one of its main objectives. Doesn’t the Welfare of women count? That’s half the population.
  2. Those who died from abortion earlier were probably women who were poor or limited in their alternatives. The entire Supreme Court justices are an elite group. Not only not poor, but also extremely highly educated at the best schools. Eight of nine got their law degree from either Harvard or Yale. Fifteen of the eighteen undergraduate and law degrees held by them are from Ivy League schools. If Roe were overturned, this elite group would be sentencing poorer women to death. Because that’s what happened. It would happen again.
  3. The word “moral” isn’t in the Constitution. It’s all over Justice Alito’s draft.
  4. As anyone who has read my FaceBook posts has seen, the word “corporation” isn’t mentioned in the Constitution. In fact, in the Hobby Lobby case opinion, corporations being treated as “persons” is described as a “legal fiction”. Yet the SCOTUS defended corporations’ rights to religious freedom and freedom of speech.
  5. Justice Alito commences his argument regarding what the Constitution says and means by referencing the discussion of the “language of the instrument” in an 1824 document. At that time slavery was still legal.
  6. Many male legal experts say the abortion issue should be left to the States where elections can reflect the citizens’ preferences. (I left out the Founding Fathers’ concerns about populism.) This is an individual rights issue, not a governance by State or Federal issue. Women didn’t even have the right to vote in every State until this century. We didn’t have females on the Supreme Court until Sandra Day O’Connor (after the Roe decision).

We live in a different era in an evolving nation, not in 1824. The decision to pursue an abortion is intensely personal and a woman’s last alternative, not her first choice. Those who claim adoption is the solution aren’t looking at the woman’s viewpoint.

There are two genders. For the species to continue, one needs to carry the developing fetus. That gender is the female. Thomas Jefferson used the term “Unalienable Rights” in our Declaration of Independence. I suggest that females bear the Unalienable Burden. It’s an immensely complicated issue that can’t be cleanly “solved” legally at either the federal or state level. It’s one that should be left to the female individually, as the Ninth Amendment contemplates.

LetterCJRobertsSCOTUS0512022

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