Wash. Post on Sunday: If Roe Goes, Our State Will Be Worse Than You Think

[Faygo Kid]

Must read:

In the 1980s, when abortion was severely limited in then-West Germany, border guards sometimes required German women returning from foreign trips to undergo vaginal examinations to make sure that they hadn't illegally terminated a pregnancy while they were abroad. According to news stories and other accounts, the guards would stop young women and ask them about drugs, then look for evidence of abortion, such as sanitary pads or nightgowns, in their cars, and eventually force them to undergo a medical examination -- as West German law empowered them to do.

Sounds like a nightmare of a police state, doesn't it? Like something that could never happen in this day and age -- and certainly not in the United States? But depending upon the outcome of this presidential election, it could happen here. This is how.

Republican presidential candidate John McCain opposes abortion, believing that life begins at conception. Imagine that he's elected to the White House and, not long after, one of the aging Supreme Court justices dies or resigns. President McCain appoints a suitably conservative replacement, and a complaisant or cowed Senate confirms the nomination. Then, an ambitious district attorney in Alabama, Delaware or any one of more than a dozen other states with old abortion laws still on the books or a new, untested abortion restriction prosecutes a local clinic for performing the procedure. (Legal scholars pretty much agree that laws from before Roe v. Wade can be revived.) The clinic goes to federal court; after appeals, the case goes to the Supreme Court, which votes 5-4 to overturn Roe. And we're back to the '60s . . .

. . . It seems a long way from McCain's bold statement that life begins at conception to police cars waiting on an abortion clinic side street in Granite City. But it's not. If the law were to take this post- Roe course, Americans' lives would be determined by their state citizenship in ways unseen since the Civil War. Professional legal scholars have traced the developments step by step. As constitutional scholar Richard Fallon of Harvard said recently, "If Roe were to go, it would not go gently."

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/09/26/AR2008092602833.html

[Tallison]

1. 3 out of the 4 oldest Justices are consistently pro-Roe

John Paul Stevens is 78, RBG and Kennedy are both 73.

Bottom line: If McCain wins, Roe gets overturned.

Why isn't our side publicizing this, especially when American women are overwhelmingly pro-choice and empowered to decide the election?

[melody]

2. That's the whole problem with the states rights idea

It would pit state against state. The religious ideologues would try to take over the other states ... so much for states rights.
We'd soon have another Civil War.

[Doctor_J]

3. "McCain opposes abortion"

so does Obama, asswipe. He just doesn't want it to be available for rich women only, and for pregnancy to be compulsory for everyone else.

I can't wait until every member of Big Media is called to account for biased reporting like this

[Waiting For Everyman]

4. And yet it's women who will vote for these nitwits.

You can't tell them anything, they know it all. I'm just glad I'm too old for it to matter to me.

They'll get what they're asking for, no doubt. Then, they'll be moaning about it. The time to care is now. Or never.

[patrice]

5. Just as if we allowed Slavery to be a States' Rights Issue, what would it then mean to be American?

If we don't honor basic Values as a nation, what is there that binds us together as "One" anything?