The argument is about the US Constitution as a ‘Living Document‘….
Abortion was illegal back then and Salivary was legal…
The document IS centuries old….
To NOT adopt it to modern time’s would essentially make it useless allowing 50 states to do whatever they want…
From the LA Times….
Roe vs. Wade, the Supreme Court’s best-known decision of the past 50 years, is also its most endangered precedent.
It gave women a nationwide legal right to choose abortion, but the backlash reshaped the nation’s politics. The landmark ruling now faces being overturned by conservative justices appointed by Republican presidents to do just that.
What went wrong with Roe? Why did the court’s effort to resolve the abortion controversy in 1973 lead instead to decades of division?
Legal scholars and political scientists point to major missteps at the start that left the decision vulnerable.
In Roe, the justices announced a broad new constitutional right to abortion that is not explicitly found in the words or the history of the Constitution.
Justice Harry A. Blackmun, who authored the long Roe opinion, included the medical history of abortion, citing the views of Persians, Greeks and Romans, and quoting two versions of the Hippocratic oath and early English authors dating back to the 13th century.
He did not, however, quote a provision in the Constitution that protected abortion rights.
That omission is cited in the draft opinion currently being circulated by conservative justices as they prepare to overturn Roe.
“The Constitution makes no reference to abortion and no such right is implicitly protected by any constitutional provision,” Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. wrote in a draft published Monday by Politico. He added that Roe’s “reasoning was exceptionally weak.”
Blackmun based his ruling on the idea that the Constitution protects a broad right to privacy, which is implied by the 14th Amendment.
The amendment says “no state shall … deprive any person of life, liberty or property without due process of law.” The court had cited this privacy right before, most notably in 1965 to strike down a Connecticut law that made it a crime for married couples to use contraceptives.
While the Constitution “does not explicitly mention any right of privacy,” he wrote, its protection for personal liberty and privacy “is broad enough to encompass a woman’s decision whether or not to terminate her pregnancy.”…