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With the balance of the Supreme Court shifted fully right for the first time in decades, Mississippi Attorney General Lynn Fitch has filed a brief requesting that the Court overturn Roe v. Wade.
Amid an appeal to the Supreme Court regarding a Mississippi law banning abortion after 15 weeks, Fitch is calling into question the very foundations of abortion rights in America.
“On a sound understanding of the Constitution,” she wrote in her brief, “the answer to the question presented in this case is clear and the path to that answer is straight. Under the Constitution, may a State prohibit elective abortions before viability? Yes. Why? Because nothing in constitutional text, structure, history, or tradition supports a right to abortion. A prohibition on elective abortions is therefore constitutional if it satisfies the rational basis review that applies to all laws.”
Fitch added, “The only workable approach to accommodating the competing interests here is to return the matter to ‘legislators, not judges.’ …The national fever on abortion can break only when this Court returns abortion policy to the states — where agreement is more common, compromise is more possible, and disagreement can be resolved at the ballot box.”
“With this brief, we’re simply asking the Court to affirm the right of the people to protect their legitimate interests and to provide clarity on how they may do so,” she continued.
The brief noted advances in science that has moved the viability point. “Legislatures should be able to respond to those advances, which they cannot do in the face of flawed precedents that are anchored to decades-stale views of life and health,” the brief states.
Fitch further argues,
“Many laws (largely post-dating Roe) protect equal opportunity — including prohibitions on sex and pregnancy discrimination in employment, guarantees of employment leave for pregnancy and birth, and support to offset the costs of childcare for working mothers…. Casey gives no good reason to believe that decades of advances for women rest on Roe, and evidence is to the contrary.”
“Heightened scrutiny of abortion laws can never serve those aims,” she stated, “because the Constitution does not protect a right to abortion, it provides no guidance to courts on how to account for the interests in this context.”
Fitch is correct in that abortion cases cannot be properly decided until these faulty decisions are overturned. The Supreme Court’s invention of a constitutional right to an abortion not only exceeded its authority but has routinely been used to prohibit states from enacting reasonable abortion restrictions regardless of what voters want.
Arbitrary standards imposed by nine justices that show no regard for modern scientific knowledge, advancements, or morality cannot be allowed to stand in the way of truth.
The Supreme Court is not immune to mistakes as can be seen most egregiously in its rulings in Dred Scott v. Sandford, which held that anyone of African descent were not and never could be U.S. citizens and helped fuel the Civil War, and Plessy v. Ferguson, which codified the racist principle of “separate but equal” and allowed Jim Crow segregation laws to flourish for another 50-plus years.
The immoral and unconstitutional rulings in Roe and Casey have dehumanized an entire category of vulnerable human beings based solely on their developmental phase, caused the deaths of more than 60 million of those human beings, and critically damaged our society.
It is high past time the Supreme Court reverses these abysmal rulings so we as a nation can begin to deal with what is nothing less than a national sin.
