When I was working in the US Congress as an intern, my undergraduate thesis in my politics degree was about ‘Abortion and the Supreme Court’ and specifically about why the issue was no longer devisive. Well, I wrote too soon. I did for that detailed thesis receive the highest grade of any of my papers and researched the judicial opinions from before and after Roe v Wade.
But the recent ruling by the US Supreme Court raises important issues for us in democracies such as the UK and India. What do you do as a minority who don’t like the laws?
The Supreme Court ruled, "Our decision returns the issue of abortion to those legislative bodies, and it allows women on both sides of the abortion issue to seek to affect the legislative process by influencing public opinion, lobbying legislators, voting, and running for office. Women are not without electoral or political power. It is noteworthy that the percentage of women who register to vote and cast ballots is consistently higher than the percentage of men who do so."
They also said, “"We do not pretend to know how our political system or society will respond to today’s decision overruling Roe and Casey. And even if we could foresee what will happen, we would have no authority to let that knowledge influence our decision. We can only do our job, which is to interpret the law, apply longstanding principles of stare decisis, and decide this case accordingly. We therefore hold that the Constitution does not confer a right to abortion. Roe and Casey must be overruled, and the authority to regulate abortion must be returned to the people and their elected representatives."
"Abortion presents a profound moral question. The Constitution does not prohibit the citizens of each State from regulating or prohibiting abortion. Roe and Casey arrogated that authority. We now overrule those decisions and return that authority to the people and their elected representatives."
So what to do? The laws of the individual States, like Alabama, reflect the views of the electors living there. It would be too easy to say those are people who are wrong and should not have the vote, or religious extremists or decendants of slave owners and so clearly should not have the vote. It doesn’t work like that. Democracies count not weigh votes.
What if the people elected representatives decide remove the vote from black people. Well that would be against the Constitution (now, but not against the same constitution 100 years ago). Yes, legal interpretation is fickle. Some are literalists and others believe you move forward with the times.
What to do when on the losing side? You have to do what the Supreme Court said, "seek to affect the legislative process by influencing public opinion, lobbying legislators, voting, and running for office.” That’s as true in the UK as it is in India. I wish there were a short-cut veto power or some super-vote only I held, alongside a magic wand. I’ve looked. There isn’t.
