Our Response to Overturning Roe v. Wade Is Crucial
leaked draft Supreme Court opinion in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health. It's marked as a draft from 2-3 months ago. Still, the fact of its leak together with the information reported by Politico about the Court’s preliminary voting is stunning — almost as stunning as the draft’s caustic disregard of women’s core rights of privacy, moral agency, and control over our bodies.
Probably at least since the national tutorial in the Senate Judiciary Committee in 1987 about the many constitutional underpinnings of our privacy rights during the hearings on the ill-fated Supreme Court nomination of Robert Bork, it has been broadly understood that one of our Constitution’s top jobs is protecting individual rights — including personal privacy — from government overreach.
The Constitution is not an index or catalog. And the fact that particular words do or don’t appear is not useful in determining when we lose the ability to control our own personal lives.
But evidently, the draft’s author, Justice Samuel Alito, disdains that understanding and those who hold it.All’s to say if this draft actually reflects the will not just of Justice Alito but a majority of the Supreme Court, we have entered an era of judicial activism unlike anything this country has seen for a hundred years.
