{"id":2063,"date":"2006-01-13T14:33:35","date_gmt":"2006-01-13T21:33:35","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.amptoons.com\/blog\/archives\/2006\/01\/13\/even-with-alito-reproductive-rights-are-not-doomed\/"},"modified":"2006-01-13T14:33:35","modified_gmt":"2006-01-13T21:33:35","slug":"even-with-alito-reproductive-rights-are-not-doomed","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/?p=2063","title":{"rendered":"Even with Alito, reproductive rights are not doomed"},"content":{"rendered":"

Yesterday<\/a>, I posted a rather doom-and-gloom post, arguing that if they get the chance, Republicans will not be content merely to allow the abortion decision to return to the states. Instead, as the nationwide “partial birth” abortion ban suggests, they will seek to chip away at abortion rights on the national level, stripping away the availability of abortion even in firmly “pro-choice” states like New York.<\/p>\n

Nor do I expect Roe <\/em>to be overturned, because they don’t need to overturn it. Especially if the Supreme Court decides that “the Salerno <\/em>standard<\/a>” should be used for abortion law, Roe <\/em>could be turned into an empty, powerless decision without actually overturning it.<\/p>\n

However, I should have also pointed out that even when Alito is confirmed, his anti-abortion views won’t dominate the Court. With Alito on the Court, the person replacing O’Connor as the swing vote will be Justice Kennedy<\/a>. And although I think Kennedy is worse than O’Connor on abortion (most notably, he voted in favor of vague “partial birth” abortion bans), it doesn’t seem likely that Kennedy – who voted with O’Connor on the Casey <\/em>decision – would want to eviscerate Roe<\/em>.<\/p>\n

So while it’s not impossible that my doomsday scenario will come about, I don’t expect it to come about just because Alito is confirmed. (But if Bush gets to replace a second <\/em>pro-choice vote in the Court, and if Republicans keep control of Congress…)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Yesterday, I posted a rather doom-and-gloom post, arguing that if they get the chance, Republicans will not be content merely to allow the abortion decision to return to the states. Instead, as the nationwide “partial birth” abortion ban suggests, they … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3,111],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2063","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-abortion-reproductive-rights","category-supreme-court-issues"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2063","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2063"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2063\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2063"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2063"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2063"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}