A commenter on my blog wrote:
Why pro-abortion radicals are rioting in left-wing jurisdictions is hard to understand. California and New York have virtually no restrictions on abortion up to the point of delivery…
I’ll try to answer the implicit question there: why would pro-abortion radicals be so deeply angry, especially in left-wing jurisdictions where abortion is not going to be outlawed and probably is going to become even more unlimited?
A lot of reasons:
(1) They’re being encouraged to do so.
(2) They’ve been lied to and led to believe that this ruling does constitute some sort of abortion ban, and since a lot of people neither understand law nor follow its ins and outs, that lie gains some traction.
(3) Even if they do understand that their own states will not be restricting abortion, they are used to it being available to all women. Some are old enough to remember the horrors of illegal abortions (some even had them), and many of the younger ones have been told stories about the olden days.
(4) Many women on the left have bought the “Handmaid’s Tale” sort of scenario which goes like this: misogynist fundamentalist Christian men are trying to control the reproductive organs of women and will stop at nothing till they get total control. This fear has been drummed up incessantly for many years.
(5) Many also believe that the Catholics on the Supreme Court are intent on imposing Catholicism on everyone and the ruling in Dobbs originates in their Catholicism. Belief in #5 relies on their not understanding that the ruling actually takes the Court out of the business of ruling on abortion at the federal level, but there are plenty of people who not only don’t understand that but who are not interested in even listening to that sort of assertion, much less crediting it.
(6) A leftist doesn’t want states to be able to make their own decisions – as opposed to the federal government dictating what states can do – unless the issue involves something the federal government is trying to do that the left is against and the right is for. Then states’ rights become good and the left will support them. When Trump tried to enforce immigration laws, for example, the left was in favor of states’ defiance against the feds. But when SCOTUS allows abortion to revert to the states to make their own varied rules as the states see fit, that is an abomination because abortion is a right – after all, Roe said so, and that’s been the law of the land for well-nigh fifty years. The fact that the Court has longer and consistently held that immigration is a federal power and never said that regulating abortion was a federal power until Roe, thus generating a large distinction between the two issues, is irrelevant to the left.
(7) They’re not used to ceding ground. Usually there’s no reversal after they’ve won a battle. There might be a pause, but it should only be temporary.
(8) They’re being told this is just the beginning of what the right is planning. Next there will be a federal abortion ban. Then the Court will reverse previous decisions on gay marriage, contraception, and even interracial marriage, and some states will ban those things and perhaps the Republicans will ban them nationwide through federal legislation if they ever get control of Congress. The fact that Dobbs explicitly stated that reversal of those cases won’t be happening, because different principles apply, is ignored. The left is also using Clarence Thomas’ concurrence – the one about the overuse of the due process clause, a position which none of the others joined – to mount its argument that these bans are on the right’s agenda. But even if Thomas hadn’t written that, the left would have said the right is planning to attack these things next anyway.
(9) The left believes it’s all Trump’s fault, and he is evil.
[Neo is a writer with degrees in law and family therapy, who blogs at the new neo.]
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