Election 2012

The Path to Overturning Roe

Irin Carmon reports on the plan to destroy reproductive rights:

Here’s what’s important to know about the right’s plan for Roe: It will be slow, and it will be indirect — to avoid a backlash — but the inexorable goal is to overturn it and ban abortion wherever possible. With an eye toward the court’s oldest member, women’s rights pioneer Ruth Bader Ginsburg, antiabortion activists would be counting on a President Romney to appoint one or more justices who would upset the fragile 5-4 balance that currently maintains the federal right to an abortion. In the meantime, they’ve been working hard to lay the groundwork to get a case before the Court that would allow justices to revisit, and possibly overturn, Roe.

“The antiabortion groups are busy trying to fill the pipeline with cases that could present vehicles to revisit the abortion issue, either tangentially or frontally,” says Supreme Court expert and author Linda Greenhouse, who has written extensively about Roe. “And the pro-choice groups, on the other hand, are not appealing even adverse rulings, because they don’t want such a vehicle to get to the Court” — even the current, shakily pro-choice court. “Right now,” says Greenhouse, “we have a standoff.”

And because too many voters viewed the first debate as an episode of American Idol, the Republicans are this close to overturning Roe and handing over the reproductive organs of more than half the population to the control of a Republican government.

And, by the way, it's worth noting that the Romney/Ryan Republicans would make it more expensive and more challenging to carry a pregnancy to term by cutting Medicaid by $1.7 trillion, by de-funding Planned Parenthood and cutting SCHIP.

Women -- the Republican Party would essentially own your body. Vote accordingly.

(h/t Thomas Soldan Attorney at Law)