General Discussion

Nevilledog

(51,055 posts) Mon Jun 27, 2022, 01:16 AM Jun 2022

The Supreme Court turns the U.S. into a cautionary tale

Link to tweet

https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/06/27/global-abortion-reproductive-rights-united-states-cautionary/

No paywall
https://archive.ph/AoH54

The American right loves to trumpet their nation’s “exceptionalism,” the myth that the United States’ political system and values are inherently unique and implicitly better than anything found elsewhere in the world. But whatever the merits of the belief, the United States in recent years has been seen by its closest partners as exceptional for all the wrong reasons.

The Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection at the Capitol prompted myriad politicians in other advanced democracies to point to the relative health of their republics and the greater decorum and maturity of their transfers of power. The merciless toll of mass shootings in the United States reminds observers in places like Canada, Australia and Britain of the greater sanity of their nations’ gun laws.

And Friday’s decision by the U.S. Supreme Court to overturn Roe v. Wade — scrapping the constitutional right to an abortion — led to a host of world leaders from across the political spectrum holding the United States up as a cautionary tale, a warning to the world of how fundamental rights can be lost.

Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, a center-left politician, described the ruling as “horrific,” tweeting that “no government, politician, or man should tell a woman what she can and cannot do with her body.” Britain’s right-wing Prime Minister Boris Johnson said the decision “clearly has massive impacts on people’s thinking around the world” and called it a “big step backward.”