Alito Says Abortion Has Nothing To Do With Gender Equality--But History Says Otherwise

[LetMyPeopleVote]

13. The Dobbs decision looks to history to rescind Roe

Again, Alito is a partisan hack who does not know history. Alito cited a witch hunter who was an advocate for marital rape as his authority to overturn Roe. Alito is both a partisan hack/bad lawyer and a bad historian

Link to tweet

https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2022/06/24/dobbs-decision-looks-history-rescind-roe/

Friday’s Supreme Court ruling in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization relies on history to rescind the constitutional right to a legal abortion established by Roe v. Wade in 1973. There’s just one problem: the history it relies on is not correct.

Writing for the majority in Dobbs, Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. argues that Roe disrupted “an unbroken tradition of prohibiting abortion on pain of criminal punishment” that had “persisted from the earliest days of the common law until 1973.” But the real picture is far blurrier — and even once states began passing stricter abortion laws between the 1820s and 1880s, public sentiment did not follow. Few abortion providers were convicted under the new laws, indicating that most Americans didn’t see abortion as a crime.

Anglo-American common law initially guided the U.S. on abortion. Under common law, abortion was only punishable after “quickening,” defined as the moment the mother first felt fetal movement — typically between 16 to 22 weeks of gestation.

Alito contends, however, that pre-quickened abortions were always strongly condemned, as shown by the wave of statutes that states passed in the 19th century criminalizing abortion for the entire pregnancy. Yet, over a third of the states actually retained the imprint of quickening in these laws, assigning a distinctly lesser penalty for abortions that took place before quickening.

Even more importantly, there is scant evidence of public concern about fetal “personhood” or moral opprobrium prompting those new state laws in the 19th century, as Alito claims in Dobbs. In fact, there appears to have been no public pressure at all for tougher laws before 1845. All the statutes passed before 1845 were added during routine revisions of state criminal codes, probably meaning that most were enacted without actual debate.