The U.S. Constitution was ahead of its time but is now rickety and antiquated — discuss

You people had 50 years to pass a constitutional amendment robbing babies of their personhood. Instead you relied on unelected activist judges to keep "finding" your leftist eugenics agenda in the constitution.
Hell, you still have control of the house, Senate & presidency. If you actually believed abortion on demand was the will of the people, you could pass a national abortion bill guaranteeing abortion to all "birthing persons" based on the interstate commerce clause, YESTERDAY. You only have to show one person crossing state lines to buy fetal tissue or organs for the feds to able to "regulate" the abortion industry. The bill would eventually get to the supreme court, and might get thrown out, but that would take 2 years or more.
The loudest 10% of the country not having the votes to change the constitution doesn't mean the constitution has failed. Instead... it means it's working.

Sure — we’ll just gather up the 90% of the electorate that Democrats will need to hold the 2/3 of federal seats that they’ll have to have to pass any abortion-related constitutional amendment within an election system that gives rural-based Republicans a massive amount of electoral affirmative action.

Not gonna happen.

You could propose an amendment that doesn’t mention abortion at all, and which in only a generic sense secures women’s equality under the law, which shouldn’t be controversial at all, and it *still* wouldn’t pass.

How do we know that? The Equal Rights Amendment — which did exactly that — languished ever since first proposed in its original form in the 1920’s and couldn’t pass even after it was revitalized in the ‘70’s, after it was demagogued to death by “traditionalist” agitators like Phyllis Schlafly.

But here’s the thing.

“Pro-life” policies are unworkable. They sound good in legislative echo chambers, they sound good in online comments sections, they sound good in the pews, but outside of conservative thought bubbles, they collide quickly with the sad realities of rape, medical emergencies, and life circumstances.

We know that from our country’s miserable experience prior to Roe, which is why Roe was decided the way it was in the first place. Now we’ve all had 50 years of collective amnesia to forget about how bad the bad old days were, and why even Americans who considered themselves against abortion at the time clenched their teeth and bore the Roe decision. (The “pro-life” movement didn’t start in earnest until later.)

Red states that conduct some of the more radical experiments with “pro-life” policies — total abortion bans, from the moment of conception, with no exceptions whatsoever, and without expanding maternal/family welfare benefits at all — will find themselves dealing with a human rights crisis of their own making. Republicans in those states will either have to moderate their “pro-life” policies, or get replaced by Democrats.

Our country has a strong civil rights and libertarian streak. Slavery failed. Keeping women out of the voting booth failed. Prohibition failed. Jim Crow failed. The War on Drugs continues to fail. And so will “Pro-Life.”

Today feels destabilizing, since extremist “pro-life” laws are a sledgehammer where a scalpel should be, but states will eventually settle into some sort of rational equilibrium. And it’ll probably look a lot like what existed while Roe was in effect.

You’re consistently overestimating your own side’s support and underestimating the depth of pro-choice feeling.

Yes, our country is sharply divided on this, with activists on both sides shouting loudly at each other— and due to geographic ideological segregation, it feels like everyone around you agrees with you 90% of the time — but at the end of the day, America is over 60% pro-choice and less than 40% pro-life.

https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2022/06/13/about-six-in-ten-americans-say-abortion-should-be-legal-in-all-or-most-cases-2/

Due to the pro-Republican electoral affirmative action that I mentioned earlier, 51+% of the nation voting for Democrats doesn’t necessarily translate to 50% of congressional power.

Internet polls don't mean anything. They only poll people who have the time to take internet polls.
You don't speak for the nation. I don't speak for the nation. A thousand people intellectual enough to take a poll don't speak for the nation.

Hilarious.
It took you three hundred thousand words to agree with me that the Democrats DON'T HAVE THE VOTES to pass the abortion on demand bull crap they want which is why they had to use activist judges trying to legislate from the bench in the first place.
Rather than explain how rule of law works, I'll just let you keep on talking. But just remember this: if your side believed any of its bullshit? You'd have passed a national abortion law yesterday. You got the house, the Senate & a rubber stamp from a dementia patient.
So when you don't have the votes, even tho you HAVE the votes? We know where the actual majority opinion lies. And it sure as hell isn't with the infanticide brigade.

If Democrats in the White House and Congress are much smarter than I think they are, then they’re simply sitting back and doing next-to-nothing on abortion rights right now so that the “pro-life” bandwagon in red states collapses under its own weight, in order that Democrats gain electoral popularity while spending no political capital.

In the meantime, thousands of women will die and potentially millions be forced into lives they didn’t choose,

Yeah let's all wait for red states to collapse under their own weight! We can all get behind that. 👍
But of course that means no crying, looting or burning when shit doesn't go the left's way. Which takes us full circle to the preposterous claim that the constitution is broken because the courts won't rewrite it on the fly for you.

The “judicial activist!”

All of the rights you’ll see on this list except the last one were established by an American court decision, not a constitutional amendment.

Extremely basic ones like the right of women to do mundane things like open a credit card. Yes, their right to vote is explicitly protected by a Constitutional amendment. Basically nothing else related to being a woman in society is.

Wait… what? The right *to* bear a child?!

Yes. The right *to* bear a child.

As of this post-Roe moment in time, there is nothing stopping a rogue state legislature from banning pregnancy entirely. That’s because the right-of-privacy established in Roe *protects reproductive freedom, period.* It protects EVERYONE’S family planning choice. That means both sides of the coin. Abortion and baby. Now that’s out the window.

You might say, “that’s ridiculous, of course a state would never ban having babies. It’s demographic suicide and in any event, would be too politically unpopular.”

But we’re not talking about generally applicable anti-pregnancy laws.

Think more evilly. Think like a Nazi, because that’s the entire point of having rights. That if Nazis ever someday took power somewhere in our country democratically, that they’d be prevented from carrying out the worst evils on helpless citizens.

A state could determine that some of its citizens are undesirables and shouldn’t be breeding. Forced sterilization was a thing in America — there are people alive today who were forcibly sterilized, subject to this most brutal and dehumanizing invasion of privacy.

Think it can’t happen again? That’s more than I’m willing to hang my hat on.

Please stop making my job so easy. Lol.
Forced sterilization? You mean like the kind the founder of planned parenthood supported for poor and black women?
Dehumanizing "undesirables"? You mean like the left wants to do to 650,000 humans a year that aren't old enough to fit your arbitrary definition of human?
The left's total inability to pass their abortion agenda LEGALLY tells you all you need to know about where the ACTUAL majority opinion lies.

Thank you for making my point for me. Lol. Forced sterilization was a thing in this country, which means that if SCOTUS slavishly applies its current “originalist” mode of analysis, it will be forced to conclude that the state’s ability to force certain citizens not to have kids is “deeply rooted in our nation’s history and traditions.”

Sanger’s 1920s-vintage views on that have been repudiated a zillion times by modern Planned Parenthood. Lol. So this is exactly like trying to argue Woodrow Wilson’s vicious anti-black bias somehow still explains the party that elected Barack Obama. If there’s a movement for sterilization, it won’t be pushed by the modern Left — it will come from MAGA folks trying to attack birthright citizenship or something like that. Next.

You don’t trust polls, or even elections probably. We’ll just have to see if “pro-life” is as strong as you seem to think.

Republicans are expected to re-take Congress — it would be a historical fluke if they didn’t — but the size of the margin matters.

If the momentous sea-change of Roe’s demise pushes even 5% more voters into the Democrats’ column, that would be huge.

The Democrats could no doubt bungle 2022 for this or other reasons — but the depth of pro-choice sentiment in this country will be a long-term deadweight on Republican chances in 2024 and beyond. Scandals come and go, economies go through cycles. But the ability to control your body and decide your future, that’s a constant that never goes away.

If you bet against freedom in America, you typically lose.

There was once another moralistic fundamentalist movement in America that took 50 years of hard work to achieve its goals. That movement was Prohibition. It captured the nation. It won a Constitutional amendment. It crated a nationwide regime that lasted over a decade. It provoked a backlash. It was defeated.

Beware!

Another 300,000 word soliloquy to admit you actually agree with me and you know you don't have the votes to cram your leftist bullshit down my throat?
Keep up the work! 👍
Oh and planned parenthood's eugenics didn't go away when the media stopped covering it. They're still the number one supporter of "weeding out" undesirables...
You keep fighting to kill more people. I'll keep fighting to kill less people and we'll see who wins!

Indeed. Bets are placed — let’s go!

Good news for many of these red states currently trailing the pack for maternal mortality is that there’s nowhere to go but up. Abortion bans might make that worse — or might make it better!

Who knows! We can’t see the future, we can only do informed guesswork!