My new column at The Hill explains the parallels between the recent SCOTUS opinion overruling Roe v. Wade and the infamous Dred Scott decision of 1857.
Here is the gist:
So much for states’ rights: Republicans target out-of-state abortions
07/13/22
The Dobbs decision may not, as Alito rationalized, simply allow “each State to regulate abortion as its citizens wish.” We may instead be headed toward years of interstate battles, in which the reddest states attempt to extend the reach of their extreme anti-abortion statutes beyond their borders, penalizing the exercise of reproductive choice even in states where women’s right to abortion is protected by law.
In 1858, Abraham Lincoln famously observed that “a house divided against itself cannot stand.” Less well known is the passage that followed. “I do expect it will cease to be divided. It will become all one thing, or all the other.” That was an aspiration – Lincoln hoped to put slavery on the “course of ultimate extinction” – but it was also an admonition that slavery’s advocates would continue to “push it forward.”
Because of the notorious Dred Scott decision, Lincoln warned, “We shall lie down pleasantly dreaming that the people of Missouri are on the verge of making their State free; and we shall awake to the reality, instead, that the Supreme Court has made Illinois a slave State.”
Chief Justice Roger Taney’s Dred Scott opinion shamefully held that that the “African race” had “no rights which the white man was bound to respect” because, according to “the histories of the times,” they were “not in the contemplation of the framers of the Constitution.”
The Dobbs opinion uses the same originalist reasoning to conclude that women have no constitutional right to terminate pregnancies because it is not “deeply rooted in this Nation’s history and tradition.” Taney allowed that the individual states could confer rights “upon any class or description of persons,” just as Alito held that abortion rights are now to be determined state-by-state. Most ominously, however, Taney declared that Dred Scott’s status as an enslaved person was governed by the law of his home state, Missouri, even after he traveled to free-state Illinois. Will Missouri women now be subjected to its punitive laws if they dare to obtain abortions in Illinois?
You can read the entire piece at The Hill.
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