Associate Justices of the Supreme Court of the United States of America Stephen Breyer, Sonia Sotomayor, and Elena Kagan issued a joint dissenting opinion in the case of Thomas E. Dobbs, Mississippi State Health Officer v. Jackson Women’s Organization, June 24, 2022,
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Roe v. Wade is Gone, Baby-Killing Will Continue, part two
Associate Justices of the Supreme Court of the United States of America Stephen Breyer, Sonia Sotomayor, and Elena Kagan issued a joint dissenting opinion in the case of Thomas E. Dobbs, Mississippi State Health Officer v. Jackson Women’s Organization, June 24, 2022, that could have been composed by a college freshman with a little bit of help from a few pro-abortion constitutional law professors steeped in the morass of emotionalism, feminism, moral relativism, and judicial positivism. The joint dissenting opinion is a screed awash with one utilitarian bromide after another that turns the Order of Creation (Nature) on its head by making it appear that childbearing, childbirth, and child-rearing are unnatural, neigh-well dangerous, and overall debasing for women.
None of the arguments, such as they can be termed, were in the least bit new as they reflect the general line of questioning that each had posed to Mississippi State Solicitor General Scott Stewart, Jackson Women’s Health Organization Attorney Julie Rikelman, and the Solicitor General of the United States of America, Elizabeth Prelogar, when the case was argued before the Supreme Court of the United States of America on Wednesday, December 1, 2021. Although the dissenting opinion bears the names of three abovenamed justices, it is not difficult to conclude that the lion’s share of the histrionics was authored by none other than the unhinged Bronx jurist named Sonia Sotomayor.
The joint dissent is based upon the following false premises:
First, that women are “autonomous” to make their own “decisions” about their own “reproductive health care” and have a “right” to “choose” what to do with their “autonomous” bodies.
Second, that the women’s equality would be debased if they were “forced” to bear children whose conception they neither “planned” nor “desired.”
Third, that women must be able to copulate like beasts without any fear of conceiving a child.
Fourth, that childbearing is life-threatening and life changing.
Seventh, that women are only “empowered” if they have careers and can achieve economic “parity” with men, careers that would be “threatened” if they were “forced” to carry a child to birth.
Eighth, that mere mortals can confer “rights” that do not exist in the nature of things and, once conferred, are irreversible merely because they have been conferred.
Ninth, that jurists cannot be bound by the intentions of the framers of either the Constitution of the United States of America itself nor of the Fourteenth Amendment as women were disenfranchised, did not take part in the debates leading to the adoption of either, and that it is thus erroneous to refer to the “will of the people” in connection to those documents as the “people” only included misogynistic males.
Tenth, that the judicial principle of stare decisis was violated by the majority in the case of Thomas E. Dobbs, Mississippi State Health Officer v. Jackson Women’s Organization as Roe v. Wade and Casey v. Planned Parenthood of Southeastern Pennsylvania are binding precedents that were meant to beyond further judicial review.
Eleventh, that the history of pre-Roe statutes delineated by Associate Justice Samuel Alito in his opinion for the Court prohibiting the surgical execution of children in most, although not all, cases is irrelevant to the world as it is today because a new and permanent “tradition” has been established upon which women have based their entire lives.
Twelfth, the chemical and surgical execution of innocent preborn children is part of the “rule of law,” and, according to the dissenting opinion, the majority:
[The Court’s majority] “makes radical change too easy and too fast, based on nothing more than the new views of new judges. The majority has overruled Roe and Casey for one and only one reason: because it has always despised them, and now it has the votes to discard them. The majority thereby substitutes a rule by judges for the rule of law.” (Dissenting Opinion, Thomas E. Dobbs, Mississippi State Health Officer v. Jackson Women’s Organization, June 24, 2022.)
Thirteenth, the dissenting opinion would have us believe that emotion is a substitute for reason while accusing those who use reason and history against them are the ones doing what they in fact have always done by way of rank judicial social engineering.
Fourteenth, the dissenting opinion nowhere mentions the binding precepts of the Divine or Natural Laws, acting as though anything above the “tradition” of the past fifty years is a threat to the “rights” of women and their “reproductive health.”
Fifteenth, the dissenting opinion is a masterpiece of emotion and amorality wrapped up in circuitous arguments of cases that are themselves masterpieces of emotion and amorality.
As one who is not “old” by contemporary standards, I am still old enough at seventy years, seven months not to want to waste my time on sophistry dressed up to appear as “mainstream” constitutional jurisprudence. It is with this in mind that I am going to briefly refute the dissenters’ major points that I summarized just above.
First, an innocent baby is a distinct human being.
Second, no mere contingent being, man or woman, has any “autonomy” over the life of an innocent human being.
Third, each human being, man, or woman, is duty bound to observe the binding precepts of the Divine Positive Law and the Natural Law, which itself was defined very succinctly by the Roman orator Cicero:
True law is right reason conformable to nature, universal, unchangeable, eternal, whose commands urge us to duty, and whose prohibitions restrain us from evil. Whether it enjoins or forbids, the good respect its injunctions, and the wicked treat them with indifference. This law cannot be contradicted by any other law, and is not liable either to derogation or abrogation. Neither the senate nor the people can give us any dispensation for not obeying this universal law of justice. It needs no other expositor and interpreter than our own conscience. It is not one thing at Rome, and another at Athens; one thing to-day, and another to-morrow; but in all times and nations this universal law must forever reign, eternal and imperishable. It is the sovereign master and emperor of all beings. God himself is its author, its promulgator, its enforcer. And he who does not obey it flies from himself, and does violence to the very nature of man. And by so doing he will endure the severest penalties even if he avoid the other evils which are usually accounted punishments. (Cicero, The Republic.)
Cicero had it almost entirely correct. Almost. He was wrong in asserting that the natural law does not need any “other expositor and interpreter than our own conscience.” He lived before the Incarnation and before the founding of the true Church upon the Rock of Peter, the Pope. Cicero thus did not know that man does need an interpreter and expositor of the natural law, namely, the Catholic Church. Apart from this, however, Cicero understood that God’s law does not admit of abrogations by a vote of the people or of a “representative” body, such as the Roman Senate in his day or the United States Congress or state legislatures, et al. in our own day.
Pope Pius XI explained in Divini Illius Magistri, December 31, 1929, the Natural Law is authoritatively explicated by Holy Mother Church even though it can be known by human reason and is thus not, unlike the Divine Positive Law, her exclusive possession:
The Church does not say that morality belongs purely, in the sense of exclusively, to her; but that it belongs wholly to her. She has never maintained that outside her fold and apart from her teaching, man cannot arrive at any moral truth; she has on the contrary more than once condemned this opinion because it has appeared under more forms than one. She does however say, has said, and will ever say, that because of her institution by Jesus Christ, because of the Holy Ghost sent her in His name by the Father, she alone possesses what she has had immediately from God and can never lose, the whole of moral truth, omnem veritatem, in which all individual moral truths are included, as well those which man may learn by the help of reason, as those which form part of revelation or which may be deduced from it (Pope Pius XI, Divini Illius Magistri, December 31, 1929.)
A mother can never dispose of the fruit of her womb as she desires. She has an obligation before God to provide the love that is the child’s due. True justice is, after all, giving to each that which his is due.
There are no “decisions” to be made about a child, only selfless, unconditional love to be offered.
There are no “difficult choices” to be made, only a firm reliance upon Our Lady’s graces to provide all the supernatural and natural helps necessary to fulfill one’s maternal duties with the distinction of a saint and imitation of the Queen of All Saints, Our Lady herself.
Our first pope, Saint Peter, explained that we are not to use our liberty as a cloak for malice, and the direct, intentional killing of any innocent human being is act of malice:
Dearly beloved, I beseech you as strangers and pilgrims, to refrain yourselves from carnal desires which war against the soul, [12] Having your conversation good among the Gentiles: that whereas they speak against you as evildoers, they may, by the good works, which they shall behold in you, glorify God in the day of visitation. [13] Be ye subject therefore to every human creature for God’s sake: whether it be to the king as excelling; [14] Or to governors as sent by him for the punishment of evildoers, and for the praise of the good: [15] For so is the will of God, that by doing well you may put to silence the ignorance of foolish men:
[16] As free, and not as making liberty a cloak for malice, but as the servants of God. [17] Honour all men. Love the brotherhood. Fear God. Honour the king. [18] Servants, be subject to your masters with all fear, not only to the good and gentle, but also to the froward. [19] For this is thankworthy, if for conscience towards God, a man endure sorrows, suffering wrongfully. [20] For what glory is it, if committing sin, and being buffeted for it, you endure? But if doing well you suffer patiently; this is thankworthy before God.
[21] For unto this are you called: because Christ also suffered for us, leaving you an example that you should follow his steps. [22] Who did no sin, neither was guile found in his mouth. [23] Who, when he was reviled, did not revile: when he suffered, he threatened not: but delivered himself to him that judged him unjustly. [24] Who his own self bore our sins in his body upon the tree: that we, being dead to sins, should live to justice: by whose stripes you were healed. [25] For you were as sheep going astray; but you are now converted to the shepherd and bishop of your souls. (1 Peter 2: 11-25.)
Fourth, the killing of an innocent human being is not health care. What the dissenting justices in Dobbs v. Jackson women’s organization call “reproductive health care” is nothing other than a euphemism for the judicially manufactured “right” not to bear children so that women can copulate at will without having to “worry” about bearing and raising children. The killing of an innocent human being is murder.
Alas, judicially manufactured “rights” have no standing in the court of the Divine Judge, Christ the King, Whose Apostle and blood cousin, Saint Jude Thaddeus, explained what happens to the unchaste if they die without repenting of their sins:
[1] Jude, the servant of Jesus Christ, and brother of James: to them that are beloved in God the Father, and preserved in Jesus Christ, and called. [2] Mercy unto you, and peace, and charity be fulfilled. [3] Dearly beloved, taking all care to write unto you concerning your common salvation, I was under a necessity to write unto you: to beseech you to contend earnestly for the faith once delivered to the saints. [4] For certain men are secretly entered in, (who were written of long ago unto this judgment,) ungodly men, turning the grace of our Lord God into riotousness, and denying the only sovereign Ruler, and our Lord Jesus Christ. [5] I will therefore admonish you, though ye once knew all things, that Jesus, having saved the people out of the land of Egypt, did afterwards destroy them that believed not:
[6] And the angels who kept not their principality, but forsook their own habitation, he hath reserved under darkness in everlasting chains, unto the judgment of the great day. [7] As Sodom and Gomorrha, and the neighbouring cities, in like manner, having given themselves to fornication, and going after other flesh, were made an example, suffering the punishment of eternal fire. [8] In like manner these men also defile the flesh, and despise dominion, and blaspheme majesty. [9] When Michael the archangel, disputing with the devil, contended about the body of Moses, he durst not bring against him the judgment of railing speech, but said: The Lord command thee. [10] But these men blaspheme whatever things they know not: and what things soever they naturally know, like dumb beasts, in these they are corrupted.
[11] Woe unto them, for they have gone in the way of Cain: and after the error of Balaam they have for reward poured out themselves, and have perished in the contradiction of Core. [12] These are spots in their banquets, feasting together without fear, feeding themselves, clouds without water, which are carried about by winds, trees of the autumn, unfruitful, twice dead, plucked up by the roots, [13] Raging waves of the sea, foaming out their own confusion; wandering stars, to whom the storm of darkness is reserved for ever. [14] Now of these Enoch also, the seventh from Adam, prophesied, saying: Behold, the Lord cometh with thousands of his saints, [15] To execute judgment upon all, and to reprove all the ungodly for all the works of their ungodliness, whereby they have done ungodly, and of all the hard things which ungodly sinners have spoken against God.
[16] These are murmurers, full of complaints, walking according to their own desires, and their mouth speaketh proud things, admiring persons for gain’ s sake. [17] But you, my dearly beloved, be mindful of the words which have been spoken before by the apostles of our Lord Jesus Christ, [18] Who told you, that in the last time there should come mockers, walking according to their own desires in ungodlinesses. [19] These are they, who separate themselves, sensual men, having not the Spirit. [20] But you, my beloved, building yourselves upon your most holy faith, praying in the Holy Ghost,
[21] Keep yourselves in the love of God, waiting for the mercy of our Lord Jesus Christ, unto life everlasting. [22] And some indeed reprove, being judged:[23] But others save, pulling them out of the fire. And on others have mercy, in fear, hating also the spotted garment which is carnal. [24] Now to him who is able to preserve you without sin, and to present you spotless before the presence of his glory with exceeding joy, in the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ,[25] To the only God our Saviour through Jesus Christ our Lord, be glory and magnificence, empire and power, before all ages, and now, and for all ages of ages. Amen. (Jude 1-25.)
Every single justice serving on the Supreme Court of the United States of America accepts fornication as an irreversible fact of life today. Although, once again, it is one thing to be fall into sin and to be sorry. It is quite another to persist in sin unrepentantly and to plan to put oneself into the near occasions of sin and/or to base one’s entire life upon living in its throes. Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ stands ready to forgive the fallen who repent, but He will be unstinting in His wrath against those who persist in their sins arrogantly and without a trace of repentance.
Sin is the most deadly force on earth, yet it is that grown human beings have been emboldened to argue on its behalf before the highest court in the United States of America.
Please note that none of this has any relation to constitutional law. It has everything to do with unrestrained carnal lust, and it is all based upon the belief that contraception is a human “right.
Contraception is a denial of the Sovereignty of God over the sanctity and fecundity of marriage.
Neither abortion nor contraception are protected by the Constitution of the United States of America, and both are proscribed by the binding precepts of the Divine Positive Law and the Natural Law.
Fifth, pregnancy and childbirth are not diseases. Although childbirth is painful because of Original Sin and can indeed carry some risks, the conception of a child is to be undertaken exclusively within the context of the marital bond as the natural fruit of that which is proper to the married state. Parents are to welcome as many or as few children as God wills for them to have as the procreation and education of children constitute the primary end of marriage, and they are to trust in God at all times as they rely upon the graces won for them by His Divine Son, Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ, during His Passion and Death on the wood of the Holy Cross on Good Friday and that flow into their hearts and souls through loving hands of Our Lady, she who is the Mediatrix of All Graces.
The civil law is not to be misused as a cloak for the malice of fornication, adultery, sodomy, or any other sins against Holy Purity. Indeed, the civil law is not to be used as a cloak for anything that is opposed to the good of souls, upon which the entirety of a just social order is premised.
Sixth, the chimerical concept of basing women’s “equality” with men on the basis of having access to the chemical and surgical execution of innocent babies is a feminist canard that is opposed to the Order of Creation (Nature) as well as the Order of Redemption (Grace).
God has created the two sexes to complement each other, not to serve as rivals. Each has distinct roles to fulfill physically and spiritually. To posit a rivalry where none is supposed to exist and to claim that women of child-bearing years can never be “fulfilled” without a career to which “planned” children must be subordinate is to invert God’s plan for human existence and to substitute in its place the adversary’s plan for the disruption of the family, which is, after all, the domestic cell of the Church Militant and the building block of societies.
Pope Pius XII explained the dangers of the adversary’s plan to make women tools of his revolutionary agenda against the family in an allocution he delivered on April 18, 1952, as His Holiness pointed out the dangers of “situation ethics,” which is, after all, the entire foundation of the dissenting opinion in the case of Thomas E. Dobbs, Mississippi State Health Officer v. Jackson Women’s Organization, June 24, 2022:
The new ethic (adapted to circumstances), say its authors, is eminently “individual.” In this determination of conscience, each individual finds himself in direct relationship with God and decides before Him, without the slightest trace of intervention by any law, any authority, any community, any cult or religion. Here there is simply the “I” of man and the “I” of the personal God, not the God of the law, but of God the Father, with whom man must unite himself in filial love. Viewed thus, the decision of conscience is a personal “risk,” according to one’s own knowledge and evaluation, in all sincerity before God. These two things, right intention and sincere response, are what God considers! He is not concerned with the action. Hence the answer may be to exchange that Catholic faith for other principles, to seek divorce, to interrupt gestation, to refuse obedience to competent authority in the family, the Church, the State, and so forth.
All this would be perfectly fitting for man’s status as one who has come “of age” and, in the Christian order, it would be in harmony with the relation of sonship which, according to the teaching of Christ, makes us pray to God as “Our Father.”
This personal view of things spares man the necessity of having to ask himself, at every instant, whether the decision to be taken corresponds with the paragraphs of the law or to the canons of abstract standards and rules. It preserves man from the hypocrisy of pharisaical fidelity to laws; it preserves him both from pathological scruples as well at from the flippancy or lack of conscience, because it puts the responsibility before God on the Christian personally. Thus speak those who preach the “new morality.”
It is Alien to the Faith and Catholic Principles
8. Stated thus expressly, the new ethic is so foreign to the faith and to Catholic principles that even a child, if he knows his catechism, will be aware of it and will feel it. It is not difficult to recognize how this new moral system derives from existentialism which either prescinds from God or simply denies Him, and, in any case, leaves man to himself. It is possible that present-day conditions may have led men to attempt to transplant this “new morality” into Catholic soil, in order to make the hardships of Christian life more bearable for the faithful. In fact, millions of them are being called upon today, and in an extraordinary degree, to practice firmness, patience, constancy, and the spirit of sacrifice, if they wish to preserve their faith intact. For they suffer the blows of fate, or are placed in surroundings which put within their reach everything which their passionate heart yearns for or desires. Such an attempt can never succeed.
The Fundamental Obligations of the Moral Law
9. It will be asked, how the moral law, which is universal, can be sufficient, and even have binding force, in an individual case, which, in the concrete, is always unique and “happens only once.” It can be sufficient and binding, and it actually is because precisely by reason of its universality, the moral law includes necessarily and “intentionally” all particular cases in which its meaning is verified. In very many cases it does so with such convincing logic that even the conscience of the simple faithful sees immediately, and with full certitude, the decision to be taken.
10. This is especially true of the negative obligations of the moral law, namely those which oblige us not to do something, or to set something else aside. Yet it is not true only of these obligations. The fundamental obligations of the moral law are based on the essence and the nature of man, and on his essential relationships, and thus they have force wherever we find man. The fundamental obligations of the Christian law, in the degree in which they are superior to those of the natural law, are based on the essence of the supernatural order established by the Divine Redeemer. From the essential relationships between man and God, between man and man, between husband and wife, between parents and children; from the essential community relationships found in the family, in the Church, and in the State, it follows, among other things, that hatred of God, blasphemy, idolatry, abandoning the true faith, denial of the faith, perjury, murder, bearing false witness, calumny, adultery and fornication, the abuse of marriage, the solitary sin, stealing and robbery, taking away the necessities of life, depriving workers of their just wage (James 5:4), monopolizing vital foodstuffs and unjustifiably increasing prices, fraudulent bankruptcy, unjust maneuvering in speculation—all this is gravely forbidden by the divine Lawmaker. No examination is necessary. No matter what the situation of the individual may be, there is no other course open to him but to obey.
11. For the rest, against “situation ethics,” We set up three considerations, or maxims. The first: We grant that God wants, first and always, a right intention. But this is not enough. He also wants the good work. A second principle is that it is not permitted to do evil in order that good may result (Rom 3:8). Now this new ethic, perhaps without being aware of it, acts according to the principle that the end justifies the means. A Christian cannot be unaware of the fact that he must sacrifice everything, even his life, in order to save his soul. Of this we are reminded by all the martyrs. Martyrs are very numerous, even in our time. The mother of the Maccabees, along with her sons; Saints Perpetua and Felicitas, notwithstanding their newborn children; Maria Goretti, and thousands of others, men and women, whom the Church venerates—did they, in the face of the “situation” in which they found themselves, uselessly or even mistakenly incur a bloody death? No, certainly not, and in their blood they are the most explicit witnesses to the truth against the “new morality.” (Pope Pius XII, Address “Soyez Les Bienvenues” (1952) – Novus Ordo Watch.)
Contrast this wonderful summary of Catholic teaching with the following two excerpts from the dissenting opinion in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Organization:
One piece of evidence on that score seems especially salient: The majority’s cavalier approach to overturning this Court’s precedents. Stare decisis is the Latin phrase for a foundation stone of the rule of law: that things decided should stay decided unless there is a very good reason for change. It is a doctrine of judicial modesty and humility. Those qualities are not evident in today’s opinion. The majority has no good reason for the upheaval in law and society it sets off. Roe and Casey have been the law of the land for decades, shaping women’s expectations of their choices when an unplanned pregnancy occurs. Women have relied on the availability of abortion both in structuring their relationships and in planning their lives. The legal framework Roe and Casey developed to balance the competing interests in this sphere has proved workable in courts across the country. No recent developments, in either law or fact, have eroded or cast doubt on those precedents. Nothing, in short, has changed. Indeed, the Court in Casey already found all of that to be true. Casey is a precedent about precedent. It reviewed the same arguments made here in support of overruling Roe, and it found that doing so was not warranted. The Court reverses course today for one reason and one reason only: because the composition of this Court has changed. Stare decisis, this Court has often said, “contributes to the actual and perceived integrity of the judicial process” by ensuring that decisions are “founded in the law rather than in the proclivities of individuals.” Payne v. Tennessee, 501 U. S. 808, 827 (1991); Vasquez v. Hillery, 474 U. S. 254, 265 (1986). Today, the proclivities of individuals rule. The Court departs from its obligation to faithfully and impartially apply the law. We dissent.
I
We start with Roe and Casey, and with their deep connections to a broad swath of this Court’s precedents. To hear the majority tell the tale, Roe and Casey are aberrations: They came from nowhere, went nowhere—and so are easy to excise from this Nation’s constitutional law. That is not true. After describing the decisions themselves, we explain how they are rooted in—and themselves led to—other rights giving individuals control over their bodies and their most personal and intimate associations. The majority does not wish to talk about these matters for obvious reasons; to do so would both ground Roe and Casey in this Court’s precedents and reveal the broad implications of today’s decision. But the facts will not so handily disappear. Roe and Casey were from the beginning, and are even more now, embedded in core constitutional concepts of individual freedom, and of the equal rights of citizens to decide on the shape of their lives. Those legal concepts, one might even say, have gone far toward defining what it means to be an American. For in this Nation, we do not believe that a government controlling all private choices is compatible with a free people. So we do not (as the majority insists today) place everything within “the reach of majorities and [government] officials.” West Virginia Bd. of Ed. v. Barnette, 319 U. S. 624, 638 (1943). We believe in a Constitution that puts some issues off limits to majority rule. Even in the face of public opposition, we uphold the right of individuals—yes, including women—to make their own choices and chart their own futures. Or at least, we did once. . . .
The most striking feature of the [majority] is the absence of any serious discussion” of how of home and family life,” with “special responsibilities” that precluded their full legal status under the Constitution. Hoyt v. Florida, 368 U. S. 57, 62 (1961). By 1973, when the Court decided Roe, fundamental social change was underway regarding the place of women—and the law had begThun to follow. See Reed v. Reed, 404 U. S. 71, 76 (1971) (recognizing that the Equal Protection Clause prohibits sex-based discrimination). By 1992, when the Court decided Casey, the traditional view of a woman’s role as only a wife and mother was “no longer consistent with our understanding of the family, the individual, or the Constitution.” 505 U. S., at 897; see supra, at 15, 23–24. Under that charter, Casey understood, women must take their place as full and equal citizens. And for that to happen, women must have control over their reproductive decisions. Nothing since Casey—no changed law, no changed fact—has undermined that promise. (Dissenting Opinion, Thomas E. Dobbs, Mississippi State Health Officer v. Jackson Women’s Organization, June 24, 2022.)
The authors of the dissenting opinion do not believe that women are “equal” or have their full status as “citizens” unless they can take their place in the world as “equal partners” with men and, at the same time, can have the assurance that they are not “tied down” to the “burdens,” “dangers,” “risks,” and “life-changing” consequences caused by the “disease” that is the conception of an “unwanted” or “unplanned” child, whose very humanity must be denied by the using the terms “fetus” or “potential” life.
Yet is that God has spoken unequivocally about the purpose of marriage and the family:
[26] And he said: Let us make man to our image and likeness: and let him have dominion over the fishes of the sea, and the fowls of the air, and the beasts, and the whole earth, and every creeping creature that moveth upon the earth. [27] And God created man to his own image: to the image of God he created him: male and female he created them. [28] And God blessed them, saying: Increase and multiply, and fill the earth, and subdue it, and rule over the fishes of the sea, and the fowls of the air, and all living creatures that move upon the earth. [29] And God said: Behold I have given you every herb bearing seed upon the earth, and all trees that have in themselves seed of their own kind, to be your meat: [30] And to all beasts of the earth, and to every fowl of the air, and to all that move upon the earth, and wherein there is life, that they may have to feed upon. And it was so done. (Genesis 1: 26-32.)
Is there any need for a further elaboration?
Alas, everything must “be up for grabs” when the souls of men are not taught, sanctified and governed by Holy Mother Church. Unrepentant sins of the most vile manner imaginable must abound, resulting ultimate in entire races of walking “blank slates,” human beings who must decide “for themselves” that which has been ordained by God Himself in the Order of Nature (Creation) and the Order of Redemption (Grace.) Men come to think that they are demigods, beings who have the ability “to decide” what to think in matters to pertaining to Faith and Morals without assenting their intellects completely and without any reservation at all to what Holy Mother Church teaches infallibly.
Individual men do not “define” marriage.
Men do not “define” marriage when acting collectively in an institution of human governance (executive, legislative, judicial).
Men do not “define” marriage when acting collectively in a voter referendum, which was what was wrong with Proposition 8 in California from the very beginning, something that I have pointed out consistently on this site, which means that all of the “conservative” gnashing of teeth and rending of garments over the State of California’s refusal to defend Proposition 8 in the state and Federal court systems is vainglorious as “the people” acting in a referendum have no more authority to “define” marriage (and Proposition 8 ceded the legitimacy of “civil unions” for those engaged in perverse acts against nature) than no judges or legislators or others in society.
The “people” do not “decide” anything about Faith and Morals.
They “people” must obey all that exists in the nature of things and that that plays its part in their own sanctification and salvation.
It should be remembered that moral relativism and judicial positivism are precisely what then President Barack Hussein Obama/Barry Soetoro desired when he nominated Sonia Sotomayor in 2009 and Elena Kagan in 2010 to replace, respectively, David Souter and John Paul Stevens, both of whom were Republican appointees and through-going pro-aborts, on the Supreme Court of the United States of America:
It is important to remember that Judge Sonia Sotomayor, some might recall, was nominated by then President Barack Hussein Obama/Barry Soetoro, not because she was an expert in constitutional law but because she was dedicated to using the Constitution of the United States of America as a sort of carte blanche for social engineering according to the perceived “needs” of “real” people.
Come with me now into the Christ or Chaos Wayback Machine for proof of this very important point that gets to the heart of Justice Sotomayor’s arrogant, hostile line of questioning of Mississippi State Solicitor General Scott Stewart. Here is what Caesar Emeritus Obama/Soetoro said on May 26, 2009, when he nominated Judge Sotomayor to replace the completely pro-abortion David H. Souter, who was an appointee of the “pro-life” George Herbert Walker Bush in 1990:
First and foremost is a rigorous intellect — a mastery of the law, an ability to hone in on the key issues and provide clear answers to complex legal questions. Second is a recognition of the limits of the judicial role, an understanding that a judge’s job is to interpret, not make, law; to approach decisions without any particular ideology or agenda, but rather a commitment to impartial justice; a respect for precedent and a determination to faithfully apply the law to the facts at hand.
These two qualities are essential, I believe, for anyone who would sit on our nation’s highest court. And yet, these qualities alone are insufficient. We need something more. For as Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes once said, “The life of the law has not been logic; it has been experience.” Experience being tested by obstacles and barriers, by hardship and misfortune; experience insisting, persisting, and ultimately overcoming those barriers. It is experience that can give a person a common touch and a sense of compassion; an understanding of how the world works and how ordinary people live. And that is why it is a necessary ingredient in the kind of justice we need on the Supreme Court. (Remarks of Caesar Obamus.)
Barack Hussein Obama’s use of “respect for precedent” has nothing to do with a respect for the words of the Constitution of the United States of America in the things that appertain to Caesar and thus are within the realm of men to determine for themselves, keeping mind, as men must do at all times and in all circumstances, the greater honor and glory of God and the good of souls. No, Obama’s invocation of a “respect for precedent” (stare decisis, “let the decision stand”) has everything to do with “respect” the decisions of the Supreme Court of the United States of America in the cases of Roe v. Wade and Doe v. Bolton, January 22, 1973. Although Judge Sotomayor has ruled infrequently in cases involving abortion–and none involving any direct challenges to the core findings held by the Supreme Court in Roe v. Wade and Doe v. Bolton), the fact that Obama went out of the way to mention “a respect for precedent” is a very good indication that he considers her to be a “safe pick” to continue David Souter’s legacy of blood on the Supreme Court of the United States of America.
It is also interesting to point out that, apart from referring to his own duties under the Constitution and the fact that he had consulted with “constitutional” scholars and that Judge Sotomayor had herself dealt with “constitutional” issues in her years as a Federal judge, Caesar Obamus did not make one single reference to the Constitution itself.
Why should he have done so? After all, a document that admits of no higher authority than the text of its own words as the foundation of social order contains the seeds of its own dissolution into irrelevancy as “experience” trumps “logic” and any consideration of an objective morality founded in the precepts of the Divine Positive Law and the Natural Law. This kind of subjectivism is one of the major linkages between the errors of Modernity and those of Modernism, as will be explored yet again, if ever so briefly, at the conclusion of this commentary.
Caesar Obamus’s invocation of the penultimate legal positivist, Oliver Wendell Holmes (I always preferred Oliver Wendell Douglas of Green Acres), is quite a telling commentary as Holmes believed the majority had the “right” to enforce its “will” upon the minority by “force” if necessary. He made this abundantly clear in the case of Buck v. Bell, May 2, 1927, in which he wrote a thoroughly utilitarian opinion justifying a compulsory sterilization law that has been passed by the state legislature of the Commonwealth of Virginia:
The judgment finds the facts that have been recited and that Carrie Buck ‘is the probable potential parent of socially inadequate offspring, likewise afflicted, that she may be sexually sterilized without detriment to her general health and that her welfare and that of society will be promoted by her sterilization,’ and thereupon makes the order. In view of the general declarations of the Legislature and the specific findings of the Court obviously we cannot say as matter of law that the grounds do not exist, and if they exist they justify the result. We have seen more than once that the public welfare may call upon the best citizens for their lives. It would be strange if it could not call upon those who already sap the strength of the State for these lesser sacrifices, often not felt to be such by those concerned, in order to prevent our being swamped with incompetence. It is better for all the world, if instead of waiting to execute degenerate offspring for crime, or to let them starve for their imbecility, society can prevent those who are manifestly unfit from continuing their kind. The principle that sustains compulsory vaccination is broad enough to cover cutting the Fallopian tubes. Jacobson v. Massachusetts, 197 U.S. 11 , 25 S. Ct. 358, 3 Ann. Cas. 765. Three generations of imbeciles are enough. [274 U.S. 200, 208] But, it is said, however it might be if this reasoning were applied generally, it fails when it is confined to the small number who are in the institutions named and is not applied to the multitudes outside. It is the usual last resort of constitutional arguments to point out shortcomings of this sort. But the answer is that the law does all that is needed when it does all that it can, indicates a policy, applies it to all within the lines, and seeks to bring within the lines all similarly situated so far and so fast as its means allow. Of course so far as the operations enable those who otherwise must be kept confined to be returned to the world, and thus open the asylum to others, the equality aimed at will be more nearly reached. (See the text of the decision of the Supreme Court of the United States of America in the case of Buck v. Bell)
Oliver Wendell Holmes’s view of law was indeed based on “experience” and not “logic.” He used the discredited, diabolical precepts of utilitarianism (public policy must be based upon the “greatest good” for the “greatest number” even if “traditional” concepts of morality are violated in the process) and the sort of Social Darwinism that was near and dear to the heart of the woman who started the Birth Control League, Margaret Sanger (whose motto was, “More from the fit, less from the unfit; that is the chief issue of birth control”), as the foundation for his decision in the case of Buck v. Bell. Indeed, Holmes’s overt rejection of the Natural Law as the foundation of jurisprudence (legal reasoning) and the civil law in favor of legal positivism extended quite explicitly to a rejection of the inviolability of innocent human life under of cover of the civil law, as Holmes made clear in a 1918 essay against the Natural Law in the Harvard Law Review:
The most fundamental of the supposed preexisting rights—the right to life—is sacrificed without a scruple not only in war, but whenever the interest of society, that is, of the predominant power in the community, is thought to demand it. Whether that interest is the interest of mankind in the long run no one can tell, and as, in any event, to those who do not think with Kant and Hegel it is only an interest, the sanctity disappears. I remember a very tender-hearted judge being of opinion that closing a hatch to stop a fire and the destruction of a cargo was justified even if it was known that doing so would stifle a man below. It is idle to illustrate further, because to those who agree with me I am uttering commonplaces and to those who disagree I am ignoring the necessary foundations of thought. The a priori men generally call the dissentients superficial. But I do agree with them in believing that one’s attitude on these matters is closely connected with one’s general attitude toward the universe. Proximately, as has been suggested, it is determined largely by early associations and temperament, coupled with the desire to have an absolute guide. Men to a great extent believe what they want to—although I see in that no basis for a philosophy that tells us what we should want to want.
Now when we come to our attitude toward the universe I do not see any rational ground for demanding the superlative—for being dissatisfied unless we are assured that our truth is cosmic truth, if there is such a thing—that the ultimates of a little creature on this little earth are the last word of the unimaginable whole. If a man sees no reason for believing that significance, consciousness and ideals are more than marks of the finite, that does not justify what has been familiar in French skeptics; getting upon a pedestal and professing to look with haughty scorn upon a world in ruins. The real conclusion is that the part cannot swallow the whole—that our categories are not, or may not be, adequate to formulate what we cannot know. If we believe that we come out of the universe, not it out of us, we must admit that we do not know what we are talking about when we speak of brute matter. We do know that a certain complex of energies can wag its tail and another can make syllogisms. These are among the powers of the unknown, and if, as may be, it has still greater powers that we cannot understand, as Fabre in his studies of instinct would have us believe, studies that gave Bergson one of the strongest strands for his philosophy and enabled Maeterlinck to make us fancy for a moment that we heard a clang from behind phenomena—if this be true, why should we not be content? Why should we employ the energy that is furnished to us by the cosmos to defy it and shake our fist at the sky? It seems to me silly. (Natural Law by Oliver Wendell Holmes)
One of the many paradoxes found in a system where a nation’s constitution and civil laws, whether passed at the Federal or state levels, do not explicitly acknowledge the primacy of the binding precepts of the Divine Positive Law and the Natural Law as these have been entrusted to the infallible teaching authority of the Catholic Church, is that it spawns competing teams of naturalists and positivists to vie with each other as to whether they will be bound by a “strict constructionist” approach to the interpretation of the words of the United States Constitution or bound only by a general, Rousseauean sense of “experience,” referred to quite specifically by the legal positivist Barack Hussein Obama, that was described as follows by the late Father Denis Fahey in The Mystical Body of Christ in the Modern World:
Rousseau carries on the revolution against the order of the world begun by Luther. Luther’s revolt was that of our individuality and sense-life against the exigencies of the supernatural order instituted by God. It was an attempt to remain attached to Christ, while rejecting the order established by Christ for our return to God. Rousseau’s revolt was against the order of natural morality, by the exaltation of the primacy of our sense-life.
The little world of each one of us, our individuality, is a divine person, supremely free and sovereignly independent of all order, natural and supernatural. he state of Liberty or of sovereign independence is the primitive state of man, and the nature of man demands the restoration of that state of liberty. It is to satisfy this-called exigency that ‘Father of modern thought’ invented the famous myth of the Social Contract.
The Social Contract gives birth to a form of association in which each one, while forming a union with all the others, obeys only himself and remains as free as before. Each one is subject to the whole, but he is not subject to any man, there is no man above him. He is absorbed in the common Ego begotten in the pact, so that obeying the law, he obeys only himself. Each citizen votes in order, that by the addition of the number of votes, the general will, expressed by the vote of the majority, is, so to say, a manifestation of the ‘deity’ immanent in the multitude. The People are God (no wonder we have gotten used to writing the word with a capital letter). The law imposed by this ‘deity’ does not need to be just in order to exact obedience. In fact, the majority vote makes or creates right and justice. An adverse majority vote can not only overthrow the directions and commands of the Heads of the Mystical Body on earth, the Pope and the Bishops, but can even deprive the Ten Commandments of all binding force.
To the triumph of those ideals in the modern world, the Masonic denial of original sin and the Rousseauist dogma of the natural goodness of man have contributed not a little. The dogma of natural goodness signifies that man lived originally in a purely natural paradise of happiness and goodness and that, even in our present degraded state, all our instinctive movements are good. We do not need grace, for nature can do for what grace does. In addition, Rousseau holds that this state of happiness and goodness, of perfect justice and innocence, of exemption from servile work and suffering, is natural to man, that is, essentially demanded by our nature. Not only then is original sin nonexistent, not only do we not come into the world as fallen sons of the first Adam, bearing in us the wounds of our fallen nature, is radically anti-natural. Suffering and pain have been introduced by society, civilization and private property. Hence we must get rid of all these and set up a new form of society. We can bet back the state of the Garden of Eden by the efforts of our own nature, without the help of grace. For Rousseau, the introduction of the present form of society, and of private property constitute the real Fall. The setting up of a republic based on his principles will act as a sort of democratic grace which will restore in its entirety our lost heritage. In a world where the clear teaching of the faith of Christ about the supernatural order of the Life of Grace has become obscured, but were men are still vaguely conscious that human nature was once happy, Rousseau’s appeal acts like an urge of homesickness. We need not be astonished, then, apart from the question of Masonic-Revolutionary organization and propaganda, at the sort of delirious enthusiasm which takes possession of men at the thought of a renewal of society. Nor need we wonder that men work for the overthrow of existing government and existing order, in the belief that they are not legitimate forms of society. A State not constructed according to Rosseauist-Masonic principles is not a State ruled by laws. It is a monstrous tyranny, and must be overthrown in the name of “Progress” and of the “onward march of democracy.’ All these influences must be borne in mind as we behold, since 1789, the triumph in one country after another or Rousseauist-Masonic democracy. (Father Denis Fahey, The Mystical Body of Christ in the Modern World.)
Sonia Sotomayor, whose heavy, irrational hand is easy to see with the text of the dissenting opinion in the Dobbs case, has been everything that the statist and apologist for all things Marxist wanted when he nominated her to replace Associate Justice David H. Souter thirteen years ago.
Thus, good readers, concern of the dissenters in Dobbs about the “political” survival of the Supreme Court of the United States of America reflect their own personal, “individual” predilections, which they believe are infallible and thus irreversible whereas the “views” of others who disagree with them are completely fallible and reversible.
Translation: Yes, to unrestricted baby-killing.
Yes, to sodomy and all its seemingly endless perverse mutations.
Yes, to vaccine mandates.
Yes, to the surveillance state.
Yes, to anything the ever-mercurial false opposite of the naturalist “left” desires in the name of the “people,” a collectivity to which Communists of all varieties have always appealed to justify and then to codify their own totalitarian control.
Those decisions are “principled,” of course, in the minds of the dissenters. Those that are not, of course, are “political,” disregarding the fact that, as one of the three branches of the government of the United States of America, the Supreme Court of the United States of America is indeed a political institution, and it is one that has been composed of justices who have long followed election returns.
Seventh, the passage of time can never confer legitimacy on that which is otherwise illegitimate. The mere fact that a decision has been rendered by mere mortals wearing black gowns and who bear the title of justices or justices does not make it right. The mere weight of numbers can never make legitimate that which is illegitimate in the objective order of things.
The fact that something has become a commonly accepted practice does not make it morally right, although we know that this is what Jorge Mario Bergoglio really believes about false religions and about those who live in sin.
Children are gifts to be welcomed with loving, open hearts, not objects to be “planned.”
Women of childbearing years who want to work to “fulfill” themselves rather than being forced into the workplace to help support their families because of abandonment by their spouses or the inability of their husbands to find work because of preference giving to women in the hiring process today (or because of the confiscatory taxes imposed to support Federal and state bureaucracies that exist to mishandle taxpayer dollars on wasteful, duplicative and, in all too many instances, unconstitutional statist programs) should not be married.
Married or not, however, no one, whether man or woman, has any “right” to use generative powers God has given to man outside the context of a valid marriage. Holy Writ speaks very plainly about what will happen who misuse the generative powers for their own illicit pleasures rather than according to God’s commands and in accordance with His laws:
Any questions?
Good.
There is no moral liberty to do that which is wrong.
Civil law must be conformed to the Divine and Natural Laws.
Contrary to what naturalists who label themselves as “liberals” or “libertarians” or even many “conservatives” contend, such things as baby-killing, whether chemical or surgical or both, or perverse sins against nature cannot be made “legal” by a decision or a court or by a legislative enactment or executive order or by a plebiscite to reflect “the will of the people,” which is considered by many naturalists, especially the libertarians, as the “will of God” that must govern legislative enactments. In other words, human beings are demigods who are “free” to act as they desire, with a few exceptions here and there, of course, as long as the “will of the people” is observed. Naturalists of the liberal bent believe that judges and other potentates can do what they want no matter what the “people” may desire.
This is all erroneous as contingent beings who did not create themselves and whose bodies are destined one day for the corruption of the grave until the General Resurrection of the Dead on the Last Day do not “determine” moral truth any more than they determine the physical laws of nature.
The law of gravity cannot be “repealed” by a decision of a judge or of a president or of a government or a mayor.
The law of gravity cannot be “repealed” by a majority vote of a human legislature or the majority vote of the “people” in a plebiscite (a referendum on a particular issue that is put to the voters at a general or a special election for their approval or rejection, sometimes originating as a result of legislative initiative or state constructional mandate and sometimes originating as a result of a grass roots petition drive to place a particular question on the ballot, which is called an “initial.” one of the “good government” reforms of the Progressive Era). It is also true that the binding precepts of the Divine Positive Law and the Natural Law cannot be repealed by the pronouncement of any judge or executive or legislative or popular enactments.
Meaningful life?
Every life is meaningful as it has been redeemed by the Second Person of the Most Blessed Trinity made Man in the Virginal and Immaculate Womb of His Most Blessed Mother. Even human beings who might be dependent upon others for care throughout their entire lives are serving as instruments of grace for those who care for them so that they can rise above themselves and to serve others as they would serve Our Lord in the very Flesh.
Yet it is that the dissenters in the Dobbs case do very much believe that legal and constitutional legitimacy is conferred upon actions in defiance of the Divine Positive Law and Natural Law merely because they have proclaimed as “rights” and reflect social trends that are nothing other than indices of the refusal people to live in accordance with those laws while engaging in the riskiest activity of all: that which leads to the loss of their immortal souls for all eternity and to spend all eternity being tormented in hell by the devil and his minions for being so stupid as to follow his temptations without seeking Absolution from a true priest in the Sacred Tribunal of Penance:
Casey itself addressed both West Coast Hotel and Brown, and found that neither supported Roe’s overruling. In West Coast Hotel, Casey explained, “the facts of economic life” had proved “different from those previously assumed.” 505 U. S., at 862. And even though “Plessy was wrong the day it was decided,” the passage of time had made that ever more clear to ever more citizens: “Society’s understanding of the facts” in 1954 was “fundamentally different” than in 1896. Id., at 863. So the Court needed to reverse course. “In constitutional adjudication as elsewhere in life, changed circumstances may impose new obligations.” Id., at 864. And because such dramatic change had occurred, the public could understand why the Court was acting. “[T]he Nation could accept each decision” as a “response to the Court’s constitutional duty.” Ibid. But that would not be true of a reversal of Roe—“[b]ecause neither the factual underpinnings of Roe’s central holding nor our understanding of it has changed.” 505 U. S., at 864.
That is just as much so today, because Roe and Casey continue to reflect, not diverge from, broad trends in American society. It is, of course, true that many Americans, including many women, opposed those decisions when issued and do so now as well. Yet the fact remains: Roe and Casey were the product of a profound and ongoing change in women’s roles in the latter part of the 20th century. Only a dozen years before Roe, the Court described women as “the centerof home and family life,” with “special responsibilities” that precluded their full legal status under the Constitution. Hoyt v. Florida, 368 U. S. 57, 62 (1961). By 1973, when the Court decided Roe, fundamental social change was underway regarding the place of women—and the law had begun to follow. See Reed v. Reed, 404 U. S. 71, 76 (1971) (recognizing that the Equal Protection Clause prohibits sex-based discrimination). By 1992, when the Court decided Casey, the traditional view of a woman’s role as only a wife and mother was “no longer consistent with our understanding of the family, the individual, or the Constitution.” 505 U. S., at 897; see supra, at 15, 23–24. Under that charter, Casey understood, women must take their place as full and equal citizens. And for that to happen, women must have control over their reproductive decisions. Nothing since Casey—no changed law, no changed fact—has undermined that promise. (Dissenting Opinion, Thomas E. Dobbs, Mississippi State Health Officer v. Jackson Women’s Organization, June 24, 2022.)
Roe v. Wade was wrong the day it was decided on Monday, January 22, 1973, which was also the day that Lyndon Baines Johnson died and that his successor, Richard Milhous Nixon, announced a “peace” agreement with the Communist North Vietnamese government that sold out the government of the Republic of Vietnam (South Vietnam), because it was in violation of the binding precepts of the Fifth Commandment, and it remains wrong today no matter how many people think that it was correct.
William Casey v. Planned Parenthood of Southeastern Pennsylvania was wrong the day it was decided on June 27, 1992, and the passage of thirty years has not conferred any legitimacy on it no matter what any mere vessel of clay may think.
The mere weight of numbers—be they fifty-one percent or ninety percent of the whole—can never make legitimate that which is otherwise illegitimate, and willful murder is one of the four sins that cry out to Heaven for vengeance and is thus forever illegitimate, something that proclamations of mere mortals can never change no matter how hard they huff and puff and cry crocodile tears while speaking in histrionic terms.
Eighth, the dissenters in the Dobbs case are so bereft of rational arguments that they must resort to pure, undisguised utilitarianism as they resort to the emotional red herring of cases in which women conceive a child after a forcible assault upon their bodily integrity and in the cases when prenatal testing reveals that a child might suffer from a disease that may take his life within a few days, months or few years after his birth:
Respecting a woman as an autonomous being, and granting her full equality, meant giving her substantial choice over this most personal and most consequential of all life decisions.
Roe and Casey well understood the difficulty and divisiveness of the abortion issue. The Court knew that Americans hold profoundly different views about the “moral[ity]” of “terminating a pregnancy, even in its earliest stage.” Casey, 505 U. S., at 850. And the Court recognized that “the State has legitimate interests from the outset of the pregnancy in protecting” the “life of the fetus that may become a child.” Id., at 846. So the Court struck a balance, as it often does when values and goals compete. It held that the State could prohibit abortions after fetal viability, so long as the ban contained exceptions to safeguard a woman’s life or health. It held that even before viability, the State could regulate the abortion procedure in multiple and meaningful ways. But until the viability line was crossed, the Court held, a State could not impose a “substantial obstacle” on a woman’s “right to elect the procedure” as she (not the government) thought proper, in light of all the circumstances and complexities of her own life. Ibid.
Today, the Court discards that balance. It says that from the very moment of fertilization, a woman has no rights to speak of. A State can force her to bring a pregnancy to term, even at the steepest personal and familial costs. An abortion restriction, the majority holds, is permissible whenever rational, the lowest level of scrutiny known to the law. And because, as the Court has often stated, protecting fetal life is rational, States will feel free to enact all manner of restrictions. The Mississippi law at issue here bars abortions after the 15th week of pregnancy. Under the majority’s ruling, though, another State’s law could do so after ten weeks, or five or three or one—or, again, from the moment of fertilization. States have already passed such laws, in anticipation of today’s ruling. More will follow. Some States have enacted laws extending to all forms of abortion procedure, including taking medication in one’s own home. They have passed laws without any exceptions for when the woman is the victim of rape or incest. Under those laws, a woman will have to bear her rapist’s child or a young girl her father’s—no matter if doing so will destroy her life. So too, after today’s ruling, some States may compel women to carry to term a fetus with severe physical anomalies—for example, one afflicted with Tay-Sachs disease, sure to die within a few years of birth. States may even argue that a prohibition on abortion need make no provision for protecting a woman from risk of death or physical harm. Across a vast array of circumstances, a State will be able to impose its moral choice on a woman and coerce her to give birth to a child. Dissenting Opinion, Thomas E. Dobbs, Mississippi State Health Officer v. Jackson Women’s Organization, June 24, 2022.)
This sick, perverted world created by Martin Luther’s revolt against the Catholic Church has wound up convincing non-Catholics and Catholics alike that there is “no purpose” to human suffering, which is why even the pain from the mildest headache must be alleviated immediately and why any kind of permanent discomfort must be treated with a variety over-the-counter and/or prescription pharmaceuticals.
This naturalistic, sentimentally-based aversion to pain and suffering, rooted in Luther’s belief that one is “saved” by making his “profession of faith” in the Name of Our Saviour Jesus Christ without having to work out one’s salvation in fear and in trembling as one seeks to make reparation for one’s sins and those of the whole world, leads many people to conclude that it is morally licit to starve and dehydrate brain-damaged human beings death, that it morally licit to use increasingly higher doses of morphine in a hospice or a hospital to expedite the death, by heart failure, of a terminally ill patient, that is an act of “compassion” to kill an innocent preborn baby who has been diagnosed in utero with some kind of malady that would cause him to suffer throughout his life.
As I used to explain to my college students when I exploded the various shibboleths and slogans used by pro-aborts to justify the chemical and surgical execution of the innocent preborn under cover of the civil law:
“Which one of you can tell an expectant mother that her baby will be perfectly happy throughout the course of his life?
“Which one of you can tell an expectant mother that her baby will never get ill, will never experience pain of any kind, will never break a limb, will never be ridiculed by his siblings or peers, will never be rejected in friendship or in love, will never fail an examination, will never lose a job, will never suffer from economic distress?
“Which one of you can tell an expectant mother that her child will never die or know the sufferings of old age prior to death if it is God’s Holy Will or them to live a long life?
“Each of us comes into life with spiritual deformity, Original Sin. Each one of our Actual Sins deforms our souls all the more, darkening our intellects and weakening our wills. The Second Person of the Blessed Trinity became Man in His Most Blessed Mother’s Virginal and Immaculate Womb to remedy these deformities, to make it possible for us to make reparation for our sins so that our souls would be as white as wool.
“Those who are born with physical or mental deformities are given to us by Our Lord to see His very image within them as we seek to serve them as we would serve Him in the very Flesh. Those who suffer are given to us to be occasions of grace for us so that we can go out of ourselves and to perform for them the Spiritual and Corporal Works of Mercy. Far being something to flee, suffering is a great gift of the merciful, loving God to permit us an opportunity to make reparation for our sins as we conform our hearts to the Most Sacred Heart of Jesus through the Sorrowful and Immaculate Heart of Mary.
“Nothing you or I can ever suffer is the equal of what we caused these twin Hearts of matchless love to suffer during the events of Our Divine Redeemer’s Passion Death. Embrace suffering with joy and gratitude. It is the path to your salvation as a member of the Catholic Church, outside of which there is no salvation and without which there can be no true social order.”
Can you see why I am no longer employed as a college professor of political science?
The dissenting justices in the Dobbs case understand none of this, and they have adopted a Hitlerian view of life without caring to know about it. Their Hitlerian views are identical in substance if not in practice to those condemned by Bishop Clemens von Galen from his cathedral in Munster, Germany, eighty-one years ago:
“Thou shalt not kill!” God wrote this commandment in the conscience of man long before any penal code laid down the penalty for murder, long before there was any prosecutor or any court to investigate and avenge a murder. Cain, who killed his brother Abel, was a murderer long before there were any states or any courts of law. And he confessed his deed, driven by his accusing conscience: “My punishment is greater than I can bear . . . and it shall come to pass, that every one that findeth me the murderer shall slay me” (Genesis 4,13-14).
“Thou shalt not kill!” This commandment from God, who alone has power to decide on life or death, was written in the hearts of men from the beginning, long before God gave the children of Israel on Mount Sinai his moral code in those lapidary sentences inscribed on stone which are recorded for us in Holy Scripture and which as children we learned by heart in the catechism. (Three Sermons of Bishop Clemens von Galen.)
“Thou shalt not kill!” is the only standard to guide civil law concerning the inviolability of human life, whether before or after birth, not “undue burden,” not “viability,” and not “quality of life.”
Secularism had gotten us to where we are today, and where are today is a state of open rebellion against everything contained within the Sacred Deposit of Faith and even a refusal to admit that the Natural Law can be used in jurisprudential decision-making.
It impossible to draw lines between right and wrong on secular terms in a pluralist regime and it is offensive to Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ to pretend that He does not exist and that His laws do not bind all men in all circumstances and at all times.
Justices Breyer, Sotomayor, and Kagain, no mere creature has any “choice” in the matter of childbearing. Human beings obey God and His Commandments.
The dissenters, of course, are pro-death ideologues and only knows how to incant slogans while using words such as “force” that connote “violence” even though it is the duty of a women who has conceived a child to bear him until birth and, in the cases of single mothers, to put the child up for adoption if she does not want to care for him. However, a mother still has the obligation to pray for her child even after she places him up for adoption.
People such as the dissenters in the Dobbs case believe that emotionalism and sloganeering can win the day, which is precisely what the Sophism of Greek antiquity was all about:
“It is as though we had returned to the age of Protagoras and the Sophists, the age when the art of persuasion–whose modern equivalent is advertising slogans, publicity, propaganda meetings, the press, the cinema, and radio–took the place of thought and controlled the fate of cities and accomplished coups d’etat. So the ninth book of Plato’s Republic looks like a description of contemporary events.” (Simone Weil, quoted in Russell Kirk, The Roots of American Order.)
Here’s a first principle for the dissenting justices in the Dobbs case to consider: “Thou shalt not kill.”
Such is the state of absurdity to which a written document must lead when the text of its words do not mean of any higher authority, thus opening itself up to deliberate misinterpretations to justify whatever mother lode of ideology passes for “jurisprudence” for men who have untethered themselves from the one and only true standard of human liberty, the Holy Cross.
Ninth, the execution of the innocent preborn is a “fundamental right” only for the devil to perpetuate a cycle of sin and violence that has reduced human beings to mere objects whose humanity can be denied or denigrated for a variety of utilitarian reasons. The rise of random attacks upon bystanders in the major cities of the United States of America, which have included slashings, stabbings, the shoving of people onto subway tracks in front of moving trains, and kinds of beatings in broad daylight in major business centers is the dire result of denying the humanity of the innocent preborn child, which itself is the consequence of denying the relevance, if not the very fact of, the Incarnation, Nativity, and Redemptive Act of Christ the King to the right ordering of men and their nations.
Tenth, weak human nature is what it is. Although, quite unlike what Jorge Mario has said repeatedly,sins of the flesh are gravely evil in the objective order of things, it used to be the case those who fell from grace in this regard, went to Confession, and then made arrangements with the parish priest for a simple nuptial ceremony in private without public fanfare. Others, perhaps in cases of adultery or in the cases of teenaged mothers, put up their children for adoption. My own mother was born out of wedlock to a women named Ruth Coomer in Kansas City, Missouri, on March 6, 1921, and I dare say that her chances of making out of the womb alive a century later would be minimal, to say the least.
Eleventh, it must be remembered that there were not over three to four million babies being killed in abortuaries around the United States of America. Laws decriminalizing surgical baby-killing between 1967 and 1973 before Roe v. Wade produced the demand for surgical abortion (with the path having been paved for surgical abortions by the acceptance of contraception and the Supreme Court of the United States of America’s decisions in Griswold v. Connecticut, June 7, 1965). Roe v. Wade created a demanded and thus fed into the sickness that pregnancy is a “burden” that a women can dispose of with complete impunity.
It makes no difference that women might still seek to kill their babies even in states with laws that have gone into effect to prohibit many, although not all, surgical executions of innocent babies now that Roe v. Wade has been reversed.
We don’t wait to enact legislation against bank robbery until all people stop robbing banks, do we? Sure, bank robberies will always take place. Desperate people will always do desperate things to “solve” their problems.
However, the civil law serves an educative function and a punitive function for those who have no regard for the binding precepts of the Divine Positive Law and the Natural Law. God does not wait for everyone to “agree” with His laws before He expects His rational creatures to comply with them. Those who make civil law, whose authority in this instance of the inviolability of innocent human life extends only to the realm of imposing particular penalties upon those involved in abortion and does not extend to any authority to “permit” direct, intentional baby killing, do not wait for everyone to be “good” in order to pass legislation to enforce the binding precepts of the Divine Positive Law and the Natural Law.
Illicit law miseducates the public into thinking that that which is by natural immoral is a “right” of theirs to do as they please. There would be no Jill Rikelmans if the world was conformed to right principles in light of First and Last Things.
Sophists believe that there is no objective morality, and they believe it absolutely, making absolutists even though they do not understand it.
No one has a right to kill a baby.
No one has the right to “choose” to kill a baby.
There is no right to “privacy” to prevent the conception of a baby or to kill him if he manages to be conceived despite the use of that which frustrates the end for which God Himself has ordained the marital union between one man and one woman.
The entire dissenting opinion in the case of Thomas E. Dobbs, Mississippi State Health Officer v. Jackson Women’s Organization is based on what the three justices who signed their names to it believe is the “fundamental right” to do that which is proscribed by God Himself, to kill innocent human beings, which are now to death at all stages of life because of a “quality of life” standard in the provision of medical care that makes human beings subject to the arbitrary whims of “medical” and “sociological” experts who are ever ready to “call in hospice,” declare a person “brain dead,” or withdraw hydration and nutrition without a moment’s hesitation or a qualm of conscience.
Alas, we are not automatons.
We are redeemed creatures who have been given the gift of both natural life from our parents as well as the gift of the supernatural life of our immortal souls in the Baptismal font.
Catholic married couples embrace children with joy as they know that God wants people here on here to know, love, and serve Him as members of His true Church and be ever ready to bear all things for Him so that they can enjoy His Beatific Vision in Heaven for all eternity.
Catholics understand that there is nothing that they, their children, or anyone else can suffer that is the equal of what one of their least Venial Sins caused Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ to suffer during His Passion and Death on the wood of the Holy Cross on Good Friday and that caused His Most Blessed to suffer in perfect compassion with Him as the Queen of Martyrs.
Catholic parents know that they must sacrifices for their children, who will, in turn, learn from those sacrifices made on their behalf during their childhood and youth to make them for others throughout their own lives, perhaps even by offering themselves as priests or consecrated religious and, if not, to be as selfless as the Divine Redeemer Himself in all their undertakings.
The dissenting opinion of the Supreme Court of the United States of America is based on selfishness, narcissism, hedonism, materialism, and subjectivism under the sloganeering pretexts as autonomy, liberty, equality, fulfillment, and the all-compassing “right to privacy.” It has no standing before the bar of Divine Justice, which means it ought to have no standing in hearts and minds of well-formed Catholics. Indeed, well-formed Catholics must understand First Principles and reject all subjectivism in favor of demonstrating an unyielding love of God as He has revealed Himself to us exclusively through His true Church, outside of which neither salvation nor any legitimate social order can be found.
Concluding Remarks
First, as has been noted so many thousands of times on this site, the triumph of the anti-Incarnational errors of Modernity, although only temporary, is the consequence of the Protestant Revolution’s overthrow of the Social Reign of Christ the King as it must be exercised by Holy Mother Church in all that pertains to the good of souls.
Second, as Pope Leo noted in Libertas Praestantissimum, June 20, 1888, Longiqua Oceani, January 6, 1985, Testem Benevolentiae Nostrae, January 22, 1899, and Tametsi Futura Prospicientibus, November 1, 1900, Holy Mother Church has had to adapt herself to conditions that are unfavorable to her status as the Queen and Mistress of all nations. Thus, she has had to make use of various modern “liberties” without, as the “Second” Vatican Council did in Dignitatis Humanae and Gaudium et Spes, December 7, 1965, conceding the nonexistent “legitimacy” of those liberties. Nevertheless, however, Holy Mother Church has had to deal with the corruption of her children by those modern liberties and errors that have seduced them into viewing the Church through the eyes of “democracy,” “rights,” “majoritarianism,” and “egalitarianism” rather than viewing the world through the eyes of the true Faith.
Here is a brief review of Pope Leo XIII’s teaching in this regard:
The main factor, no doubt, in bringing things into this happy state were the ordinances and decrees of your synods, especially of those which in more recent times were convened and confirmed by the authority of the Apostolic See. But, moreover (a fact which it gives pleasure to acknowledge), thanks are due to the equity of the laws which obtain in America and to the customs of the well-ordered Republic. For the Church amongst you, unopposed by the Constitution and government of your nation, fettered by no hostile legislation, protected against violence by the common laws and the impartiality of the tribunals, is free to live and act without hindrance. Yet, though all this is true, it would be very erroneous to draw the conclusion that in America is to be sought the type of the most desirable status of the Church, or that it would be universally lawful or expedient for State and Church to be, as in America, dissevered and divorced. The fact that Catholicity with you is in good condition, nay, is even enjoying a prosperous growth, is by all means to be attributed to the fecundity with which God has endowed His Church, in virtue of which unless men or circumstances interfere, she spontaneously expands and propagates herself; but she would bring forth more abundant fruits if, in addition to liberty, she enjoyed the favor of the laws and the patronage of the public authority. (Pope Leo XIII, Longiqua Oceani, January 6, 1895.)
Pope Leo XIII also understood, however, that his teaching on the Christian Constitution of States (Immortale Dei, November 1, 1885) on the nature of human liberty (Libertas Praestantissimum, June 20, 1884, and the Chief Duties of Christians as Citizens (Sapientiae Christiane, January 10, 1890) were not being taught, by and large, by the American bishops while at the same time condemning secret societies (Masonic lodges, etc.) that were incompatible with the good of souls and thus of the civil state:
15. As regards civil affairs, experience has shown how important it is that the citizens should be upright and virtuous. In a free State, unless justice be generally cultivated, unless the people be repeatedly and diligently urged to observe the precepts and laws of the Gospel, liberty itself may be pernicious. Let those of the clergy, therefore, who are occupied with the instruction of the multitude, treat plainly this topic of the duties of citizens, so that all may understand and feel the necessity, in political life, of conscientiousness, self restraint, and integrity; for that cannot be lawful in public which is unlawful in private affairs. On this whole subject there are to be found, as you know, in the encyclical letters written by Us from time to time in the course of Our pontificate, many things which Catholics should attend to and observe. In these writings and expositions We have treated of human liberty, of the chief Christian duties, of civil government, and of the Christian constitution of States, drawing Our principles as well from the teaching of the Gospels as from reason. They, then, who wish to be good citizens and discharge their duties faithfully may readily learn from Our Letters the ideal of an upright life. In like manner, let the priests be persistent in keeping before the minds of the people the enactments of the Third Council of Baltimore, particularly those which inculcate the virtue of temperance, the frequent use of the sacraments and the observance of the just laws and institutions of the Republic.
16. Now, with regard to entering societies, extreme care should be taken not to be ensnared by error. And We wish to be understood as referring in a special manner to the working classes, who assuredly have the right to unite in associations for the promotion of their interests; a right acknowledged by the Church and unopposed by nature. But it is very important to take heed with whom they are to associate, lest whilst seeking aid for the improvement of their condition they may be imperilling far weightier interests. The most effectual precaution against this peril is to determine with themselves at no time or in any matter to be parties to the violation of justice. Any society, therefore, which is ruled by and servilely obeys persons who are not steadfast for the right and friendly to religion is capable of being extremely prejudicial to the interests as well of individuals as of the community; beneficial it cannot be. Let this conclusion, therefore, remain firm-to shun not only those associations which have been openly condemned by the judgment of the Church, but those also which, in the opinion of intelligent men, and especially of the bishops, are regarded as suspicious and dangerous. (Pope Leo XIII, Longinqua Oceani, January 6, 1895.)
In plain English, therefore, Pope Leo XIII was telling the American bishops that they had to correct the errors of Americanism that were corrupting the worldviews of Catholics in the United States of America, and to this end he minced no words in Testem Benevolentiae Nostrae, January 22, 1899:
But, beloved son, in this present matter of which we are speaking, there is even a greater danger and a more manifest opposition to Catholic doctrine and discipline in that opinion of the lovers of novelty, according to which they hold such liberty should be allowed in the Church, that her supervision and watchfulness being in some sense lessened, allowance be granted the faithful, each one to follow out more freely the leading of his own mind and the trend of his own proper activity. They are of opinion that such liberty has its counterpart in the newly given civil freedom which is now the right and the foundation of almost every secular state.
In the apostolic letters concerning the constitution of states, addressed by us to the bishops of the whole Church, we discussed this point at length; and there set forth the difference existing between the Church, which is a divine society, and all other social human organizations which depend simply on free will and choice of men.
It is well, then, to particularly direct attention to the opinion which serves as the argument in behalf of this greater liberty sought for and recommended to Catholics.
It is alleged that now the Vatican decree concerning the infallible teaching authority of the Roman Pontiff having been proclaimed that nothing further on that score can give any solicitude, and accordingly, since that has been safeguarded and put beyond question a wider and freer field both for thought and action lies open to each one. But such reasoning is evidently faulty, since, if we are to come to any conclusion from the infallible teaching authority of the Church, it should rather be that no one should wish to depart from it, and moreover that the minds of all being leavened and directed thereby, greater security from private error would be enjoyed by all. And further, those who avail themselves of such a way of reasoning seem to depart seriously from the over-ruling wisdom of the Most High-which wisdom, since it was pleased to set forth by most solemn decision the authority and supreme teaching rights of this Apostolic See-willed that decision precisely in order to safeguard the minds of the Church’s children from the dangers of these present times.
These dangers, viz., the confounding of license with liberty, the passion for discussing and pouring contempt upon any possible subject, the assumed right to hold whatever opinions one pleases upon any subject and to set them forth in print to the world, have so wrapped minds in darkness that there is now a greater need of the Church’s teaching office than ever before, lest people become unmindful both of conscience and of duty.
We, indeed, have no thought of rejecting everything that modern industry and study has produced; so far from it that we welcome to the patrimony of truth and to an ever-widening scope of public well-being whatsoever helps toward the progress of learning and virtue. Yet all this, to be of any solid benefit, nay, to have a real existence and growth, can only be on the condition of recognizing the wisdom and authority of the Church. (Pope Leo XIII, Testem Benvolentiae Nostrae, January 22, 1899.)
This telling passage from Pope Leo’s Apostolical Letter to the longtime Americanist Archbishop of Baltimore, James Cardinal Gibbons, is a prophetic warning about the counterfeit church of conciliarism that would owe much of its origins to the heresy of Americanism:
For it would give rise to the suspicion that there are among you some who conceive of and desire the Church in America to be different from what it is in the rest of the world. (Testem Benevolentiae Nostrae, January 22, 1899.)
Behold the fact that the Church desired by the Americanists in the Nineteenth Century has arisen, the counterfeit church of conciliarism, that embraces the errors of Modernity while propagating them anew with a Modernist spin. As it is false of its very nature, conciliarism reflects the competing camps of the false opposites of “liberalism” and “conservativism” that exist in the world, and is thus doomed as everything else based on falsehoods, including the modern civil state that is designed the make the world safe for every “religion” except Catholicism and for everything that eschews the Natural Law in favor of moral subjectivism.
Quite specifically, you see, a nation that is not founded on right principles must degenerate into the barbarism of our present era, having no immutable teaching authority to guide it, choosing to be “guided” by the demigods of national founding fathers and/or by the shifting winds of majoritarian sentiment at any particular point in time. Contradiction and instability are bound to result, as we can see with great clarity today.
It is very much beside the point to argue that the “founders” would have opposed this or that social evil. They premised the entire fabric of national life under the Constitution upon the false belief that men could sort out their differences by means of a cumbersome process of negotiation and debate in the national legislative process, believing that there was no single belief that could unite men and guide them in the pursuit of the common good as the supreme and eternal good each man was kept in mind. There is no way, therefore, for naturalists to use a naturalist Constitution to defend against various evils. Evil must win when man does not subordinate himself to the Deposit of Faith that Our Blessed Lord and Saviour entrusted exclusively to the Catholic Church and when men do not have belief in, access to or cooperation with Sanctifying Grace
Here is a summary of the major principles that explain why naturalism is incapable of providing the framework for social order and must yield to the forces of barbarism over the course of time:
1) There are limits that exist in the nature of things beyond which men have no authority or right to transgress, whether acting individually or collectively in the institutions of civil governance.
2) There are limits that have been revealed positively by God Himself in his Divine Revelation, that bind all men in all circumstances at all times, binding even the institutions of civil governance.
3) A divinely-instituted hierarchy exists in man’s most basic natural unit of association: the family. The father is the head of the family and governs his wife and children in accord with the binding precepts of the Divine positive law and the natural law. Children do not have the authority to disobey the legitimate commands of their parents. Parents do not have the authority to issue illegitimate and/or unjust commands.
4) Our Lord Himself became Incarnate in Our Lady’s virginal and immaculate womb, subjecting Himself to the authority of His creatures, obeying his foster-father, Saint Joseph, as the head of the Holy Family, thus teaching us that all men everywhere must recognize an ultimate authority over them in their social relations, starting with the family.
5) Our Lord instituted the Catholic Church, founding it on the Rock of Peter, the Pope, to be the means by which His Deposit of Faith is safeguarded and transmitted until the end of time. The Church is the mater, mother, and magister, teacher, of all men in all nations at all times, whether or not men and nations recognize this to be the case.
6) The Pope and the bishops of the Church have the solemn obligation to proclaim nothing other than the fullness of the truths of the Faith for the good of the sanctification and salvation of men unto eternity and thus for whatever measure of common good in the temporal real, which the Church desires earnestly to promote, can be achieved in a world full of fallen men.
7) It is not possible for men to live virtuously as citizens of any country unless they first strive for sanctity as citizens of Heaven. That is, it is not possible for there to be order in any nation if men do not have belief in access to and cooperation with sanctifying grace, which equips them to accept the truths contained in the Deposit of Faith and to obey God’s commands with diligence in every aspect of their lives without exception.
8) The rulers of Christendom came to understand, although never perfectly and never without conflicts and inconsistencies, that the limits of the Divine positive law and the natural law obligated them to exercise the powers of civil governance with a view towards promoting man’s temporal good in this life so as to foster in him his return to God in the next life. In other words, rulers such as Saint Louis IX, King of France, knew that they would be judged by Our Lord at the moment of his Particular Judgment on the basis of how well they had fostered those conditions in their countries that made it more possible for their subjects to get to Heaven.
9) The rulers of Christendom accepted the truth that the Church had the right, which she used principally through her Indirect Power over civil rulers by proclaiming the truths of the Holy Faith, to interpose herself in the event that a civil ruler proposed to do something or had indeed done something that violated grievously the administration of justice and thus posed a grave threat to the good of souls.
10) The Social Kingship of Jesus Christ may be defined as the right of the Catholic Church to see to it that the binding precepts of the Divine Positive Law and the Natural Law are the basis of the actions of civil governance in all that pertains to the good of souls and that those who exercise civil power keep in mind man’s last end, the salvation of his immortal soul as a member of the Catholic Church. Civil leaders must, therefore, recognize the Catholic Church as the true Church founded by God Himself and having the right to reprimand and place interdicts upon those who issue edicts and ordinances contrary to God’s laws. (A summary of the points that I have made in my writing for the past thirty years.)
This is but a brief distillation of the points contained in the brilliant social encyclical letters of Popes Leo XIII, St. Pius X, and Pius XI, in particular, although Popes Gregory XVI and Pius IX also contributed to their reiteration and explication. I have spent much time in the past twenty-five years or so illustrating these points with quotations from these encyclical letters, which contain immutably binding teachings that no Catholic may dissent from legitimately (as Pope Pius XI noted in Ubi Arcano Dei Consilio in 1922).
The Modern State, including the United States of America, is founded on a specific and categorical rejection of each of these points. Consider the following:
1) Martin Luther himself said that a prince may be a Christian but that his religion should not influence how he governs, giving rise to the contemporary notion of “separation of Church and state,” condemned repeatedly by Popes in the Nineteenth and early Twentieth Centuries.
2) Martin Luther planted the seeds of contemporary deconstructionism, which reduces all written documents to the illogical and frequently mutually contradictory private judgments of individual readers, by rejecting the Catholic Church as the repository and explicator of the Deposit of Faith, making the “private judgment” of individuals with regard to the Bible supreme. If mutually contradictory and inconsistent interpretations of the Bible can stand without correction from a supreme authority instituted by God, then it is an easy thing for all written documents, including a Constitution that makes no reference at all to the God-Man or His Holy Church, to become the plaything of whoever happens to have power over its interpretation
3) The sons of the so-called Enlightenment, influenced by the multifaceted and inter-related consequences of the errors of the Renaissance and the Protestant Revolt, brought forth secular nations that contended the source of governing authority was the people. Ultimately, all references to “God” were in accord with the Freemasonic notion of a “supreme intelligence” without any recognition of the absolute necessity of belief in and acceptance of the Incarnation and of the Deposit of Faith as it has been given to Holy Mother Church for personal happiness and hence al social order.
4) The Founding Fathers of the United States of America did not believe that it was necessary to refer all things in civil life to Christ the King as He had revealed Himself through His true Church, believing that men would be able to pursue “civic virtue” by the use of their own devices and thus maintain social order in the midst of cultural and religious pluralism. This leads, as Pope Leo XIII noted of religious indifferentism, to the triumph of the lowest common denominator, that is, atheism.
5) As the Constitution of the United States of America admits of no authority higher than its own words, it, like the words of Holy Writ are for a Protestant or to a Modernist, is utterly defenseless when the plain meanings of its words are distorted and used to advance ends that its framers would have never thought imaginable, no less approved in fact. The likes of Barack Hussein Obama/Barry Soetoro, Hillary Diane Rodham Clinton, and Joseph Robinette Biden, Jr., have no regard for the words of the Constitution or for the just laws passed by Congress, and Donald John Trump was and remains plainly ignorant of most of the Constitution’s provisions as he is a man of “action” who is not prone to read, study, and reflect. He reacts to external stimuli, which got him into a whole lot of needlessly, self-made trouble during his presidency. We continue to be governed by men who are contemptuous of true law or wholly ignorant of it. Quite a state of affairs.
6) This is but the secular version of Antinomianism: the belief advanced by those who took the logic of Luther’s argument of being “saved by faith alone” to its inexorable conclusion that one could live a wanton life of sin and still be saved. Luther himself did not see where the logic of his rejection of Catholic doctrine would lead and fought against the Antinomians. In like manner, you see, the Constitutionalists and Federalists of today do not see that what is happening today in Federal courts, including the Supreme Court of the United States, is the inexorable result of a Constitution that rejects Christ the King and the Catholic Church. These Constitutionalists and Federalists will fight time and time again like Sisyphus pushing the bolder up a hill. They will always lose because they cannot admit that the thing they admire, the Constitution, is the proximate problem that has resulted in all of the evils they are trying to fight.
A nation founded on false premises, no matter the “good intentions” of those whose intellects were misinformed by several centuries of naturalist lies and Protestant theological heresies and errors, is bound to degenerate more and more over time into a land of materialism and hedonism and relativism and positivism and utilitarianism and naturalism and paganism and atheism and environmentalism and feminism and barbarism. Many evils, including the daily carnage against the preborn, both by surgical and chemical means, continue to be committed in this country. American “popular culture” destroys souls and bodies both here and abroad. Full vent is given each day to a panoply of false ideas that are from Hell and confuse even believing Catholics no end as they try to find some “naturalist” hero or idea by which to win the “culture wars,” oblivious to the fact that it is only Catholicism that can do so.
Third, the conciliar bishops, both those of whom were truly consecrated and those who were not, enabled, whether directly by words of praise for their alleged commitment to “social justice” or by abject inaction, pro-abortion Catholics in public life in the immediate aftermath of Roe v. Wade, January 22, 1983, and thus made it possible for those same reprobates and their successors in public life to become full-throated supporters of the homosexual collective’s agenda in behalf of perversity. We would not be faced with the likes of the self-anointed biologists, philosophes, and “theologians” such as Joseph Robinette Biden, Jr., and Nancy Patricia D’Alesandro Pelosi had those in the conciliar hierarchy exercised their duty to duly warn and then to excommunicate each and every Catholic in public life committed to the promotion of evils that cry out to Heaven for vengeance.
Indeed, part three of what is turning out to be a three-part series will deal with the Biden administration’s efforts to provide “support” for expectant mothers to kill and their children as well as the efforts of some tin horn judges in Texas and Louisiana who want to show off their pro-abortion bona fides by attempting to block laws restricting many surgical abortions in those two states even though the Supreme Court of the United States of Americas ruled in the case of Thomas E. Dobbs, Mississippi State Health Officer v. Jacksougson Women’s Health Organizationthat the “people” are free to act as they desire (which they are not, of course) in crafting such laws. So much for the “people” “are free to act.” As the late James Francis Durante (see an appearance of his as the “mystery guest” on What’s My Line, Sunday, January 31, 1965– Jimmy Durante on What’s My Line 1965) was wont to say, “Everybody wants to get into the act, cha, cha, cha.”
On the Feast of the Visitation of the Blessed Virgin Mary
Today, July 2, 2022, is the Feast of the Visitation of the Blessed Virgin Mary.
Our Lady sought to provide charity to her mother’s aged cousin, Saint Elizabeth, who had conceived in the normal manner despite her advanced years, and to her unborn child, Saint John the Baptist, who was to be the Precursor of her Divine Son, Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ, and the Last of the Old Testament Prophets, the bridge between the Old Covenant of Moses and the New and Eternal Covenant that Our Lord would institute at the Last Supper and then ratifiy by the shedding of every single drop of His Most Precious Blood on the wood of the Holy Cross on Good Friday as the curtain in the Temple was torn in two from top to bottom and the earth quaked.
Saint Elizabeth heard the sweet music of Our Lady’s melodious voice. She is the very flower of our race gave joy unto the heart and soul of Saint Elizabeth while the unborn Saint John the Baptist responded to the grace of Our Lady’s visit with her own unborn Child, Our Lord Jesus Christ, and leapt for joy and the unborn Jesus baptized him in the womb in anticipation of the merits He would win for the many atop the dung heap of Calvary over thirty-three years later. There was vivid intercommunion between the unborn Redeemer, Christ the King, and His Precursor and Herald, Saint John the Baptist at the when Our Lady took Him, hidden within of Our Lady’s Virginal and Immaculate Womb eight days after His Incarnation by the power of the Third Person of the Most Blessed Trinity, God the Holy Ghost, immediately after her Annunciation up the long, arduous road to the hill country of Judah.
Although it means nothing to the dissenters in the case of Thomas E. Dobbs, Mississippi State Health Office v. Jackson Women’s Organization, the selfless charity of Our Lady and the intercommunion between the Redeemer and His Herald should teach us that unborn babies in their mothers’ wombs are meant to be brought to the Baptismal font as soon after birth as possible so that they can be regenerated unto the supernatural life of Sanctifying Grace and thus enjoy the working of the Blessed Trinity in their immortal souls.
The unborn Baby Jesus had baptized the unborn Saint John the Baptist for the irreplaceable work that he had to perform to prepare the way for Our Lord to sanctify the waters of the Jordan River and thus of the whole world for His baptism of regeneration after He had sanctified domestic life and all manual labor during His Hidden Years in Nazareth as He submitted Himself in all humility for that which He, as God Incarnate, did not need but sought to teach us and to fulfill all that He has caused to be written about Himself in Holy Writ by accepting a symbolic baptism of repentance prior to His forty days of fasting and temptation in the desert and thence the commencement of His Public Ministry.
We, too, must exercise the Spiritual and Corporal Works of Mercy as we show unto the unborn and their mothers the charity shown unto Saint Elizabeth and Saint John the Baptist by Our Lady and Our Lord Himself in the Flesh thought hidden from the world until His Nativity in Bethlehem, and one of the best ways we can do this is to pray as many Rosaries each day as our state in life permit, remembering to pray for the conversion of all those who kill babies, assist in the killing babies and/or are accessories to the genocide of the preborn by their actions of public officials, whether elected or appointed.
Perhaps most importantly, as I try to note so frequently on this website, we must beg Our Lady through her Most Holy Rosary for our own conversion by making a perfect Act of Contrition upon rising, frequently during the day and before we lay our heads down to sleep, which is itself symbolic of the long sleep of death that awaits us all at a time known only to God Himself, and by going to Confession to a true priest regularly if this is at all possible where one lives in this time of apostasy and betrayal.
Remember, the Sorrowful and Immaculate Heart of Mary will triumph one day, and that triumph can be advanced by offering up our prayer, sacrifices, sufferings, and merits to her Divine Son through that same Sorrowful and Immaculate Heart in reparation for our sins and those of the whole world.
Moreover, we must never lose heart in the midst of the world’s troubles as we can to mind Our Lord’s very own words to Saint Margaret Mary Alacoque:
“I will reign despite all those who oppose me.”
Sorrowful and Immaculate Heart of Mary, pray for us now, and at the hour of our death.
Our Lady of the Rarcosary, pray for us.
Saint Joseph, pray for us.
Saints Peter and Paul, pray for us.
Saint John the Baptist, pray for us.
Saint Elizabeth, pray for us.
Saint Zachary, pray for us.
Saint Michael the Archangel, pray for us.
Saint Gabriel the Archangel, pray for us,
Saint Raphael the Archangel, pray for us.
Saints Processus and Martinian, pray for us.
Appendix
The Text of the Dissenting Opinion in Thomas E, Dobbs, Mississippi State Health Officer v. Jackson Women’s Organization, June 24, 2022
JUSTICE BREYER, JUSTICE SOTOMAYOR, and JUSTICE KAGAN, dissenting.
For half a century, Roe v. Wade, 410 U. S. 113 (1973), and Planned Parenthood of Southeastern Pa. v. Casey, 505 U. S. 833 (1992), have protected the liberty and equality of women. Roe held, and Casey reaffirmed, that the Constitution safeguards a woman’s right to decide for herself whether to bear a child. Roe held, and Casey reaffirmed, that in the first stages of pregnancy, the government could not make that choice for women. The government could not control a woman’s body or the course of a woman’s life: It could not determine what the woman’s future would be. See Casey, 505 U. S., at 853; Gonzales v. Carhart, 550 U. S. 124, 171–172 (2007) (Ginsburg, J., dissenting). Respecting a woman as an autonomous being, and granting her full equality, meant giving her substantial choice over this most personal and most consequential of all life decisions.
Roe and Casey well understood the difficulty and divisiveness of the abortion issue. The Court knew that Americans hold profoundly different views about the “moral[ity]” of “terminating a pregnancy, even in its earliest stage.” Casey, 505 U. S., at 850. And the Court recognized that “the State has legitimate interests from the outset of the pregnancy in protecting” the “life of the fetus that may become a child.” Id., at 846. So the Court struck a balance, as it often does when values and goals compete. It held that the State could prohibit abortions after fetal viability, so long as the ban contained exceptions to safeguard a woman’s life or health. It held that even before viability, the State could regulate the abortion procedure in multiple and meaningful ways. But until the viability line was crossed, the Court held, a State could not impose a “substantial obstacle” on a woman’s “right to elect the procedure” as she (not the government) thought proper, in light of all the circumstances and complexities of her own life. Ibid.
Today, the Court discards that balance. It says that from the very moment of fertilization, a woman has no rights to speak of. A State can force her to bring a pregnancy to term, even at the steepest personal and familial costs. An abortion restriction, the majority holds, is permissible whenever rational, the lowest level of scrutiny known to the law. And because, as the Court has often stated, protecting fetal life is rational, States will feel free to enact all manner of restrictions. The Mississippi law at issue here bars abortions after the 15th week of pregnancy. Under the majority’s ruling, though, another State’s law could do so after ten weeks, or five or three or one—or, again, from the moment of fertilization. States have already passed such laws, in anticipation of today’s ruling. More will follow. Some States have enacted laws extending to all forms of abortion procedure, including taking medication in one’s own home. They have passed laws without any exceptions for when the woman is the victim of rape or incest. Under those laws, a woman will have to bear her rapist’s child or a young girl her father’s—no matter if doing so will destroy her life. So too, after today’s ruling, some States may compel women to carry to term a fetus with severe physical anomalies—for example, one afflicted with Tay-Sachs disease, sure to die within a few years of birth. States may even argue that a prohibition on abortion need make no provision for protecting a woman from risk of death or physical harm. Across a vast array of circumstances, a State will be able to impose its moral choice on a woman and coerce her to give birth to a child.
Enforcement of all these draconian restrictions will also be left largely to the States’ devices. A State can of course impose criminal penalties on abortion providers, including lengthy prison sentences. But some States will not stop there. Perhaps, in the wake of today’s decision, a state law will criminalize the woman’s conduct too, incarcerating or fining her for daring to seek or obtain an abortion. And as Texas has recently shown, a State can turn neighbor against neighbor, enlisting fellow citizens in the effort to root out anyone who tries to get an abortion, or to assist another in doing so.
The majority tries to hide the geographically expansive effects of its holding. Today’s decision, the majority says, permits “each State” to address abortion as it pleases. Ante, at 79. That is cold comfort, of course, for the poor woman who cannot get the money to fly to a distant State for a procedure. Above all others, women lacking financial resources will suffer from today’s decision. In any event, interstate restrictions will also soon be in the offing. After this decision, some States may block women from traveling out of State to obtain abortions, or even from receiving abortion medications from out of State. Some may criminalize efforts, including the provision of information or funding, to help women gain access to other States’ abortion services. Most threatening of all, no language in today’s decision stops the Federal Government from prohibiting abortions nationwide, once again from the moment of conception and without exceptions for rape or incest. If that happens, “the views of [an individual State’s] citizens” will not matter. Ante, at 1. The challenge for a woman will be to finance a trip not to “New York [or] California” but to Toronto. Ante, at 4 (KAVANAUGH, J., concurring).
Whatever the exact scope of the coming laws, one result of today’s decision is certain: the curtailment of women’s rights, and of their status as free and equal citizens. Yesterday, the Constitution guaranteed that a woman confronted with an unplanned pregnancy could (within reasonable limits) make her own decision about whether to bear a child, with all the life-transforming consequences that act involves. And in thus safeguarding each woman’s reproductive freedom, the Constitution also protected “[t]he ability of women to participate equally in [this Nation’s] economic and social life.” Casey, 505 U. S., at 856. But no longer. As of today, this Court holds, a State can always force a woman to give birth, prohibiting even the earliest abortions. A State can thus transform what, when freely undertaken, is a wonder into what, when forced, may be a nightmare. Some women, especially women of means, will find ways around the State’s assertion of power. Others—those without money or childcare or the ability to take time off from work—will not be so fortunate. Maybe they will try an unsafe method of abortion, and come to physical harm, or even die. Maybe they will undergo pregnancy and have a child, but at significant personal or familial cost. At the least, they will incur the cost of losing control of their lives. The Constitution will, today’s majority holds, provide no shield, despite its guarantees of liberty and equality for all. And no one should be confident that this majority is done with its work. The right Roe and Casey recognized does not stand alone. To the contrary, the Court has linked it for decades to other settled freedoms involving bodily integrity, familial relationships, and procreation. Most obviously, the right to terminate a pregnancy arose straight out of the right to purchase and use contraception. See Griswold v. Connecticut, 381 U. S. 479 (1965); Eisenstadt v. Baird, 405 U. S. 438 (1972). In turn, those rights led, more recently, to rights of same-sex intimacy and marriage. See Lawrence v. Texas, 539 U. S. 558 (2003); Obergefell v. Hodges, 576 U. S. 644 (2015). They are all part of the same constitutional fabric, protecting autonomous decisionmaking over the most personal of life decisions. The majority (or to be more accurate, most of it) is eager to tell us today that nothing it does “cast[s] doubt on precedents that do not concern abortion.” Ante, at 66; cf. ante, at 3 (THOMAS, J., concurring) (advocating the overruling of Griswold, Lawrence, and Obergefell). But how could that be? The lone rationale for what the majority does today is that the right to elect an abortion is not “deeply rooted in history”: Not until Roe, the majority argues, did people think abortion fell within the Constitution’s guarantee of liberty. Ante, at 32. The same could be said, though, of most of the rights the majority claims it is not tampering with. The majority could write just as long an opinion showing, for example, that until the mid-20th century, “there was no support in American law for a constitutional right to obtain [contraceptives].” Ante, at 15. So one of two things must be true. Either the majority does not really believe in its own reasoning. Or if it does, all rights that have no history stretching back to the mid19th century are insecure. Either the mass of the majority’s opinion is hypocrisy, or additional constitutional rights are under threat. It is one or the other.
One piece of evidence on that score seems especially salient: The majority’s cavalier approach to overturning this Court’s precedents. Stare decisis is the Latin phrase for a foundation stone of the rule of law: that things decided should stay decided unless there is a very good reason for change. It is a doctrine of judicial modesty and humility. Those qualities are not evident in today’s opinion. The majority has no good reason for the upheaval in law and society it sets off. Roe and Casey have been the law of the land for decades, shaping women’s expectations of their choices when an unplanned pregnancy occurs. Women have relied on the availability of abortion both in structuring their relationships and in planning their lives. The legal framework Roe and Casey developed to balance the competing interests in this sphere has proved workable in courts across the country. No recent developments, in either law or fact, have eroded or cast doubt on those precedents. Nothing, in short, has changed. Indeed, the Court in Casey already found all of that to be true. Casey is a precedent about precedent. It reviewed the same arguments made here in support of overruling Roe, and it found that doing so was not warranted. The Court reverses course today for one reason and one reason only: because the composition of this Court has changed. Stare decisis, this Court has often said, “contributes to the actual and perceived integrity of the judicial process” by ensuring that decisions are “founded in the law rather than in the proclivities of individuals.” Payne v. Tennessee, 501 U. S. 808, 827 (1991); Vasquez v. Hillery, 474 U. S. 254, 265 (1986). Today, the proclivities of individuals rule. The Court departs from its obligation to faithfully and impartially apply the law. We dissent.
I
We start with Roe and Casey, and with their deep connections to a broad swath of this Court’s precedents. To hear the majority tell the tale, Roe and Casey are aberrations: They came from nowhere, went nowhere—and so are easy to excise from this Nation’s constitutional law. That is not true. After describing the decisions themselves, we explain how they are rooted in—and themselves led to—other rights giving individuals control over their bodies and their most personal and intimate associations. The majority does not wish to talk about these matters for obvious reasons; to do so would both ground Roe and Casey in this Court’s precedents and reveal the broad implications of today’s decision. But the facts will not so handily disappear. Roe and Casey were from the beginning, and are even more now, embedded in core constitutional concepts of individual freedom, and of the equal rights of citizens to decide on the shape of their lives. Those legal concepts, one might even say, have gone far toward defining what it means to be an American. For in this Nation, we do not believe that a government controlling all private choices is compatible with a free people. So we do not (as the majority insists today) place everything within “the reach of majorities and [government] officials.” West Virginia Bd. of Ed. v. Barnette, 319 U. S. 624, 638 (1943). We believe in a Constitution that puts some issues off limits to majority rule. Even in the face of public opposition, we uphold the right of individuals—yes, including women—to make their own choices and chart their own futures. Or at least, we did once.
A
Some half-century ago, Roe struck down a state law making it a crime to perform an abortion unless its purpose was to save a woman’s life. The Roe Court knew it was treading on difficult and disputed ground. It understood that different people’s “experiences,” “values,” and “religious training” and beliefs led to “opposing views” about abortion. 410 U. S., at 116. But by a 7-to-2 vote, the Court held that in the earlier stages of pregnancy, that contested and contestable choice must belong to a woman, in consultation with her family and doctor. The Court explained that a long line of precedents, “founded in the Fourteenth Amendment’s concept of personal liberty,” protected individual decision making related to “marriage, procreation, contraception, family relationships, and child rearing and education.” Id., at 152–153 (citations omitted). For the same reasons, the Court held, the Constitution must protect “a woman’s decision whether or not to terminate her pregnancy.” Id., at 153. The Court recognized the myriad ways bearing a child can alter the “life and future” of a woman and other members of her family. Ibid. A State could not, “by adopting one theory of life,” override all “rights of the pregnant woman.” Id., at 162.
At the same time, though, the Court recognized “valid interest[s]” of the State “in regulating the abortion decision.” Id., at 153. The Court noted in particular “important interests” in “protecting potential life,” “maintaining medical standards,” and “safeguarding [the] health” of the woman. Id., at 154. No “absolut[ist]” account of the woman’s right could wipe away those significant state claims. Ibid.
The Court therefore struck a balance, turning on the stage of the pregnancy at which the abortion would occur. The Court explained that early on, a woman’s choice must prevail, but that “at some point the state interests” become “dominant.” Id., at 155. It then set some guideposts. In the first trimester of pregnancy, the State could not interfere at all with the decision to terminate a pregnancy. At any time after that point, the State could regulate to protect the pregnant woman’s health, such as by insisting that abortion providers and facilities meet safety requirements. And after the fetus’s viability—the point when the fetus “has the capability of meaningful life outside the mother’s womb”—the State could ban abortions, except when necessary to preserve the woman’s life or health. Id., at 163–164.
In the 20 years between Roe and Casey, the Court expressly reaffirmed Roe on two occasions, and applied it on many more. Recognizing that “arguments [against Roe] continue to be made,” we responded that the doctrine of stare decisis “demands respect in a society governed by the rule of law.” Akron v. Akron Center for Reproductive Health, Inc., 462 U. S. 416, 419–420 (1983). And we avowed that the “vitality” of “constitutional principles cannot be allowed to yield simply because of disagreement with them.” Thornburgh v. American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, 476 U. S. 747, 759 (1986). So the Court, over and over, enforced the constitutional principles Roe had declared. See, e.g., Ohio v. Akron Center for Reproductive Health, 497 U. S. 502 (1990); Hodgson v. Minnesota, 497 U. S. 417 (1990); Simopoulos v. Virginia, 462 U. S. 506 (1983); Planned Parenthood Assn. of Kansas City, Mo., Inc. v. Ashcroft, 462 U. S. 476 (1983); H. L. v. Matheson, 450 U. S. 398 (1981); Bellotti v. Baird, 443 U. S. 622 (1979); Planned Parenthood of Central Mo. v. Danforth, 428 U. S. 52 (1976). Then, in Casey, the Court considered the matter anew, and again upheld Roe’s core precepts. Casey is in significant measure a precedent about the doctrine of precedent— until today, one of the Court’s most important. But we leave for later that aspect of the Court’s decision. The key thing now is the substantive aspect of the Court’s considered conclusion that “the essential holding of Roe v. Wade should be retained and once again reaffirmed.” 505 U. S., at 846.
Central to that conclusion was a full-throated restatement of a woman’s right to choose. Like Roe, Casey grounded that right in the Fourteenth Amendment’s guarantee of “liberty.” That guarantee encompasses realms of conduct not specifically referenced in the Constitution: “Marriage is mentioned nowhere” in that document, yet the Court was “no doubt correct” to protect the freedom to marry “against state interference.” 505 U. S., at 847–848. And the guarantee of liberty encompasses conduct today that was not protected at the time of the Fourteenth Amendment. See id., at 848. “It is settled now,” the Court said—though it was not always so—that “the Constitution places limits on a State’s right to interfere with a person’s most basic decisions about family and parenthood, as well as bodily integrity.” Id., at 849 (citations omitted); see id., at 851 (similarly describing the constitutional protection given to “personal decisions relating to marriage, procreation, contraception, [and] family relationships”). Especially important in this web of precedents protecting an individual’s most “personal choices” were those guaranteeing the right to contraception. Ibid.; see id., at 852–853. In those cases, the Court had recognized “the right of the individual” to make the vastly consequential “decision whether to bear” a child. Id., at 851 (emphasis deleted). So too, Casey reasoned, the liberty clause protects the decision of a woman confronting an unplanned pregnancy. Her decision about abortion was central, in the same way, to her capacity to chart her life’s course. See id., at 853.
In reaffirming the right Roe recognized, the Court took full account of the diversity of views on abortion, and the importance of various competing state interests. Some Americans, the Court stated, “deem [abortion] nothing short of an act of violence against innocent human life.” 505 U. S., at 852. And each State has an interest in “the protection of potential life”—as Roe itself had recognized. 505 U. S., at 871 (plurality opinion). On the one hand, that interest was not conclusive. The State could not “resolve” the “moral and spiritual” questions raised by abortion in “such a definitive way that a woman lacks all choice in the matter.” Id., at 850 (majority opinion). It could not force her to bear the “pain” and “physical constraints” of “carr[ying] a child to full term” when she would have chosen an early abortion. Id., at 852. But on the other hand, the State had, as Roe had held, an exceptionally significant interest in disallowing abortions in the later phase of a pregnancy. And it had an ever-present interest in “ensur[ing] that the woman’s choice is informed” and in presenting the case for “choos[ing] childbirth over abortion.” 505 U. S., at 878 (plurality opinion).
So Casey again struck a balance, differing from Roe’s in only incremental ways. It retained Roe’s “central holding” that the State could bar abortion only after viability. 505 U. S., at 860 (majority opinion). The viability line, Casey thought, was “more workable” than any other in marking the place where the woman’s liberty interest gave way to a State’s efforts to preserve potential life. Id., at 870 (plurality opinion). At that point, a “second life” was capable of “independent existence.” Ibid. If the woman even by then had not acted, she lacked adequate grounds to object to “the State’s intervention on [the developing child’s] behalf.” Ibid. At the same time, Casey decided, based on two decades of experience, that the Roe framework did not give States sufficient ability to regulate abortion prior to viability. In that period, Casey now made clear, the State could regulate not only to protect the woman’s health but also to “promot[e] prenatal life.” 505 U. S., at 873 (plurality opinion). In particular, the State could ensure informed choice and could try to promote childbirth. See id., at 877–878. But the State still could not place an “undue burden”—or “substantial obstacle”—“in the path of a woman seeking an abortion.” Id., at 878. Prior to viability, the woman, consistent with the constitutional “meaning of liberty,” must “retain the ultimate control over her destiny and her body.” Id., at 869.
freedom and equality are likewise involved. That fact—the presence of countervailing interests—is what made the abortion question hard, and what necessitated balancing. The majority scoffs at that idea, castigating us for “repeatedly prais[ing] the ‘balance’” the two cases arrived at (with the word “balance” in scare quotes). Ante, at 38. To the majority “balance” is a dirty word, as moderation is a foreign concept. The majority would allow States to ban abortion from conception onward because it does not think forced childbirth at all implicates a woman’s rights to equality and freedom. Today’s Court, that is, does not think there is anything of constitutional significance attached to a woman’s control of her body and the path of her life. Roe and Casey thought that one-sided view misguided. In some sense, that is the difference in a nutshell between our precedents and the majority opinion. The constitutional regime we have lived in for the last 50 years recognized competing interests, and sought a balance between them. The constitutional regime we enter today erases the woman’s interest and recognizes only the State’s (or the Federal Government’s).
B
The majority makes this change based on a single question: Did the reproductive right recognized in Roe and Casey exist in “1868, the year when the Fourteenth Amendment was ratified”? Ante, at 23. The majority says (and with this much we agree) that the answer to this question is no: In 1868, there was no nationwide right to end a pregnancy, and no thought that the Fourteenth Amendment provided one.
Of course, the majority opinion refers as well to some later and earlier history. On the one side of 1868, it goes back as far as the 13th (the 13th!) century. See ante, at 17. But that turns out to be wheel-spinning. First, it is not clear what relevance such early history should have, even to the majority. See New York State Rifle & Pistol Assn., Inc. v. Bruen, 597 U. S. ___, ___ (2022) (slip op., at 26) (“Historical evidence that long predates [ratification] may not illuminate the scope of the right”). If the early history obviously supported abortion rights, the majority would no doubt say that only the views of the Fourteenth Amendment’s ratifiers are germane. See ibid. (It is “better not to go too far back into antiquity,” except if olden “law survived to become our Founders’ law”). Second—and embarrassingly for the majority—early law in fact does provide some support for abortion rights. Common-law authorities did not treat abortion as a crime before “quickening”—the point when the fetus moved in the womb.2 And early American law followed the common-law rule.3 So the criminal law of that early time might be taken as roughly consonant with Roe’s and Casey’s different treatment of early and late abortions. Better, then, to move forward in time. On the other side of 1868, the majority occasionally notes that many States barred abortion up to the time of Roe. See ante, at 24, 36. That is convenient for the majority, but it is window dressing. As the same majority (plus one) just informed us, “post-ratification adoption or acceptance of laws that are inconsistent with the original meaning of the constitutional text obviously cannot overcome or alter that text.” New York State Rifle & Pistol Assn., Inc., 597 U. S., at ___–___ (slip op., at 27–28). Had the pre-Roe liberalization of abortion laws occurred more quickly and more widely in the 20th century, the majority would say (once again) that only the ratifiers’ views are germane.
The majority’s core legal postulate, then, is that we in the 21st century must read the Fourteenth Amendment just as its ratifiers did. And that is indeed what the majority emphasizes over and over again. See ante, at 47 (“[T]he most important historical fact [is] how the States regulated abortion when the Fourteenth Amendment was adopted”); see also ante, at 5, 16, and n. 24, 23, 25, 28. If the ratifiers did not understand something as central to freedom, then neither can we. Or said more particularly: If those people did not understand reproductive rights as part of the guarantee of liberty conferred in the Fourteenth Amendment, then those rights do not exist.
As an initial matter, note a mistake in the just preceding sentence. We referred there to the “people” who ratified the Fourteenth Amendment: What rights did those “people” have in their heads at the time? But, of course, “people” did not ratify the Fourteenth Amendment. Men did. So it is perhaps not so surprising that the ratifiers were not perfectly attuned to the importance of reproductive rights for women’s liberty, or for their capacity to participate as equal members of our Nation. Indeed, the ratifiers—both in 1868 and when the original Constitution was approved in 1788— did not understand women as full members of the community embraced by the phrase “We the People.” In 1868, the first wave of American feminists were explicitly told—of course by men—that it was not their time to seek constitutional protections. (Women would not get even the vote for another half-century.) To be sure, most women in 1868 also had a foreshortened view of their rights: If most men could not then imagine giving women control over their bodies, most women could not imagine having that kind of autonomy. But that takes away nothing from the core point. Those responsible for the original Constitution, including the Fourteenth Amendment, did not perceive women as equals, and did not recognize women’s rights. When the majority says that we must read our foundational charter as viewed at the time of ratification (except that we may also check it against the Dark Ages), it consigns women to second-class citizenship.
Casey itself understood this point, as will become clear. See infra, at 23–24. It recollected with dismay a decision this Court issued just five years after the Fourteenth Amendment’s ratification, approving a State’s decision to deny a law license to a woman and suggesting as well that a woman had no legal status apart from her husband. See 505 U. S., at 896–897 (majority opinion) (citing Bradwell v. State, 16 Wall. 130 (1873)). “There was a time,” Casey explained, when the Constitution did not protect “men and women alike.” 505 U. S., at 896. But times had changed. A woman’s place in society had changed, and constitutional law had changed along with it. The relegation of women to inferior status in either the public sphere or the family was “no longer consistent with our understanding” of the Constitution. Id., at 897. Now, “[t]he Constitution protects all individuals, male or female,” from “the abuse of governmental power” or “unjustified state interference.” Id., at 896, 898.
So how is it that, as Casey said, our Constitution, read now, grants rights to women, though it did not in 1868? How is it that our Constitution subjects discrimination against them to heightened judicial scrutiny? How is it that our Constitution, through the Fourteenth Amendment’s liberty clause, guarantees access to contraception (also not legally protected in 1868) so that women can decide for themselves whether and when to bear a child? How is it that until today, that same constitutional clause protected a woman’s right, in the event contraception failed, to end a pregnancy in its earlier stages?
The answer is that this Court has rejected the majority’s pinched view of how to read our Constitution. “The Founders,” we recently wrote, “knew they were writing a document designed to apply to ever-changing circumstances over centuries.” NLRB v. Noel Canning, 573 U. S. 513, 533–534 (2014). Or in the words of the great Chief Justice John Marshall, our Constitution is “intended to endure for ages to come,” and must adapt itself to a future “seen dimly,” if at all. McCulloch v. Maryland, 4 Wheat. 316, 415 (1819). That is indeed why our Constitution is written as it is. The Framers (both in 1788 and 1868) understood that the world changes. So they did not define rights by reference to the specific practices existing at the time. Instead, the Framers defined rights in general terms, to permit future evolution in their scope and meaning. And over the course of our history, this Court has taken up the Framers’ invitation. It has kept true to the Framers’ principles by applying them in new ways, responsive to new societal understandings and conditions.
Nowhere has that approach been more prevalent than in construing the majestic but open-ended words of the Fourteenth Amendment—the guarantees of “liberty” and “equality” for all. And nowhere has that approach produced prouder moments, for this country and the Court. Consider an example Obergefell used a few years ago. The Court there confronted a claim, based on Washington v. Glucksberg, 521 U. S. 702 (1997), that the Fourteenth Amendment “must be defined in a most circumscribed manner, with central reference to specific historical practices”—exactly the view today’s majority follows. Obergefell, 576 U. S., at 671. And the Court specifically rejected that view.4 In doing so, the Court reflected on what the proposed, historically circumscribed approach would have meant for interracial marriage. See ibid. The Fourteenth Amendment’s ratifiers did not think it gave black and white people a right to marry each other. To the contrary, contemporaneous practice deemed that act quite as unprotected as abortion. Yet the Court in Loving v. Virginia, 388 U. S. 1 (1967), read the Fourteenth Amendment to embrace the Lovings’ union. If, Obergefell explained, “rights were defined by who exercised them in the past, then received practices could serve as their own continued justification”—even when they conflict with “liberty” and “equality” as later and more broadly understood. 576 U. S., at 671. The Constitution does not freeze for all time the original view of what those rights guarantee, or how they apply.
That does not mean anything goes. The majority wishes people to think there are but two alternatives: (1) accept the original applications of the Fourteenth Amendment and no others, or (2) surrender to judges’ “own ardent views,” ungrounded in law, about the “liberty that Americans should enjoy.” Ante, at 14. At least, that idea is what the majority sometimes tries to convey. At other times, the majority (or, rather, most of it) tries to assure the public that it has no designs on rights (for example, to contraception) that arose only in the back half of the 20th century—in other words, that it is happy to pick and choose, in accord with individual preferences. See ante, at 32, 66, 71–72; ante, at 10 (KAVANAUGH, J., concurring); but see ante, at 3 (THOMAS, J., concurring). But that is a matter we discuss later. See infra, at 24–29. For now, our point is different: It is that applications of liberty and equality can evolve while remaining grounded in constitutional principles, constitutional history, and constitutional precedents. The second Justice Harlan discussed how to strike the right balance when he explained why he would have invalidated a State’s ban on contraceptive use. Judges, he said, are not “free to roam where unguided speculation might take them.” Poe v. Ullman, 367 U. S. 497, 542 (1961) (dissenting opinion). Yet they also must recognize that the constitutional “tradition” of this country is not captured whole at a single moment. Ibid. Rather, its meaning gains content from the long sweep of our history and from successive judicial precedents—each looking to the last and each seeking to apply the Constitution’s most fundamental commitments to new conditions. That is why Americans, to go back to Obergefell’s example, have a right to marry across racial lines. And it is why, to go back to Justice Harlan’s case, Americans have a right to use contraceptives so they can choose for themselves whether to have children.
All that is what Casey understood. Casey explicitly rejected the present majority’s method. “[T]he specific practices of States at the time of the adoption of the Fourteenth Amendment,” Casey stated, do not “mark[ ] the outer limits of the substantive sphere of liberty which the Fourteenth Amendment protects.” 505 U. S., at 848.5 To hold otherwise—as the majority does today—“would be inconsistent with our law.” Id., at 847. Why? Because the Court has “vindicated [the] principle” over and over that (no matter the sentiment in 1868) “there is a realm of personal liberty which the government may not enter”—especially relating to “bodily integrity” and “family life.” Id., at 847, 849, 851. Casey described in detail the Court’s contraception cases. See id., at 848–849, 851–853. It noted decisions protecting the right to marry, including to someone of another race. See id., at 847–848 (“[I]nterracial marriage was illegal in most States in the 19th century, but the Court was no doubt correct in finding it to be an aspect of liberty protected against state interference”). In reviewing decades and decades of constitutional law, Casey could draw but one conclusion: Whatever was true in 1868, “[i]t is settled now, as it was when the Court heard arguments in Roe v. Wade, that the Constitution places limits on a State’s right to interfere with a person’s most basic decisions about family and parenthood.” Id., at 849.
And that conclusion still held good, until the Court’s intervention here. It was settled at the time of Roe, settled at the time of Casey, and settled yesterday that the Constitution places limits on a State’s power to assert control over an individual’s body and most personal decision making. A multitude of decisions supporting that principle led to Roe’s recognition and Casey’s reaffirmation of the right to choose; and Roe and Casey in turn supported additional protections for intimate and familial relations. The majority has embarrassingly little to say about those precedents. It (literally) rattles them off in a single paragraph; and it implies that they have nothing to do with each other, or with the right to terminate an early pregnancy. See ante, at 31–32 (asserting that recognizing a relationship among them, as addressing aspects of personal autonomy, would ineluctably “license fundamental rights” to illegal “drug use [and] prostitution”). But that is flat wrong. The Court’s precedents about bodily autonomy, sexual and familial relations, and procreation are all interwoven—all part of the fabric of our constitutional law, and because that is so, of our lives. Especially women’s lives, where they safeguard a right to self-determination. And eliminating that right, we need to say before further describing our precedents, is not taking a “neutral” position, as JUSTICE KAVANAUGH tries to argue. Ante, at 2–3, 5, 7, 11–12 (concurring opinion). His idea is that neutrality lies in giving the abortion issue to the States, where some can go one way and some another. But would he say that the Court is being “scrupulously neutral” if it allowed New York and California to ban all the guns they want? Ante, at 3. If the Court allowed some States to use unanimous juries and others not? If the Court told the States: Decide for yourselves whether to put restrictions on church attendance? We could go on—and in fact we will. Suppose JUSTICE KAVANAUGH were to say (in line with the majority opinion) that the rights we just listed are more textually or historically grounded than the right to choose. What, then, of the right to contraception or same-sex marriage? Would it be “scrupulously neutral” for the Court to eliminate those rights too? The point of all these examples is that when it comes to rights, the Court does not act “neutrally” when it leaves everything up to the States. Rather, the Court acts neutrally when it protects the right against all comers.
And to apply that point to the case here: When the Court decimates a right women have held for 50 years, the Court is d When the Court decimates a right women have held for 50 years, the Court is Cite as: 597 U. S. ____ (2022) 21 BREYER, SOTOMAYOR, and KAGAN, JJ., dissenting not being “scrupulously neutral.” It is instead taking sides: against women who wish to exercise the right, and for States (like Mississippi) that want to bar them from doing so. JUSTICE KAVANAUGH cannot obscure that point by appropriating the rhetoric of even-handedness. His position just is what it is: A brook-no-compromise refusal to recognize a woman’s right to choose, from the first day of a pregnancy. And that position, as we will now show, cannot be squared with this Court’s longstanding view that women indeed have rights (whatever the state of the world in 1868) to make the most personal and consequential decisions about their bodies and their lives.
We make one initial point about this analysis in light of the majority’s insistence that Roe and Casey, and we in defending them, are dismissive of a “State’s interest in protecting prenatal life.” Ante, at 38. Nothing could get those decisions more wrong. As just described, Roe and Casey invoked powerful state interests in that protection, operative at every stage of the pregnancy and overriding the woman’s liberty after viability. The strength of those state interests is exactly why the Court allowed greater restrictions on the abortion right than on other rights deriving from the Fourteenth Amendment.1 But what Roe and Casey also recognized—which today’s majority does not—is that a woman’s exist in “1868, the year when the Fourteenth Amendment was ratified”? Ante, at 23. The majority says (and with this much we agree) that the answer to this question is no: In 1868, there was no nationwide right to end a pregnancy, and no thought that the Fourteenth Amendment provided one.
Of course, the majority opinion refers as well to some later and earlier history. On the one side of 1868, it goes back as far as the 13th (the 13th!) century. See ante, at 17. But that turns out to be wheel-spinning. First, it is not clear what relevance such early history should have, even to the majority. See New York State Rifle & Pistol Assn., Inc. v. Bruen, 597 U. S. ___, ___ (2022) (slip op., at 26) (“Historical evidence that long predates [ratification] may not illuminate the scope of the right”). If the early history obviously supported abortion rights, the majority would no doubt say that only the views of the Fourteenth Amendment’s ratifiers are germane. See ibid. (It is “better not to go too far back into antiquity,” except if olden “law survived to become our Founders’ law”). Second—and embarrassingly for the majority—early law in fact does provide some support for abortion rights. Common-law authorities did not treat abortion as a crime before “quickening”—the point when the fetus moved in the womb.2 And early American law followed the common-law rule.3 So the criminal law of that early time might be taken as roughly consonant with Roe’s and Casey’s different treatment of early and late abortions. Better, then, to move forward in time. On the other side of 1868, the majority occasionally notes that many States barred abortion up to the time of Roe. See ante, at 24, 36. That is convenient for the majority, but it is window dressing. As the same majority (plus one) just informed us, “post-ratification adoption or acceptance of laws that are inconsistent with the original meaning of the constitutional text obviously cannot overcome or alter that text.” New York State Rifle & Pistol Assn., Inc., 597 U. S., at ___–___ (slip op., at 27–28). Had the pre-Roe liberalization of abortion laws occurred more quickly and more widely in the 20th century, the majority would say (once again) that only the ratifiers’ views are germane.
The majority’s core legal postulate, then, is that we in the 21st century must read the Fourteenth Amendment just as its ratifiers did. And that is indeed what the majority emphasizes over and over again. See ante, at 47 (“[T]he most important historical fact [is] how the States regulated abortion when the Fourteenth Amendment was adopted”); see also ante, at 5, 16, and n. 24, 23, 25, 28. If the ratifiers did not understand something as central to freedom, then neither can we. Or said more particularly: If those people did not understand reproductive rights as part of the guarantee of liberty conferred in the Fourteenth Amendment, then those rights do not exist.
As an initial matter, note a mistake in the just preceding sentence. We referred there to the “people” who ratified the Fourteenth Amendment: What rights did those “people” have in their heads at the time? But, of course, “people” did not ratify the Fourteenth Amendment. Men did. So it is perhaps not so surprising that the ratifiers were not perfectly attuned to the importance of reproductive rights for women’s liberty, or for their capacity to participate as equal members of our Nation. Indeed, the ratifiers—both in 1868 and when the original Constitution was approved in 1788—did not understand women as full members of the community embraced by the phrase “We the People.” In 1868, the first wave of American feminists were explicitly told—of course by men—that it was not their time to seek constitutional protections. (Women would not get even the vote for another half-century.) To be sure, most women in 1868 also had a foreshortened view of their rights: If most men could not then imagine giving women control over their bodies, most women could not imagine having that kind of autonomy. But that takes away nothing from the core point. Those responsible for the original Constitution, including the Fourteenth Amendment, did not perceive women as equals, and did not recognize women’s rights. When the majority says that we must read our foundational charter as viewed at the time of ratification (except that we may also check it against the Dark Ages), it consigns women to second-class citizenship.
Casey itself understood this point, as will become clear. See infra, at 23–24. It recollected with dismay a decision this Court issued just five years after the Fourteenth Amendment’s ratification, approving a State’s decision to deny a law license to a woman and suggesting as well that a woman had no legal status apart from her husband. See 505 U. S., at 896–897 (majority opinion) (citing Bradwell v. State, 16 Wall. 130 (1873)). “There was a time,” Casey explained, when the Constitution did not protect “men and women alike.” 505 U. S., at 896. But times had changed. A woman’s place in society had changed, and constitutional law had changed along with it. The relegation of women to inferior status in either the public sphere or the family was “no longer consistent with our understanding” of the Constitution. Id., at 897. Now, “[t]he Constitution protects all individuals, male or female,” from “the abuse of governmental power” or “unjustified state interference.” Id., at 896, 898.
So how is it that, as Casey said, our Constitution, read How is it that our Constitution subjects discrimination against them to heightened judicial scrutiny? How is it that our Constitution, through the Fourteenth Amendment’s liberty clause, guarantees access to contraception (also not legally protected in 1868) so that women can decide for themselves whether and when to bear a child? How is it that until today, that same constitutional clause protected a woman’s right, in the event contraception failed, to end a pregnancy in its earlier stages?
The answer is that this Court has rejected the majority’s pinched view of how to read our Constitution. “The Founders,” we recently wrote, “knew they were writing a document designed to apply to ever-changing circumstances over centuries.” NLRB v. Noel Canning, 573 U. S. 513, 533–534 (2014). Or in the words of the great Chief Justice John Marshall, our Constitution is “intended to endure for ages to come,” and must adapt itself to a future “seen dimly,” if at all. McCulloch v. Maryland, 4 Wheat. 316, 415 (1819). That is indeed why our Constitution is written as it is. The Framers (both in 1788 and 1868) understood that the world changes. So they did not define rights by reference to the specific practices existing at the time. Instead, the Framers defined rights in general terms, to permit future evolution in their scope and meaning. And over the course of our history, this Court has taken up the Framers’ invitation. It has kept true to the Framers’ principles by applying them in new ways, responsive to new societal understandings and conditions.
Nowhere has that approach been more prevalent than in construing the majestic but open-ended words of the Fourteenth Amendment—the guarantees of “liberty” and “equality” for all. And nowhere has that approach produced prouder moments, for this country and the Court. Consider an example Obergefell used a few years ago. The Court there confronted a claim, based on Washington v. Glucksberg, 521 U. S. 702 (1997), that the Fourteenth Amendment “must be defined in a most circumscribed manner, with central reference to specific historical practices”—exactly the view today’s majority follows. Obergefell, 576 U. S., at 671. And the Court specifically rejected that view.4 In doing so, the Court reflected on what the proposed, historically circumscribed approach would have meant for interracial marriage. See ibid. The Fourteenth Amendment’s ratifiers did not think it gave black and white people a right to marry each other. To the contrary, contemporaneous practice deemed that act quite as unprotected as abortion. Yet the Court in Loving v. Virginia, 388 U. S. 1 (1967), read the Fourteenth Amendment to embrace the Lovings’ union. If, Obergefell explained, “rights were defined by who exercised them in the past, then received practices could serve as their own continued justification”—even when they conflict with “liberty” and “equality” as later and more broadly understood. 576 U. S., at 671. The Constitution does not freeze for all time the original view of what those rights guarantee, or how they apply.
That does not mean anything goes. The majority wishes people to think there are but two alternatives: (1) accept the original applications of the Fourteenth Amendment and no others, or (2) surrender to judges’ “own ardent views,” ungrounded in law, about the “liberty that Americans should enjoy.” Ante, at 14. At least, that idea is what the majority sometimes tries to convey. At other times, the majority (or, rather, most of it) tries to assure the public that it has no designs on rights (for example, to contraception) that arose only in the back half of the 20th century—in other words, that it is happy to pick and choose, in accord with individual preferences. See ante, at 32, 66, 71–72; ante, at 10 (KAVANAUGH, J., concurring); but see ante, at 3 (THOMAS, J., concurring). But that is a matter we discuss later. See infra, at 24–29. For now, our point is different: It is that applications of liberty and equality can evolve while remaining grounded in constitutional principles, constitutional history, and constitutional precedents. The second Justice Harlan discussed how to strike the right balance when he explained why he would have invalidated a State’s ban on contraceptive use. Judges, he said, are not “free to roam where unguided speculation might take them.” Poe v. Ullman, 367 U. S. 497, 542 (1961) (dissenting opinion). Yet they also must recognize that the constitutional “tradition” of this country is not captured whole at a single moment. Ibid. Rather, its meaning gains content from the long sweep of our history and from successive judicial precedents—each looking to the last and each seeking to apply the Constitution’s most fundamental commitments to new conditions. That is why Americans, to go back to Obergefell’s example, have a right to marry across racial lines. And it is why, to go back to Justice Harlan’s case, Americans have a right to use contraceptives so they can choose for themselves whether to have children.
All that is what Casey understood. Casey explicitly rejected the present majority’s method. “[T]he specific practices of States at the time of the adoption of the Fourteenth Amendment,” Casey stated, do not “mark[ ] the outer limits of the substantive sphere of liberty which the Fourteenth Amendment protects.” 505 U. S., at 848.5 To hold otherwise—as the majority does today—“would be inconsistent with our law.” Id., at 847. Why? Because the Court has “vindicated [the] principle” over and over that (no matter the sentiment in 1868) “there is a realm of personal liberty which the government may not enter”—especially relating to “bodily integrity” and “family life.” Id., at 847, 849, 851. Casey described in detail the Court’s contraception cases. See id., at 848–849, 851–853. It noted decisions protecting the right to marry, including to someone of another race. See id., at 847–848 (“[I]nterracial marriage was illegal in most States in the 19th century, but the Court was no doubt correct in finding it to be an aspect of liberty protected against state interference”). In reviewing decades and decades of constitutional law, Casey could draw but one conclusion: Whatever was true in 1868, “[i]t is settled now, as it was when the Court heard arguments in Roe v. Wade, that the Constitution places limits on a State’s right to interfere with a person’s most basic decisions about family and parenthood.” Id., at 849.
And that conclusion still held good, until the Court’s intervention here. It was settled at the time of Roe, settled at the time of Casey, and settled yesterday that the Constitution places limits on a State’s power to assert control over an individual’s body and most personal decisionmaking. A multitude of decisions supporting that principle led to Roe’s recognition and Casey’s reaffirmation of the right to choose; and Roe and Casey in turn supported additional protections for intimate and familial relations. The majority has embarrassingly little to say about those precedents. It (literally) rattles them off in a single paragraph; and it implies that they have nothing to do with each other, or with the right to terminate an early pregnancy. See ante, at 31–32 (asserting that recognizing a relationship among them, as addressing aspects of personal autonomy, would ineluctably “license fundamental rights” to illegal “drug use [and] prostitution”). But that is flat wrong. The Court’s precedents about bodily autonomy, sexual and familial relations, and procreation are all interwoven—all part of the fabric of our constitutional law, and because that is so, of our lives. Especially women’s lives, where they safeguard a right to self-determination.
And eliminating that right, we need to say before further describing our precedents, is not taking a “neutral” position, as JUSTICE KAVANAUGH tries to argue. Ante, at 2–3, 5, 7, 11–12 (concurring opinion). His idea is that neutrality lies in giving the abortion issue to the States, where some can go one way and some another. But would he say that the Court is being “scrupulously neutral” if it allowed New York and California to ban all the guns they want? Ante, at 3. If the Court allowed some States to use unanimous juries and others not? If the Court told the States: Decide for yourselves whether to put restrictions on church attendance? We could go on—and in fact we will. Suppose JUSTICE KAVANAUGH were to say (in line with the majority opinion) that the rights we just listed are more textually or historically grounded than the right to choose. What, then, of the right to contraception or same-sex marriage? Would it be “scrupulously neutral” for the Court to eliminate those rights too? The point of all these examples is that when it comes to rights, the Court does not act “neutrally” when it leaves everything up to the States. Rather, the Court acts neutrally when it protects the right against all comers. And to apply that point to the case here: When the Court decimates a right women have held for 50 years, the Court is not being “scrupulously neutral.” It is instead taking sides: against women who wish to exercise the right, and for States (like Mississippi) that want to bar them from doing so. JUSTICE KAVANAUGH cannot obscure that point by appropriating the rhetoric of even-handedness. His position just is what it is: A brook-no-compromise refusal to recognize a woman’s right to choose, from the first day of a pregnancy. And that position, as we will now show, cannot be squared with this Court’s longstanding view that women indeed have rights (whatever the state of the world in 1868) to make the most personal and consequential decisions about their bodies and their lives.
Consider first, then, the line of this Court’s cases protecting “bodily integrity.” Casey, 505 U. S., at 849. “No right,” in this Court’s time-honored view, “is held more sacred, or is more carefully guarded,” than “the right of every individual to the possession and control of his own person.” Union Pacific R. Co. v. Botsford, 141 U. S. 250, 251 (1891); see Cruzan v. Director, Mo. Dept. of Health, 497 U. S. 261, 269 (1990) (Every adult “has a right to determine what shall be done with his own body”). Or to put it more simply: Everyone, including women, owns their own bodies. So the Court has restricted the power of government to interfere with a person’s medical decisions or compel her to undergo medical procedures or treatments. See, e.g., Winston v. Lee, 470 U. S. 753, 766–767 (1985) (forced surgery); Rochin v. California, 342 U. S. 165, 166, 173–174 (1952) (forced stomach pumping); Washington v. Harper, 494 U. S. 210, 229, 236 (1990) (forced administration of antipsychotic drugs).
Casey recognized the “doctrinal affinity” between those precedents and Roe. 505 U. S., at 857. And that doctrinal affinity is born of a factual likeness. There are few greater incursions on a body than forcing a woman to complete a pregnancy and give birth. For every woman, those experiences involve all manner of physical changes, medical treatments (including the possibility of a cesarean section), and medical risk. Just as one example, an American woman is 14 times more likely to die by carrying a pregnancy to term than by having an abortion. See Whole Woman’s Health v. Hellerstedt, 579 U. S. 582, 618 (2016). That women happily undergo those burdens and hazards of their own accord does not lessen how far a State impinges on a woman’s body when it compels her to bring a pregnancy to term. And for some women, as Roe recognized, abortions are medically necessary to prevent harm. See 410 U. S., at 153. The majority does not say—which is itself ominous—whether a State may prevent a woman from obtaining an abortion when she and her doctor have determined it is a needed medical treatment.
So too, Roe and Casey fit neatly into a long line of decisions protecting from government intrusion a wealth of private choices about family matters, child rearing, intimate relationships, and procreation. See Casey, 505 U. S., at 851, 857; Roe, 410 U. S., at 152–153; see also ante, at 31–32 (listing the myriad decisions of this kind that Casey relied on). Those cases safeguard particular choices about whom to marry; whom to have sex with; what family members to live with; how to raise children—and crucially, whether and when to have children. In varied cases, the Court explained that those choices—“the most intimate and personal” a person can make—reflect fundamental aspects of personal identity; they define the very “attributes of personhood.” Casey, 505 U. S., at 851. And they inevitably shape the nature and future course of a person’s life (and often the lives of those closest to her). So, the Court held, those choices belong to the individual, and not the government. That is the essence of what liberty requires.
And liberty may require it, this Court has repeatedly said, even when those living in 1868 would not have recognized the claim—because they would not have seen the person making it as a full-fledged member of the community. Throughout our history, the sphere of protected liberty has expanded, bringing in individuals formerly excluded. In that way, the constitutional values of liberty and equality go hand in hand; they do not inhabit the hermetically sealed containers the majority portrays. Compare Obergefell, 576 U. S., at 672–675, with ante, at 10–11. So before Roe and Casey, the Court expanded in successive cases those who could claim the right to marry—though their relationships would have been outside the law’s protection in the mid19th century. See, e.g., Loving, 388 U. S. 1 (interracial couples); Turner v. Safley, 482 U. S. 78 (1987) (prisoners); see also, e.g., Stanley v. Illinois, 405 U. S. 645, 651–652 (1972) (offering constitutional protection to untraditional “family unit[s]”). And after Roe and Casey, of course, the Court continued in that vein. With a critical stop to hold that the Fourteenth Amendment protected same-sex intimacy, the Court resolved that the Amendment also conferred on same-sex couples the right to marry. See Lawrence, 539 U. S. 558; Obergefell, 576 U. S. 644. In considering that question, the Court held, “[h]istory and tradition,” especially as reflected in the course of our precedent, “guide and discipline [the] inquiry.” Id., at 664. But the sentiments of 1868 alone do not and cannot “rule the present.” Ibid.
Casey similarly recognized the need to extend the constitutional sphere of liberty to a previously excluded group. The Court then understood, as the majority today does not, that the men who ratified the Fourteenth Amendment and wrote the state laws of the time did not view women as full and equal citizens. See supra, at 15. A woman then, Casey wrote, “had no legal existence separate from her husband.” 505 U. S., at 897. Women were seen only “as the center of home and family life,” without “full and independent legal status under the Constitution.” Ibid. But that could not be true any longer: The State could not now insist on the historically dominant “vision of the woman’s role.” Id., at 852. And equal citizenship, Casey realized, was inescapably connected to reproductive rights. “The ability of women to participate equally” in the “life of the Nation”—in all its economic, social, political, and legal aspects—“has been facilitated by their ability to control their reproductive lives.” Id., at 856. Without the ability to decide whether and when to have children, women could not—in the way men took for granted—determine how they would live their lives, and how they would contribute to the society around them.
For much that reason, Casey made clear that the precedents Roe most closely tracked were those involving contraception. Over the course of three cases, the Court had held that a right to use and gain access to contraception was part of the Fourteenth Amendment’s guarantee of liberty. See Griswold, 381 U. S. 479; Eisenstadt, 405 U. S. 438; Carey v. Population Services Int’l, 431 U. S. 678 (1977). That clause, we explained, necessarily conferred a right “to be free from unwarranted governmental intrusion into matters so fundamentally affecting a person as the decision whether to bear or beget a child.” Eisenstadt, 405 U. S., at 453; see Carey, 431 U. S., at 684–685. Casey saw Roe as of a piece: In “critical respects the abortion decision is of the same character.” 505 U. S., at 852. “[R]easonable people,” the Court noted, could also oppose contraception; and indeed, they could believe that “some forms of contraception” similarly implicate a concern with “potential life.” Id., at 853, 859. Yet the views of others could not automatically prevail against a woman’s right to control her own body and make her own choice about whether to bear, and probably to raise, a child. When an unplanned pregnancy is involved— because either contraception or abortion is outlawed—“the liberty of the woman is at stake in a sense unique to the human condition.” Id., at 852. No State could undertake to resolve the moral questions raised “in such a definitive way” as to deprive a woman of all choice. Id., at 850.
Faced with all these connections between Roe/Casey and judicial decisions recognizing other constitutional rights, the majority tells everyone not to worry. It can (so it says) neatly extract the right to choose from the constitutional edifice without affecting any associated rights. (Think of someone telling you that the Jenga tower simply will not collapse.) Today’s decision, the majority first says, “does not undermine” the decisions cited by Roe and Casey—the ones involving “marriage, procreation, contraception, [and] family relationships”—“in any way.” Ante, at 32; Casey, 505 U. S., at 851. Note that this first assurance does not extend to rights recognized after Roe and Casey, and partly based on them—in particular, rights to same-sex intimacy and marriage. See supra, at 23.6 On its later tries, though, the majority includes those too: “Nothing in this opinion should be understood to cast doubt on precedents that do not concern abortion.” Ante, at 66; see ante, at 71–72. That right is unique, the majority asserts, “because [abortion] terminates life or potential life.” Ante, at 66 (internal quotation marks omitted); see ante, at 32, 71–72. So the majority depicts today’s decision as “a restricted railroad ticket, good for this day and train only.” Smith v. Allwright, 321 U. S. 649, 669 (1944) (Roberts, J., dissenting). Should the audience for these too-much-repeated protestations be duly satisfied? We think not.
The first problem with the majority’s account comes from JUSTICE THOMAS’s concurrence—which makes clear he is not with the program. In saying that nothing in today’s opinion casts doubt on non-abortion precedents, JUSTICE THOMAS explains, he means only that they are not at issue in this very case. See ante, at 7 (“[T]his case does not present the opportunity to reject” those precedents). But he lets us know what he wants to do when they are. “[I]n future cases,” he says, “we should reconsider all of this Court’s substantive due process precedents, including Griswold, Lawrence, and Obergefell.” Ante, at 3; see also supra, at 25, and n. 6. And when we reconsider them? Then “we have a duty” to “overrul[e] these demonstrably erroneous decisions.” Ante, at 3. So at least one Justice is planning to use the ticket of today’s decision again and again and again.
Even placing the concurrence to the side, the assurance in today’s opinion still does not work. Or at least that is so if the majority is serious about its sole reason for overturning Roe and Casey: the legal status of abortion in the 19th century. Except in the places quoted above, the state interest in protecting fetal life plays no part in the majority’s analysis. To the contrary, the majority takes pride in not expressing a view “about the status of the fetus.” Ante, at 65; see ante, at 32 (aligning itself with Roe’s and Casey’s stance of not deciding whether life or potential life is involved); ante, at 38–39 (similar). The majority’s departure from Roe and Casey rests instead—and only—on whether a woman’s decision to end a pregnancy involves any Fourteenth Amendment liberty interest (against which Roe and Casey balanced the state interest in preserving fetal life).7
According to the majority, no liberty interest is present— because (and only because) the law offered no protection to the woman’s choice in the 19th century. But here is the rub. The law also did not then (and would not for ages) protect a wealth of other things. It did not protect the rights recognized in Lawrence and Obergefell to same-sex intimacy and marriage. It did not protect the right recognized in Loving to marry across racial lines. It did not protect the right recognized in Griswold to contraceptive use. For that matter, it did not protect the right recognized in Skinner v. Oklahoma ex rel. Williamson, 316 U. S. 535 (1942), not to be sterilized without consent. So if the majority is right in its legal analysis, all those decisions were wrong, and all those matters properly belong to the States too—whatever the particular state interests involved. And if that is true, it is impossible to understand (as a matter of logic and principle) how the majority can say that its opinion today does not threaten—does not even “undermine”—any number of other constitutional rights. Ante, at 32.8
Nor does it even help just to take the majority at its word. Assume the majority is sincere in saying, for whatever reason, that it will go so far and no further. Scout’s honor. Still, the future significance of today’s opinion will be decided in the future. And law often has a way of evolving without regard to original intentions—a way of actually following where logic leads, rather than tolerating hard-toexplain lines. Rights can expand in that way. Dissenting in Lawrence, Justice Scalia explained why he took no comfort in the Court’s statement that a decision recognizing the right to same-sex intimacy did “not involve” same-sex marriage. 539 U. S., at 604. That could be true, he wrote, “only if one entertains the belief that principle and logic have nothing to do with the decisions of this Court.” Id., at 605. Score one for the dissent, as a matter of prophecy. And logic and principle are not one-way ratchets. Rights can contract in the same way and for the same reason—because whatever today’s majority might say, one thing really does lead to another. We fervently hope that does not happen because of today’s decision. We hope that we will not join Justice Scalia in the book of prophets. But we cannot understand how anyone can be confident that today’s opinion will be the last of its kind.
Consider, as our last word on this issue, contraception. The Constitution, of course, does not mention that word. And there is no historical right to contraception, of the kind the majority insists on. To the contrary, the American legal landscape in the decades after the Civil War was littered with bans on the sale of contraceptive devices. So again, there seem to be two choices. See supra, at 5, 26–27. If the majority is serious about its historical approach, then Griswold and its progeny are in the line of fire too. Or if it is not serious, then . . . what is the basis of today’s decision? If we had to guess, we suspect the prospects of this Court approving bans on contraception are low. But once again, the future significance of today’s opinion will be decided in the future. At the least, today’s opinion will fuel the fight to get contraception, and any other issues with a moral dimension, out of the Fourteenth Amendment and into state legislatures.9 Anyway, today’s decision, taken on its own, is catastrophic enough. As a matter of constitutional method, the majority’s commitment to replicate in 2022 every view about the meaning of liberty held in 1868 has precious little to recommend it. Our law in this constitutional sphere, as in most, has for decades upon decades proceeded differently. It has considered fundamental constitutional principles, the whole course of the Nation’s history and traditions, and the step-by-step evolution of the Court’s precedents. It is disciplined but not static. It relies on accumulated judgments, not just the sentiments of one long-ago generation of men (who themselves believed, and drafted the Constitution to reflect, that the world progresses). And by doing so, it includes those excluded from that olden conversation, rather than perpetuating its bounds.
As a matter of constitutional substance, the majority’s opinion has all the flaws its method would suggest. Because laws in 1868 deprived women of any control over their bodies, the majority approves States doing so today. Because those laws prevented women from charting the course of their own lives, the majority says States can do the same again. Because in 1868, the government could tell a pregnant woman—even in the first days of her pregnancy—that she could do nothing but bear a child, it can once more impose that command. Today’s decision strips women of agency over what even the majority agrees is a contested and contestable moral issue. It forces her to carry out the State’s will, whatever the circumstances and whatever the harm it will wreak on her and her family. In the Fourteenth Amendment’s terms, it takes away her liberty. Even before we get to stare decisis, we dissent.
II
By overruling Roe, Casey, and more than 20 cases reaffirming or applying the constitutional right to abortion, the majority abandons stare decisis, a principle central to the rule of law. “Stare decisis” means “to stand by things decided.” Black’s Law Dictionary 1696 (11th ed. 2019). Blackstone called it the “established rule to abide by former precedents.” 1 Blackstone 69.
Stare decisis “promotes the evenhanded, predictable, and consistent development of legal principles.” Payne, 501 U. S., at 827. It maintains a stability that allows people to order their lives under the law. See H. Hart & A. Sacks, The Legal Process: Basic Problems in the Making and Application of Law 568–569 (1994). Stare decisis also “contributes to the integrity of our constitutional system of government” by ensuring that decisions “are founded in the law rather than in the proclivities of individuals.” Vasquez, 474 U. S., at 265. As Hamilton wrote: It “avoid[s] an arbitrary discretion in the courts.” The Federalist No. 78, p. 529 (J. Cooke ed. 1961) (A. Hamilton). And as Blackstone said before him: It “keep[s] the scale of justice even and steady, and not liable to waver with every new judge’s opinion.” 1 Blackstone 69. The “glory” of our legal system is that it “gives preference to precedent rather than . . . jurists.” H. Humble, Departure From Precedent, 19 Mich. L. Rev. 608, 614 (1921). That is why, the story goes, Chief Justice John Marshall donned a plain black robe when he swore the oath of office. That act personified an American tradition. Judges’ personal preferences do not make law; rather, the law speaks through them. That means the Court may not overrule a decision, even a constitutional one, without a “special justification.” Gamble v. United States, 587 U. S. ___, ___ (2019) (slip op., at 11). Stare decisis is, of course, not an “inexorable command”; it is sometimes appropriate to overrule an earlier decision. Pearson v. Callahan, 555 U. S. 223, 233 (2009). But the Court must have a good reason to do so over and above the belief “that the precedent was wrongly decided.” Halliburton Co. v. Erica P. John Fund, Inc., 573 U. S. 258, 266 (2014). “[I]t is not alone sufficient that we would decide a case differently now than we did then.” Kimble v. Marvel Entertainment, LLC, 576 U. S. 446, 455 (2015).
The majority today lists some 30 of our cases as overruling precedent, and argues that they support overruling Roe and Casey. But none does, as further described below and in the Appendix. See infra, at 61–66. In some, the Court only partially modified or clarified a precedent. And in the rest, the Court relied on one or more of the traditional stare decisis factors in reaching its conclusion. The Court found, for example, (1) a change in legal doctrine that undermined or made obsolete the earlier decision; (2) a factual change that had the same effect; or (3) an absence of reliance because the earlier decision was less than a decade old. (The majority is wrong when it says that we insist on a test of changed law or fact alone, although that is present in most of the cases. See ante, at 69.) None of those factors apply here: Nothing—and in particular, no significant legal or factual change—supports overturning a half-century of settled law giving women control over their reproductive lives.
First, for all the reasons we have given, Roe and Casey were correct. In holding that a State could not “resolve” the debate about abortion “in such a definitive way that a woman lacks all choice in the matter,” the Court protected women’s liberty and women’s equality in a way comporting with our Fourteenth Amendment precedents. Casey, 505 U. S., at 850. Contrary to the majority’s view, the legal status of abortion in the 19th century does not weaken those decisions. And the majority’s repeated refrain about “usurp[ing]” state legislatures’ “power to address” a publicly contested question does not help it on the key issue here. Ante, at 44; see ante, at 1. To repeat: The point of a right is to shield individual actions and decisions “from the vicissitudes of political controversy, to place them beyond the reach of majorities and officials and to establish them as legal principles to be applied by the courts.” Barnette, 319 U. S., at 638; supra, at 7. However divisive, a right is not at the people’s mercy.
In any event “[w]hether or not we . . . agree” with a prior precedent is the beginning, not the end, of our analysis— and the remaining “principles of stare decisis weigh heavily against overruling” Roe and Casey. Dickerson v. United States, 530 U. S. 428, 443 (2000). Casey itself applied those principles, in one of this Court’s most important precedents about precedent. After assessing the traditional stare decisis factors, Casey reached the only conclusion possible— that stare decisis operates powerfully here. It still does. The standards Roe and Casey set out are perfectly workable. No changes in either law or fact have eroded the two decisions. And tens of millions of American women have relied, and continue to rely, on the right to choose. So under traditional stare decisis principles, the majority has no special justification for the harm it causes.
And indeed, the majority comes close to conceding that point. The majority barely mentions any legal or factual changes that have occurred since Roe and Casey. It suggests that the two decisions are hard for courts to implement, but cannot prove its case. In the end, the majority says, all it must say to override stare decisis is one thing: that it believes Roe and Casey “egregiously wrong.” Ante, at 70. That rule could equally spell the end of any precedent with which a bare majority of the present Court disagrees.
So how does that approach prevent the “scale of justice” from “waver[ing] with every new judge’s opinion”? 1 Blackstone 69. It does not. It makes radical change too easy and too fast, based on nothing more than the new views of new judges. The majority has overruled Roe and Casey for one and only one reason: because it has always despised them, and now it has the votes to discard them. The majority thereby substitutes a rule by judges for the rule of law.
A
Contrary to the majority’s view, there is nothing unworkable about Casey’s “undue burden” standard. Its primary focus on whether a State has placed a “substantial obstacle” on a woman seeking an abortion is “the sort of inquiry familiar to judges across a variety of contexts.” June Medical Services L. L. C. v. Russo, 591 U. S. ___, ___ (2020) (slip op., at 6) (ROBERTS, C. J., concurring in judgment). And it has given rise to no more conflict in application than many standards this Court and others unhesitatingly apply every day.
General standards, like the undue burden standard, are ubiquitous in the law, and particularly in constitutional adjudication. When called on to give effect to the Constitution’s broad principles, this Court often crafts flexible standards that can be applied case-by-case to a myriad of unforeseeable circumstances. See Dickerson, 530 U. S., at 441 (“No court laying down a general rule can possibly foresee the various circumstances” in which it must apply). So, for example, the Court asks about undue or substantial burdens on speech, on voting, and on interstate commerce. See, e.g., Arizona Free Enterprise Club’s Freedom Club PAC v. Bennett, 564 U. S. 721, 748 (2011); Burdick v. Takushi, 504 U. S. 428, 433–434 (1992); Pike v. Bruce Church, Inc., 397 U. S. 137, 142 (1970). The Casey undue burden standard is the same. It also resembles general standards that courts work with daily in other legal spheres—like the “rule of reason” in antitrust law or the “arbitrary and capricious” standard for agency decision making. See Standard Oil Co. of N. J. v. United States, 221 U. S. 1, 62 (1911); Motor Vehicle Mfrs. Assn. of United States, Inc. v. State Farm Mut. Automobile Ins. Co., 463 U. S. 29, 42–43 (1983). Applying general standards to particular cases is, in many contexts, just what it means to do law.
And the undue burden standard has given rise to no unusual difficulties. Of course, it has provoked some disagreement among judges. Casey knew it would: That much “is to be expected in the application of any legal standard which must accommodate life’s complexity.” 505 U. S., at 878 (plurality opinion). Which is to say: That much is to be expected in the application of any legal standard. But the majority vastly overstates the divisions among judges applying the standard. We count essentially two. THE CHIEF JUSTICE disagreed with other Justices in the June Medical majority about whether Casey called for weighing the benefits of an abortion regulation against its burdens. See 591 U. S., at ___–___ (slip op., at 6–7); ante, at 59, 60, and n. 53.10 We agree that the June Medical difference is a difference—but not one that would actually make a difference in the result of most cases (it did not in June Medical), and not one incapable of resolution were it ever to matter. As for lower courts, there is now a one-year-old, one-to-one Circuit split about how the undue burden standard applies to state laws that ban abortions for certain reasons, like fetal abnormality. See ante, at 61, and n. 57. That is about it, as far as we can see.11 And that is not much. This Court mostly does not even grant certiorari on one-year-old, oneto-one Circuit splits, because we know that a bit of disagreement is an inevitable part of our legal system. To borrow an old saying that might apply here: Not one or even a couple of swallows can make the majority’s summer. Anyone concerned about workability should consider the majority’s substitute standard. The majority says a law regulating or banning abortion “must be sustained if there is a rational basis on which the legislature could have thought that it would serve legitimate state interests.” Ante, at 77. And the majority lists interests like “respect for and preservation of prenatal life,” “protection of maternal health,” elimination of certain “medical procedures,” “mitigation of fetal pain,” and others. Ante, at 78. This Court will surely face critical questions about how that test applies. Must a state law allow abortions when necessary to protect a woman’s life and health? And if so, exactly when? How much risk to a woman’s life can a State force her to incur, before the Fourteenth Amendment’s protection of life kicks in? Suppose a patient with pulmonary hypertension has a 30-to-50 percent risk of dying with ongoing pregnancy; is that enough? And short of death, how much illness or injury can the State require her to accept, consistent with the Amendment’s protection of liberty and equality? Further, the Court may face questions about the application of abortion regulations to medical care most people view as quite different from abortion. What about the morning-after pill? IUDs? In vitro fertilization? And how about the use of dilation and evacuation or medication for miscarriage management? See generally L. Harris, Navigating Loss of Abortion Services—A Large Academic Medical Center Prepares for the Overturn of Roe v. Wade, 386 New England J. Med. 2061 (2022).12
Finally, the majority’s ruling today invites a host of questions about interstate conflicts. See supra, at 3; see generally D. Cohen, G. Donley, & R. Rebouché, The New Abortion Battleground, 123 Colum. L. Rev. (forthcoming 2023), https://ssrn.com/abstract=4032931. Can a State bar women from traveling to another State to obtain an abortion? Can a State prohibit advertising out-of-state abortions or helping women get to out-of-state providers? Can a State interfere with the mailing of drugs used for medication abortions? The Constitution protects travel and speech and interstate commerce, so today’s ruling will give rise to a host of new constitutional questions. Far from removing the Court from the abortion issue, the majority puts the Court at the center of the coming “interjurisdictional abortion wars.” Id., at ___ (draft, at 1).
In short, the majority does not save judges from unwieldy tests or extricate them from the sphere of controversy. To the contrary, it discards a known, workable, and predictable standard in favor of something novel and probably far more complicated. It forces the Court to wade further into hotly contested issues, including moral and philosophical ones, that the majority criticizes Roe and Casey for addressing.
B
When overruling constitutional precedent, the Court has almost always pointed to major legal or factual changes undermining a decision’s original basis. A review of the Appendix to this dissent proves the point. See infra, at 61–66. Most “successful proponent[s] of overruling precedent,” this Court once said, have carried “the heavy burden of persuading the Court that changes in society or in the law dictate that the values served by stare decisis yield in favor of a greater objective.” Vasquez, 474 U. S., at 266. Certainly, that was so of the main examples the majority cites: Brown v. Board of Education, 347 U. S. 483 (1954), and West Coast Hotel Co. v. Parrish, 300 U. S. 379 (1937). But it is not so today. Although nodding to some arguments others have made about “modern developments,” the majority does not really rely on them, no doubt seeing their slimness. Ante, at 33; see ante, at 34. The majority briefly invokes the current controversy over abortion. See ante, at 70–71. But it has to acknowledge that the same dispute has existed for decades: Conflict over abortion is not a change but a constant. (And as we will later discuss, the presence of that continuing division provides more of a reason to stick with, than to jettison, existing precedent. See infra, at 55–57.) In the end, the majority throws longstanding precedent to the winds without showing that anything significant has changed to justify its radical reshaping of the law. See ante, at 43.
1
Subsequent legal developments have only reinforced Roe and Casey. The Court has continued to embrace all the decisions Roe and Casey cited, decisions which recognize a constitutional right for an individual to make her own choices about “intimate relationships, the family,” and contraception. Casey, 505 U. S., at 857. Roe and Casey have themselves formed the legal foundation for subsequent decisions protecting these profoundly personal choices. As discussed earlier, the Court relied on Casey to hold that the Fourteenth Amendment protects same-sex intimate relationships. See Lawrence, 539 U. S., at 578; supra, at 23. The Court later invoked the same set of precedents to accord constitutional recognition to same-sex marriage. See Obergefell, 576 U. S., at 665–666; supra, at 23. In sum, Roe and Casey are inextricably interwoven with decades of precedent about the meaning of the Fourteenth Amendment. See supra, at 21–24. While the majority might wish it otherwise, Roe and Casey are the very opposite of “‘obsolete constitutional thinking.’” Agostini v. Felton, 521 U. S. 203, 236 (1997) (quoting Casey, 505 U. S., at 857).
Moreover, no subsequent factual developments have undermined Roe and Casey. Women continue to experience unplanned pregnancies and unexpected developments in pregnancies. Pregnancies continue to have enormous physical, social, and economic consequences. Even an uncomplicated pregnancy imposes significant strain on the body, unavoidably involving significant physiological change and excruciating pain. For some women, pregnancy and childbirth can mean life-altering physical ailments or even death. Today, as noted earlier, the risks of carrying a pregnancy to term dwarf those of having an abortion. See supra, at 22. Experts estimate that a ban on abortions increases maternal mortality by 21 percent, with white women facing a 13 percent increase in maternal mortality while black women face a 33 percent increase.13 Pregnancy and childbirth may also impose large-scale financial costs. The majority briefly refers to arguments about changes in laws relating to healthcare coverage, pregnancy discrimination, and family leave. See ante, at 33–34. Many women, however, still do not have adequate healthcare coverage before and after pregnancy; and, even when insurance coverage is available, healthcare services may be far away.14 Women also continue to face pregnancy discrimination that interferes with their ability to earn a living. Paid family leave remains inaccessible to many who need it most. Only 20 percent of private-sector workers have access to paid family leave, including a mere 8 percent of workers in the bottom quartile of wage earners.15
The majority briefly notes the growing prevalence of safe haven laws and demand for adoption, see ante, at 34, and nn. 45–46, but, to the degree that these are changes at all, they too are irrelevant.16 Neither reduces the health risks or financial costs of going through pregnancy and childbirth. Moreover, the choice to give up parental rights after giving birth is altogether different from the choice not to carry a pregnancy to term. The reality is that few women denied an abortion will choose adoption.17 The vast majority will continue, just as in Roe and Casey’s time, to shoulder the costs of childrearing. Whether or not they choose to parent, they will experience the profound loss of autonomy and dignity that coerced pregnancy and birth always impose.1
Mississippi’s own record illustrates how little facts on the ground have changed since Roe and Casey, notwithstanding the majority’s supposed “modern developments.” Ante, at 33. Sixty-two percent of pregnancies in Mississippi are unplanned, yet Mississippi does not require insurance to cover contraceptives and prohibits educators from demonstrating proper contraceptive use.19 The State neither bans pregnancy discrimination nor requires provision of paid parental leave. Brief for Yale Law School Information Society Project as Amicus Curiae 13 (Brief for Yale Law School); Brief for National Women’s Law Center et al. as Amici Curiae 32. It has strict eligibility requirements for Medicaid and nutrition assistance, leaving many women and families without basic medical care or enough food. See Brief for 547 Deans, Chairs, Scholars and Public Health Professionals et al. as Amici Curiae 32–34 (Brief for 547 Deans). Although 86 percent of pregnancy-related deaths in the State are due to postpartum complications, Mississippi rejected federal funding to provide a year’s worth of Medicaid coverage to women after giving birth. See Brief for Yale Law School 12–13. Perhaps unsurprisingly, health outcomes in Mississippi are abysmal for both women and children. Mississippi has the highest infant mortality rate in the country, and some of the highest rates for preterm birth, low birthweight, cesarean section, and maternal death.20 It is approximately 75 times more dangerous for a woman in the State to carry a pregnancy to term than to have an abortion. See Brief for 547 Deans 9–10. We do not say that every State is Mississippi, and we are sure some have made gains since Roe and Casey in providing support for women and children. But a state-by-state analysis by public health professionals shows that States with the most restrictive abortion policies also continue to invest the least in women’s and children’s health. See Brief for 547 Deans 23–34.
The only notable change we can see since Roe and Casey cuts in favor of adhering to precedent: It is that American abortion law has become more and more aligned with other nations. The majority, like the Mississippi Legislature, claims that the United States is an extreme outlier when it comes to abortion regulation. See ante, at 6, and n. 15. The global trend, however, has been toward increased provision of legal and safe abortion care. A number of countries, including New Zealand, the Netherlands, and Iceland, permit abortions up to a roughly similar time as Roe and Casey set. See Brief for International and Comparative Legal Scholars as Amici Curiae 18–22. Canada has decriminalized abortion at any point in a pregnancy. See id., at 13–15. Most Western European countries impose restrictions on abortion after 12 to 14 weeks, but they often have liberal exceptions to those time limits, including to prevent harm to a woman’s physical or mental health. See id., at 24–27; Brief for European Law Professors as Amici Curiae 16–17, Appendix. They also typically make access to early abortion easier, for example, by helping cover its cost.21 Perhaps most notable, more than 50 countries around the world—in Asia, Latin America, Africa, and Europe—have expanded access to abortion in the past 25 years. See Brief for International and Comparative Legal Scholars as Amici Curiae 28–29. In light of that worldwide liberalization of abortion laws, it is American States that will become international outliers after today.
In sum, the majority can point to neither legal nor factual developments in support of its decision. Nothing that has happened in this country or the world in recent decades undermines the core insight of Roe and Casey. It continues to be true that, within the constraints those decisions established, a woman, not the government, should choose whether she will bear the burdens of pregnancy, childbirth, and parenting
2
In support of its holding, see ante, at 40, the majority invokes two watershed cases overruling prior constitutional precedents: West Coast Hotel Co. v. Parrish and Brown v. Board of Education. But those decisions, unlike today’s, responded to changed law and to changed facts and attitudes that had taken hold throughout society. As Casey recognized, the two cases are relevant only to show—by stark contrast—how unjustified overturning the right to choose is. See 505 U. S., at 861–864.
West Coast Hotel overruled Adkins v. Children’s Hospital of D. C., 261 U. S. 525 (1923), and a whole line of cases beginning with Lochner v. New York, 198 U. S. 45 (1905). Adkins had found a state minimum-wage law unconstitutional because, in the Court’s view, the law interfered with a constitutional right to contract. 261 U. S., at 554–555. But then the Great Depression hit, bringing with it unparalleled economic despair. The experience undermined—in fact, it disproved—Adkins’s assumption that a wholly unregulated market could meet basic human needs. As Justice Jackson (before becoming a Justice) wrote of that time: “The older world of laissez faire was recognized everywhere outside the Court to be dead.” The Struggle for Judicial Supremacy 85 (1941). In West Coast Hotel, the Court caught up, recognizing through the lens of experience the flaws of existing legal doctrine. See also ante, at 11 (ROBERTS, C. J., concurring in judgment). The havoc the Depression had worked on ordinary Americans, the Court noted, was “common knowledge through the length and breadth of the land.” 300 U. S., at 399. The laissez-faire approach had led to “the exploiting of workers at wages so low as to be insufficient to meet the bare cost of living.” Ibid. And since Adkins was decided, the law had also changed. In several decisions, the Court had started to recognize the power of States to implement economic policies designed to enhance their citizens’ economic well-being. See, e.g., Nebbia v. New York, 291 U. S. 502 (1934); O’Gorman & Young, Inc. v. Hartford Fire Ins. Co., 282 U. S. 251 (1931). The statements in those decisions, West Coast Hotel explained, were “impossible to reconcile” with Adkins. 300 U. S., at 398. There was no escaping the need for Adkins to go.
Brown v. Board of Education overruled Plessy v. Ferguson, 163 U. S. 537 (1896), along with its doctrine of “separate but equal.” By 1954, decades of Jim Crow had made clear what Plessy’s turn of phrase actually meant: “inherent[ ] [in]equal[ity].” Brown, 347 U. S., at 495. Segregation was not, and could not ever be, consistent with the Reconstruction Amendments, ratified to give the former slaves full citizenship. Whatever might have been thought in Plessy’s time, the Brown Court explained, both experience and “modern authority” showed the “detrimental effect[s]” of state-sanctioned segregation: It “affect[ed] [children’s] hearts and minds in a way unlikely ever to be undone.” 347 U. S., at 494. By that point, too, the law had begun to reflect that understanding. In a series of decisions, the Court had held unconstitutional public graduate schools’ exclusion of black students. See, e.g., Sweatt v. Painter, 339 U. S. 629 (1950); Sipuel v. Board of Regents of Univ. of Okla., 332 U. S. 631 (1948) (per curiam); Missouri ex rel. Gaines v. Canada, 305 U. S. 337 (1938). The logic of those cases, Brown held, “appl[ied] with added force to children in grade and high schools.” 347 U. S., at 494. Changed facts and changed law required Plessy’s end.
The majority says that in recognizing those changes, we are implicitly supporting the half-century interlude between Plessy and Brown. See ante, at 70. That is not so. First, if the Brown Court had used the majority’s method of constitutional construction, it might not ever have overruled Plessy, whether 5 or 50 or 500 years later. Brown thought that whether the ratification-era history supported desegregation was “[a]t best . . . inconclusive.” 347 U. S., at 489. But even setting that aside, we are not saying that a decision can never be overruled just because it is terribly wrong. Take West Virginia Bd. of Ed. v. Barnette, 319 U. S. 624, which the majority also relies on. See ante, at 40–41, 70. That overruling took place just three years after the initial decision, before any notable reliance interests had developed. It happened as well because individual Justices changed their minds, not because a new majority wanted to undo the decisions of their predecessors. Both Barnette and Brown, moreover, share another feature setting them apart from the Court’s ruling today. They protected individuarights with a strong basis in the Constitution’s most fundamental commitments; they did not, as the majority does here, take away a right that individuals have held, and relied on, for 50 years. To take that action based on a new and bare majority’s declaration that two Courts got the result egregiously wrong? And to justify that action by reference to Barnette? Or to Brown—a case in which the Chief Justice also wrote an (11-page) opinion in which the entire Court could speak with one voice? These questions answer themselves.
Casey itself addressed both West Coast Hotel and Brown, and found that neither supported Roe’s overruling. In West Coast Hotel, Casey explained, “the facts of economic life” had proved “different from those previously assumed.” 505 U. S., at 862. And even though “Plessy was wrong the day it was decided,” the passage of time had made that ever more clear to ever more citizens: “Society’s understanding of the facts” in 1954 was “fundamentally different” than in 1896. Id., at 863. So the Court needed to reverse course. “In constitutional adjudication as elsewhere in life, changed circumstances may impose new obligations.” Id., at 864. And because such dramatic change had occurred, the public could understand why the Court was acting. “[T]he Nation could accept each decision” as a “response to the Court’s constitutional duty.” Ibid. But that would not be true of a reversal of Roe—“[b]ecause neither the factual underpinnings of Roe’s central holding nor our understanding of it has changed.” 505 U. S., at 864.
That is just as much so today, because Roe and Casey continue to reflect, not diverge from, broad trends in American society. It is, of course, true that many Americans, including many women, opposed those decisions when issued and do so now as well. Yet the fact remains: Roe and Casey were the product of a profound and ongoing change in women’s roles in the latter part of the 20th century. Only a dozen years before Roe, the Court described women as “the centerof home and family life,” with “special responsibilities” that precluded their full legal status under the Constitution. Hoyt v. Florida, 368 U. S. 57, 62 (1961). By 1973, when the Court decided Roe, fundamental social change was underway regarding the place of women—and the law had begun to follow. See Reed v. Reed, 404 U. S. 71, 76 (1971) (recognizing that the Equal Protection Clause prohibits sex-based discrimination). By 1992, when the Court decided Casey, the traditional view of a woman’s role as only a wife and mother was “no longer consistent with our understanding of the family, the individual, or the Constitution.” 505 U. S., at 897; see supra, at 15, 23–24. Under that charter, Casey understood, women must take their place as full and equal citizens. And for that to happen, women must have control over their reproductive decisions. Nothing since Casey—no changed law, no changed fact—has undermined that promise.
C
The reasons for retaining Roe and Casey gain further strength from the overwhelming reliance interests those decisions have created. The Court adheres to precedent not just for institutional reasons, but because it recognizes that stability in the law is “an essential thread in the mantle of protection that the law affords the individual.” Florida Dept. of Health and Rehabilitative Servs. v. Florida Nursing Home Assn., 450 U. S. 147, 154 (1981) (Stevens, J., concurring). So when overruling precedent “would dislodge [individuals’] settled rights and expectations,” stare decisis has “added force.” Hilton v. South Carolina Public Railways Comm’n, 502 U. S. 197, 202 (1991). Casey understood that to deny individuals’ reliance on Roe was to “refuse to face the fact[s].” 505 U. S., at 856. Today the majority refuses to face the facts. “The most striking feature of the [majority] is the absence of any serious discussion” of how of home and family life,” with “special responsibilities” that precluded their full legal status under the Constitution. Hoyt v. Florida, 368 U. S. 57, 62 (1961). By 1973, when the Court decided Roe, fundamental social change was underway regarding the place of women—and the law had begun to follow. See Reed v. Reed, 404 U. S. 71, 76 (1971) (recognizing that the Equal Protection Clause prohibits sex-based discrimination). By 1992, when the Court decided Casey, the traditional view of a woman’s role as only a wife and mother was “no longer consistent with our understanding of the family, the individual, or the Constitution.” 505 U. S., at 897; see supra, at 15, 23–24. Under that charter, Casey understood, women must take their place as full and equal citizens. And for that to happen, women must have control over their reproductive decisions. Nothing since Casey—no changed law, no changed fact—has undermined that promise.
C
The reasons for retaining Roe and Casey gain further strength from the overwhelming reliance interests those decisions have created. The Court adheres to precedent not just for institutional reasons, but because it recognizes that stability in the law is “an essential thread in the mantle of protection that the law affords the individual.” Florida Dept. of Health and Rehabilitative Servs. v. Florida Nursing Home Assn., 450 U. S. 147, 154 (1981) (Stevens, J., concurring). So when overruling precedent “would dislodge [individuals’] settled rights and expectations,” stare decisis has “added force.” Hilton v. South Carolina Public Railways Comm’n, 502 U. S. 197, 202 (1991). Casey understood that to deny individuals’ reliance on Roe was to “refuse to face the fact[s].” 505 U. S., at 856. Today the majority refuses to face the facts. “The most striking feature of the [majority] is the absence of any serious discussion” of how its ruling will affect women. Ante, at 37. By characterizing Casey’s reliance arguments as “generalized assertions about the national psyche,” ante, at 64, it reveals how little it knows or cares about women’s lives or about the suffering its decision will cause.
In Casey, the Court observed that for two decades individuals “have organized intimate relationships and made” significant life choices “in reliance on the availability of abortion in the event that contraception should fail.” 505 U. S., at 856. Over another 30 years, that reliance has solidified. For half a century now, in Casey’s words, “[t]he ability of women to participate equally in the economic and social life of the Nation has been facilitated by their ability to control their reproductive lives.” Ibid.; see supra, at 23– 24. Indeed, all women now of childbearing age have grown up expecting that they would be able to avail themselves of Roe’s and Casey’s protections.
The disruption of overturning Roe and Casey will therefore be profound. Abortion is a common medical procedure and a familiar experience in women’s lives. About 18 percent of pregnancies in this country end in abortion, and about one quarter of American women will have an abortion before the age of 45.22 Those numbers reflect the predictable and life-changing effects of carrying a pregnancy, giving birth, and becoming a parent. As Casey understood, people today rely on their ability to control and time pregnancies when making countless life decisions: where to live, whether and how to invest in education or careers, how to allocate financial resources, and how to approach intimate and family relationships. Women may count on abortion access for when contraception fails. They may count on abortion access for when contraception cannot be used, for example, if they were raped. They may count on abortion for when something changes in the midst of a pregnancy, whether it involves family or financial circumstances, unanticipated medical complications, or heartbreaking fetal diagnoses. Taking away the right to abortion, as the majority does today, destroys all those individual plans and expectations. In so doing, it diminishes women’s opportunities to participate fully and equally in the Nation’s political, social, and economic life. See Brief for Economists as Amici Curiae 13 (showing that abortion availability has “large effects on women’s education, labor force participation, occupations, and earnings” (footnotes omitted)).
The majority’s response to these obvious points exists far from the reality American women actually live. The majority proclaims that “‘reproductive planning could take virtually immediate account of any sudden restoration of state authority to ban abortions.’” Ante, at 64 (quoting Casey, 505 U. S., at 856).23 The facts are: 45 percent of pregnancies in the United States are unplanned. See Brief for 547 Deans 5. Even the most effective contraceptives fail, and effective contraceptives are not universally accessible.24 Not all sexual activity is consensual and not all contraceptive choices are made by the party who risks pregnancy. See Brief for Legal Voice et al. as Amici Curiae 18–19. The Mississippi law at issue here, for example, has no exception for rape or incest, even for underage women. Finally, themajority ignores, as explained above, that some women decide to have an abortion because their circumstances change during a pregnancy. See supra, at 49. Human bodies care little for hopes and plans. Events can occur after conception, from unexpected medical risks to changes in family circumstances, which profoundly alter what it means to carry a pregnancy to term. In all these situations, women have expected that they will get to decide, perhaps in consultation with their families or doctors but free from state interference, whether to continue a pregnancy. For those who will now have to undergo that pregnancy, the loss of Roe and Casey could be disastrous.
That is especially so for women without money. When we “count[] the cost of [Roe’s] repudiation” on women who once relied on that decision, it is not hard to see where the greatest burden will fall. Casey, 505 U. S., at 855. In States that bar abortion, women of means will still be able to travel to obtain the services they need.25 It is women who cannot afford to do so who will suffer most. These are the women most likely to seek abortion care in the first place. Women living below the federal poverty line experience unintended pregnancies at rates five times higher than higher income women do, and nearly half of women who seek abortion care live in households below the poverty line. See Brief for 547 Deans 7; Brief for Abortion Funds and Practical Support Organizations as Amici Curiae 8 (Brief for Abortion Funds). Even with Roe’s protection, these women face immense obstacles to raising the money needed to obtain abortion care early in their pregnancy. See Brief for Abortion Funds 7– 12.26 After today, in States where legal abortions are not available, they will lose any ability to obtain safe, legal abortion care. They will not have the money to make the trip necessary; or to obtain childcare for that time; or to take time off work. Many will endure the costs and risks of pregnancy and giving birth against their wishes. Others will turn in desperation to illegal and unsafe abortions. They may lose not just their freedom, but their lives.27
Finally, the expectation of reproductive control is integral to many women’s identity and their place in the Nation. See Casey, 505 U. S., at 856. That expectation helps define a woman as an “equal citizen[],” with all the rights, privileges, and obligations that status entails. Gonzales, 550 U. S., at 172 (Ginsburg, J., dissenting); see supra, at 23–24. It reflects that she is an autonomous person, and that society and the law recognize her as such. Like many constitutional rights, the right to choose situates a woman in relationship to others and to the government. It helps define a sphere of freedom, in which a person has the capacity to make choices free of government control. As Casey recognized, the right “order[s]” her “thinking” as well as her “living.” 505 U. S., at 856. Beyond any individual choice about residence, or education, or career, her whole life reflects the control and authority that the right grants.
Withdrawing a woman’s right to choose whether to continue a pregnancy does not mean that no choice is being made. It means that a majority of today’s Court has wrenched this choice from women and given it to the States. To allow a State to exert control over one of “the most intimate and personal choices” a woman may make is not only to affect the course of her life, monumental as those effects might be. Id., at 851. It is to alter her “views of [herself]” and her understanding of her “place[] in society” as someone with the recognized dignity and authority to make these choices. Id., at 856. Women have relied on Roe and Casey in this way for 50 years. Many have never known anything else. When Roe and Casey disappear, the loss of power, control, and dignity will be immense.
The Court’s failure to perceive the whole swath of expectations Roe and Casey created reflects an impoverished view of reliance. According to the majority, a reliance interest must be “very concrete,” like those involving “property” or “contract.” Ante, at 64. While many of this Court’s cases addressing reliance have been in the “commercial context,” Casey, 505 U. S., at 855, none holds that interests must be analogous to commercial ones to warrant stare decisis protection.28 This unprecedented assertion is, at bottom, a radical claim to power. By disclaiming any need to consider broad swaths of individuals’ interests, the Court arrogates to itself the authority to overrule established legal principles without even acknowledging the costs of its decisions for the individuals who live under the law, costs that this Court’s stare decisis doctrine instructs us to privilege when deciding whether to change course.
The majority claims that the reliance interests women have in Roe and Casey are too “intangible” for the Court to consider, even if it were inclined to do so. Ante, at 65. This is to ignore as judges what we know as men and women. The interests women have in Roe and Casey are perfectly, viscerally concrete. Countless women will now make different decisions about careers, education, relationships, and whether to try to become pregnant than they would have when Roe served as a backstop. Other women will carry pregnancies to term, with all the costs and risk of harm that involves, when they would previously have chosen to obtain an abortion. For millions of women, Roe and Casey have been critical in giving them control of their bodies and their lives. Closing our eyes to the suffering today’s decision will impose will not make that suffering disappear. The majority cannot escape its obligation to “count[] the cost[s]” of its decision by invoking the “conflicting arguments” of “contending sides.” Casey, 505 U. S., at 855; ante, at 65. Stare decisis requires that the Court calculate the costs of a decision’s repudiation on those who have relied on the decision, not on those who have disavowed it. See Casey, 505 U. S., at 855.
More broadly, the majority’s approach to reliance cannot be reconciled with our Nation’s understanding of constitutional rights. The majority’s insistence on a “concrete,” economic showing would preclude a finding of reliance on a wide variety of decisions recognizing constitutional rights— such as the right to express opinions, or choose whom to marry, or decide how to educate children. The Court, on the majority’s logic, could transfer those choices to the State without having to consider a person’s settled understanding that the law makes them hers. That must be wrong. All those rights, like the right to obtain an abortion, profoundly affect and, indeed, anchor individual lives. To recognize that people have relied on these rights is not to dabble in abstractions, but to acknowledge some of the most “concrete” and familiar aspects of human life and liberty. Ante, at 64.
All those rights, like the one here, also have a societal dimension, because of the role constitutional liberties play in our structure of government. See, e.g., Dickerson, 530 U. S., at 443 (recognizing that Miranda “warnings have become part of our national culture” in declining to overrule Miranda v. Arizona, 384 U. S. 436 (1966)). Rescinding an individual right in its entirety and conferring it on the State, an action the Court takes today for the first time in history, affects all who have relied on our constitutional system of government and its structure of individual liberties protected from state oversight. Roe and Casey have of course aroused controversy and provoked disagreement. But the right those decisions conferred and reaffirmed is part of society’s understanding of constitutional law and of how the Court has defined the liberty and equality that women are entitled to claim.
After today, young women will come of age with fewer rights than their mothers and grandmothers had. The majority accomplishes that result without so much as considering how women have relied on the right to choose or what it means to take that right away. The majority’s refusal even to consider the life-altering consequences of reversing Roe and Casey is a stunning indictment of its decision.
D
One last consideration counsels against the majority’s ruling: the very controversy surrounding Roe and Casey. The majority accuses Casey of acting outside the bounds of the law to quell the conflict over abortion—of imposing an unprincipled “settlement” of the issue in an effort to end “national division.” Ante, at 67. But that is not what Casey did. As shown above, Casey applied traditional principles of stare decisis—which the majority today ignores—in reaffirming Roe. Casey carefully assessed changed circumstances (none) and reliance interests (profound). It considered every aspect of how Roe’s framework operated. It adhered to the law in its analysis, and it reached the conclusion that the law required. True enough that Casey took notice of the “national controversy” about abortion: The Court knew in 1992, as it did in 1973, that abortion was a “divisive issue.” Casey, 505 U. S., at 867–868; see Roe, 410 U. S., at 116. But Casey’s reason for acknowledging public conflict was the exact opposite of what the majority insinuates. Casey addressed the national controversy in order to emphasize how important it was, in that case of all cases, for the Court to stick to the law. Would that today’s majority had done likewise.
Consider how the majority itself summarizes this aspect of Casey:
“The American people’s belief in the rule of law would be shaken if they lost respect for this Court as an institution that decides important cases based on principle, not ‘social and political pressures.’ There is a special danger that the public will perceive a decision as having been made for unprincipled reasons when the Court overrules a controversial ‘watershed’ decision, such as Roe. A decision overruling Roe would be perceived as having been made ‘under fire’ and as a ‘surrender to political pressure.’” Ante, at 66–67 (citations omitted).
That seems to us a good description. And it seems to us right. The majority responds (if we understand it correctly): well, yes, but we have to apply the law. See ante, at 67. To which Casey would have said: That is exactly the point. Here, more than anywhere, the Court needs to apply the law—particularly the law of stare decisis. Here, we know that citizens will continue to contest the Court’s decision, because “[m]en and women of good conscience” deeply disagree about abortion. Casey, 505 U. S., at 850. When that contestation takes place—but when there is no legal basis for reversing course—the Court needs to be steadfast, to stand its ground. That is what the rule of law requires. And that is what respect for this Court depends on.
“The promise of constancy, once given” in so charged an environment, Casey explained, “binds its maker for as long as” the “understanding of the issue has not changed so fundamentally as to render the commitment obsolete.” Id., at 868. A breach of that promise is “nothing less than a breach of faith.” Ibid. “[A]nd no Court that broke its faith with the people could sensibly expect credit for principle.” Ibid. No Court breaking its faith in that way would deserve credit for principle. As one of Casey’s authors wrote in another case, “Our legitimacy requires, above all, that we adhere to stare decisis” in “sensitive political contexts” where “partisan controversy abounds.” Bush v. Vera, 517 U. S. 952, 985 (1996) (opinion of O’Connor, J.).
Justice Jackson once called a decision he dissented from a “loaded weapon,” ready to hand for improper uses. Korematsu v. United States, 323 U. S. 214, 246 (1944). We fear that today’s decision, departing from stare decisis for no legitimate reason, is its own loaded weapon. Weakening stare decisis threatens to upend bedrock legal doctrines, far beyond any single decision. Weakening stare decisis creates profound legal instability. And as Casey recognized, weakening stare decisis in a hotly contested case like this one calls into question this Court’s commitment to legal principle. It makes the Court appear not restrained but aggressive, not modest but grasping. In all those ways, today’s decision takes aim, we fear, at the rule of law.
III
“Power, not reason, is the new currency of this Court’s decisionmaking.” Payne, 501 U. S., at 844 (Marshall, J., dissenting). Roe has stood for fifty years. Casey, a precedent about precedent specifically confirming Roe, has stood for thirty. And the doctrine of stare decisis—a critical element of the rule of law—stands foursquare behind their continued existence. The right those decisions established and preserved is embedded in our constitutional law, both originating in and leading to other rights protecting bodily integrity, personal autonomy, and family relationships. The abortion right is also embedded in the lives of women— shaping their expectations, influencing their choices about relationships and work, supporting (as all reproductive rights do) their social and economic equality. Since the right’s recognition (and affirmation), nothing has changed to support what the majority does today. Neither law nor facts nor attitudes have provided any new reasons to reach a different result than Roe and Casey did. All that has changed is this Court.
Mississippi—and other States too—knew exactly what they were doing in ginning up new legal challenges to Roe and Casey. The 15-week ban at issue here was enacted in 2018. Other States quickly followed: Between 2019 and 2021, eight States banned abortion procedures after six to eight weeks of pregnancy, and three States enacted all-out bans.29 Mississippi itself decided in 2019 that it had not gone far enough: The year after enacting the law under review, the State passed a 6-week restriction. A state senator who championed both Mississippi laws said the obvious out loud. “[A] lot of people thought,” he explained, that “finally, we have” a conservative Court “and so now would be a good time to start testing the limits of Roe.”30 In its petition for certiorari, the State had exercised a smidgen of restraint. It had urged the Court merely to roll back Roe and Casey, specifically assuring the Court that “the questions presented in this petition do not require the Court to overturn” those precedents. Pet. for Cert. 5; see ante, at 5–6 (ROBERTS, C. J., concurring in judgment). But as Mississippi grew ever more confident in its prospects, it resolved to go all in. It urged the Court to overrule Roe and Casey. Nothing but everything would be enough.
Earlier this Term, this Court signaled that Mississippi’s stratagem would succeed. Texas was one of the fistful of States to have recently banned abortions after six weeks of pregnancy. It added to that “flagrantly unconstitutional” restriction an unprecedented scheme to “evade judicial scrutiny.” Whole Woman’s Health v. Jackson, 594 U. S. ___, ___ (2021) (SOTOMAYOR, J., dissenting) (slip op., at 1). And five Justices acceded to that cynical maneuver. They let Texas defy this Court’s constitutional rulings, nullifying Roe and Casey ahead of schedule in the Nation’s second largest State.
And now the other shoe drops, courtesy of that same five person majority. (We believe that THE CHIEF JUSTICE’s opinion is wrong too, but no one should think that there is not a large difference between upholding a 15-week ban on the grounds he does and allowing States to prohibit abortion from the time of conception.) Now a new and bare majority of this Court—acting at practically the first moment possible—overrules Roe and Casey. It converts a series of dissenting opinions expressing antipathy toward Roe and Casey into a decision greenlighting even total abortion bans. See ante, at 57, 59, 63, and nn. 61–64 (relying on former dissents). It eliminates a 50-year-old constitutional right that safeguards women’s freedom and equal station. It breaches a core rule-of-law principle, designed to promote constancy in the law. In doing all of that, it places in jeopardy other rights, from contraception to same-sex intimacy and marriage. And finally, it undermines the Court’s legitimacy.
Casey itself made the last point in explaining why it would not overrule Roe—though some members of its majority might not have joined Roe in the first instance. Just as we did here, Casey explained the importance of stare decisis; the inappositeness of West Coast Hotel and Brown; the absence of any “changed circumstances” (or other reason) justifying the reversal of precedent. 505 U. S., at 864; see supra, at 30–33, 37–47. “[T]he Court,” Casey explained, “could not pretend” that overruling Roe had any “justification beyond a present doctrinal disposition to come out differently from the Court of 1973.” 505 U. S., at 864. And to overrule for that reason? Quoting Justice Stewart, Casey explained that to do so—to reverse prior law “upon a ground no firmer than a change in [the Court’s] membership”— would invite the view that “this institution is little different from the two political branches of the Government.” Ibid. No view, Casey thought, could do “more lasting injury to this Court and to the system of law which it is our abiding mission to serve.” Ibid. For overruling Roe, Casey concluded, the Court would pay a “terrible price.” 505 U. S., at 864.
The Justices who wrote those words—O’Connor, Kennedy, and Souter—they were judges of wisdom. They would not have won any contests for the kind of ideological purity some court watchers want Justices to deliver. But if there were awards for Justices who left this Court better than they found it? And who for that reason left this country better? And the rule of law stronger? Sign those Justices up. They knew that “the legitimacy of the Court [is] earned over time.” Id., at 868. They also would have recognized that it can be destroyed much more quickly. They worked hard to avert that outcome in Casey. The American public, they thought, should never conclude that its constitutional protections hung by a thread—that a new majority, adhering to a new “doctrinal school,” could “by dint of numbers” alone expunge their rights. Id., at 864. It is hard—no, it is impossible—to conclude that anything else has happened here. One of us once said that “[i]t is not often in the law that so few have so quickly changed so much.” S. Breyer, Breaking the Promise of Brown: The Resegregation of America’s Schools 30 (2022). For all of us, in our time on this Court, that has never been more true than today. In overruling Roe and Casey, this Court betrays its guiding principles.
With sorrow—for this Court, but more, for the many millions of American women who have today lost a fundamental constitutional protection—we dissent. (19-1392 Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization.)
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