Maggie's Farm

The Court

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From 2002, Anderson in City Journal: Click here: City Journal Summer 2002 | Why the Battle for the Court Will Be Nasty by Brian C. Anderson :questions of sex have tempted the Court to bend and twist the Constitution almost as energetically as questions of race. Roe v. Wade (1973) is the most famous case in point. Whatever your views about abortion, it is hard to deny that, as jurisprudence, Roe is embarrassingly shoddy. In a 51-page majority opinion by Justice Harry Blackmun that lacked any discernible legal reasoning, the Court based itself on the “privacy” right of married couples to use contraceptives that it had found in the “penumbras, formed by emanations” of the Bill of Rights in the 1965 Griswold v. Connecticut case. It asserted that this new guarantee of privacy, conjured up like a will-o’-the-wisp rising out of swamp gas, included an absolute right, protected by the due process clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, for all women to terminate pregnancy up until the third trimester—a penumbra formed by emanations indeed.

 Q