Putting aside the fact that the rolling back of women's rights is not a curiosity in the slightest, it is curious to see how this has all played out from a foreign legalistic perspective.
This decision puts abortion in the same legal position it is in here in Australia - a matter for the states. There is no federal constitutional or statutory protection (and frankly, the concept of an implied federal constitutional protection for abortion is a little odd). So American women now having the exact same federal protections as Australian women (i.e. none) does not, on its face, appear to be a catastrophe.
But the real difference is the simple political fact that many American states are captured by religious extremists, in a way that is uncommon in most Western democracies. Australian women do not have to be overly concerned about their abortion rights being substantially curtailed (accepting that many haven't actually had those rights in the first place for very long) because there is no substantial religious extremism in state governance.
It's also a sign of how irretrievably broken American democracy is, where the idea that Congress would be capable of implementing wide-ranging federal statutory protections is laughable. It seems like the almost universal response to American judicial decisions on rights is to consider those judicial decisions as being determinative of the issue, when that is not at all how things would play out elsewhere. Due to the impotence of the other branches of federal government, Americans appear to expect that judicial decisions will reflect a view of what policy should be, rather than what the law currently is. It's almost unthinkable that the conservative justices would find in favour of a liberal policy position on a purely interpretive basis, or that the liberal justices would find in favour of a conservative policy position on a purely interpretive basis. This seems to be the logical result of the US governmental framework being fundamentally unfit for purpose.
That dynamic will no doubt play out in the coming days in West Virginia v EPA. The whole weird concept of Chevron deference just wouldn't be necessary if there was a functional legislature.
This decision puts abortion in the same legal position it is in here in Australia - a matter for the states. There is no federal constitutional or statutory protection (and frankly, the concept of an implied federal constitutional protection for abortion is a little odd). So American women now having the exact same federal protections as Australian women (i.e. none) does not, on its face, appear to be a catastrophe.
But the real difference is the simple political fact that many American states are captured by religious extremists, in a way that is uncommon in most Western democracies. Australian women do not have to be overly concerned about their abortion rights being substantially curtailed (accepting that many haven't actually had those rights in the first place for very long) because there is no substantial religious extremism in state governance.
It's also a sign of how irretrievably broken American democracy is, where the idea that Congress would be capable of implementing wide-ranging federal statutory protections is laughable. It seems like the almost universal response to American judicial decisions on rights is to consider those judicial decisions as being determinative of the issue, when that is not at all how things would play out elsewhere. Due to the impotence of the other branches of federal government, Americans appear to expect that judicial decisions will reflect a view of what policy should be, rather than what the law currently is. It's almost unthinkable that the conservative justices would find in favour of a liberal policy position on a purely interpretive basis, or that the liberal justices would find in favour of a conservative policy position on a purely interpretive basis. This seems to be the logical result of the US governmental framework being fundamentally unfit for purpose.
That dynamic will no doubt play out in the coming days in West Virginia v EPA. The whole weird concept of Chevron deference just wouldn't be necessary if there was a functional legislature.
