Finally putting Roe to rest
Laura Ingraham: The reasoning in Roe v. Wade was pure legal fiction, it's time to let the people determine this issue for themselves
In her "Ingraham Angle" commentary on Wednesday, host Laura Ingraham said there is a decent potential for the conservative-majority U.S. Supreme Court to finally "put Roe to rest" and reserve the legality of abortion to the states to individually determine.
"Today’s oral arguments in the biggest abortion case since Casey v. Planned Parenthood were fascinating to listen to, and simply confirmed what conservative legal scholars have been arguing for nearly 50 years — that the reasoning in Roe [v. Wade] was pure legal fiction," Ingraham said.
"The court never should have waded into the abortion wars," she added.
Ingraham said the most "revealing and disturbing" part of Wednesday's hearing was when the court heard arguments about ‘stare decisis’ – the idea that precedent should be generally respected and provide for predictable development of legal principles.
However, she said, left-wing justices like Obama nominee Sonia Sotomayor clashed with one counsel, Mississippi State Solicitor General Scott Stewart, over the idea of a fetus being a living being and whether the Constitution prohibits the act of killing an unborn baby.
"At this point, their main argument is that Roe has been on the books for a long time, and it's too late to do anything about it. That's absurd," said Ingraham. "The notion that the American people are stuck with a wicked decision just for the sake of tradition goes against everything this country stands for."
She said that by the left-wing justices' reasoning, the "separate-but-equal" ruling in Plessy v. Ferguson allowing segregation should never have been overturned in Brown v. Board of Ed, based on precedent and tradition.
Associate Justice Sonia Sotomayor poses in the official group photo at the US Supreme Court in Washington, DC on November 30, 2018. (MANDEL NGAN/AFP via Getty Images)
In his argument with Sotomayor, Stewart said that advancements since Roe have allowed for further knowledge of fetal pain, ultrasound imagery that presents an unborn baby in such a way that appears and is "fully human very early."
In part of her response, Sotomayor said that people who are brain-dead can still exhibit signs their nervous system is active and human:
"There are spontaneous acts by dead brain people. So I don't think that a response to by a fetus necessarily proves that there's a sensation of pain or that there's consciousness," she said. "There is about 40 percent of [brain-dead] people who if he or she touch their feet, the foot will recoil.
Ingraham strongly criticized Sotomayor, calling her comments "twisted, callous, and uninformed."
"By her logic, I guess expectant mothers shouldn’t get too excited when her baby kicks in the womb. After all, the baby could be dead and merely twitching," the host said.
"Will this institution survive the stench that this creates in the public percept that the Constitution and its reading are just political acts? I don't see how it is possible," Sotomayor later asked as well.
Ingraham remarked that Sotomayor should indeed worry about a "noxious stench" – but instead one created in 1973 with the Roe decision, "robbing" the states of 10th Amendment-style legislative powers.
FILE - In this Oct. 18, 2011 file photo, U.S. Supreme Court justice Antonin Scalia looks into the balcony before addressing the Chicago-Kent College Law justice in Chicago. On Saturday, Feb. 13, 2016, the U.S. Marshals Service confirmed that Scalia has died at the age of 79. (AP Photo/Charles Rex Arbogast, File) (ASSOCIATED PRESS)
Ingraham said the late Justice Antonin Scalia put it best in that regard:
"Whether you’re for abortion rights or not … the Constitution doesn’t say anything about it. It leaves it up to Democratic choice," the late jurist once said. "Some states prohibited it. Some states didn’t. What Roe did was so no state can ever prohibit it. That’s simply not in the Constitution. It’s one of many rights not addressed in the Constitution one of the many things in the word left to Democratic choice."
"The fact is, neither the Framers who wrote the original Constitution and Bill of Rights, nor the drafters of the Fourteenth Amendment, ever intended to create a Constitutional right to abortion. Indeed, they would have found such a concept to be barbarous and evil," Ingraham later concluded.
"The Left claims to care about ‘democracy.’ So let's let the people decide the important questions presented by abortion. And if a Court with a majority of 6 Republican appointees fails to put Roe to rest, then it should expect a conservative-led movement to shrink the court’s power. And it would also mean ‘adios’ to the Federalist Society."
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