Talk:Roe v. Wade

federal vs. state

This statement: "However, the USA is a federal state, so that individual states have rights against the country as a whole" opens up a huge can of worms. The Civil War was fought over this issue, as well as many smaller battles such as enforcement of environmental regulations. The current court is leaning more towards states rights over federal, but probably a majority of people in the country feel this is wrong. So we might find some way to work a discussion of this matter into the article, later. Pat Palmer (talk) 08:52, 27 June 2022 (CDT)

I wonder whether it's actually true, or at least relevant, that "probably a majority of people in the country feel this is wrong". I suspect people's attitudes vary according to the issue being discussed. And federalism means that the majority opposing minority rights may be irrelevant. Sort of infinite regress. For what it's worth, I think consensus is very important. The tendency of the establishment to ignore large swathes of public opinion probably played a major role in the election of President Trump. I suspect the Founding Fathers knew what they were doing when they required 3/4 of the states to agree an amendment. In RvW the Court interpreted a century-old provision to rule against nearly all the states in effectively amending the Constitution. Whatever one might think of the morality of the decision, I suspect it was politically harmful, contributing to the extreme polarization we see nowadays.

Most of that is irrelevant to the article, of course. Peter Jackson (talk) 04:46, 28 June 2022 (CDT)

So many awful decisions came from the Supreme Court, including the Dread Scott decision that almost directly provoked the Civil War. But also some really important good changes, such as Brown vs. Board of Education, which prohibited segregation of schools by race. That is something, unfortunately, that never could have occurred via legislation due to the politics of the country. It's the whole history of the U.S.--it lumbers along, doing kind of badly, and everyone constantly predicting "this is the beginning of the end", but still, when we have major disagreement, we don't usually go out and shoot our own citizens, or randomly imprison them, as happens all too often under dictatorships and communist regimes. But as you say, the debate about this probably belongs in the article about the Supreme Court, rather than in this article. BTW, the equal rights amendment for women never passed--but it came within one state of passing. THAT is how difficult it is to pass an amendment. This in a country where more than half the voters are female, but not, of course, the representatives who get to vote on amendments; those remain predominantly male. Pat Palmer (talk) 10:27, 28 June 2022 (CDT)