Your personal opinion is the Constitution?

Towards the end of last year, we watched The Daily Show's Trevor Noah interviewing Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor.  It was a delight to watch her and listen to her.  

Among many things, Sotomayor talked about the Court and the landmark Roe V. Wade decision, which made abortion legal in the US.

When Sotomayor said that the court's decision was not a narrow majority but a 7-2 split, I was shocked.  I had no idea; I had always assumed it was a close 5-4 or a 6-3 decision.  But, 7-2?

Sotomayor then said something else that made a deep impact.  She said that while we might get all charged and upset about a decision that doesn't go our way, or celebrate when it is a win for us, it would do us all good if we read the opinions.

Now, of course, Sotomayor is a unique justice in that we the public are her audience when she writes her opinions.  She writes in a way that anybody with average intelligence can understand her opinion and the logic behind it.  I have been a huge fan of hers, and she would become the Chief Justice in my alternate universe:

#SCOTUS no longer a #Roberts court.
It is a #Thomas court.
If Roberts really cares about the legitimacy of the institution and how history will record him, he would resign in 2021#Biden then elevates #Sotomayor and adds a replacement.https://t.co/UPFL5GiWiQ #Barrett

— Sriram K (@congoboy) October 27, 2020

The recent leak of the draft opinion of the majority of the Supreme Court, which is on the verge of tossing out the Roe V. Wade decision, confirms my suspicion that the Court is now firmly in the hands of Thomas, his allies, and his wife.

I decided to take up Sotomayor's directive to read the Court's decision in 1973 that made Roe V. Wade a phrase with which we have become familiar.

Right in the beginning, the 1973 decision notes:

We forthwith acknowledge our awareness of the sensitive and emotional nature of the abortion controversy, of the vigorous opposing views, even among physicians, and of the deep and seemingly absolute convictions that the subject inspires. One's philosophy, one's experiences, one's exposure to the raw edges of human existence, one's religious training, one's attitudes toward life and family and their values, and the moral standards one establishes and seeks to observe, are all likely to influence and to color one's thinking and conclusions about abortion.

In addition, population growth, pollution, poverty, and racial overtones tend to complicate and not to simplify the problem.

Those sentences are true today too.  It is foolish to pretend otherwise, which is why I, like many, practically laughed when Justice Roberts said at his nomination hearings that his job was merely to call balls and strikes like a baseball umpire would:

Judges are like umpires. Umpires don’t make the rules, they apply them. The role of an umpire and a judge is critical.  They make sure everybody plays by the rules, but it is a limited role.  Nobody ever went to a ball game to see the umpire.

On matters that reach the Court, "One's philosophy, one's experiences, one's exposure to the raw edges of human existence, one's religious training, one's attitudes toward life and family and their values, and the moral standards one establishes and seeks to observe, are all likely to influence and to color one's thinking and conclusions" to quote from the Roe V. Wade decision.

Much later in the opinion, the Court notes:

Texas urges that, apart from the Fourteenth Amendment, life begins at conception and is present throughout pregnancy, and that, therefore, the State has a compelling interest in protecting that life from and after conception. We need not resolve the difficult question of when life begins. When those trained in the respective disciplines of medicine, philosophy, and theology are unable to arrive at any consensus, the judiciary, at this point in the development of man's knowledge, is not in a position to speculate as to the answer. 

It should be sufficient to note briefly the wide divergence of thinking on this most sensitive and difficult question.

Almost 50 years later, we are back to arguing the same set of issues!

Don't you agree with the 1973 opinion that "One's philosophy, one's experiences, one's exposure to the raw edges of human existence, one's religious training, one's attitudes toward life and family and their values, and the moral standards one establishes and seeks to observe, are all likely to influence and to color one's thinking and conclusions"?