A chara, – Maria Steen writes that both Roe v Wade in 1973, which found there was a right to privacy in the US constitution that included the right to an abortion, and Dobbs v Jackson Women’s Health, which overturned that decision last month, were the result of politicised courts (Opinion & Analysis, July 9th).
However, the composition of the court five decades apart suggests this was not the case with Roe.
Roe v Wade was decided by a majority of seven to two. The opinion was written by Harry Blackmun, who had been appointed to the court in 1970 by Richard Nixon and drew on his experience as counsel for the Mayo Clinic. Of the seven who signed the decision, five (Blackmun himself, chief justice Warren Burger, William Brennan, Potter Stewart, and Lewis Powell) had been appointed by Republican presidents, while two (William O Douglas and Thurgood Marshall) had been appointed by Democratic presidents.
Of the two dissenters, Byron White and William Rehnquist had been appointed by Democratic and Republican presidents respectively.
In the years since Roe, and particularly since Planned Parenthood v Casey (1992), in which recent Republican-appointed judges accepted the “central holding” of a right to an abortion, the Republican Party organised to ensure orthodoxy in its judicial appointments.
This was explicit in Donald Trump’s pledge before the 2016 election that he would appoint judges to overturn Roe v Wade. The five judges who overturned Roe had been appointed by Republican presidents, with three appointed by President Trump, in fulfilment of his pre-election pledge; the chief justice, who upheld the Mississippi abortion ban on narrower grounds, had been appointed by President George W Bush. The three writing in dissent had all been appointed by Democratic presidents.
The politicised nature of the US supreme court is not limited to abortion.
Whether it be guns, money in politics, access to voting, religion in schools, or environmental regulation, it has become all too easy to predict the outcome of their major cases based solely on the party which appointed six of the judges.
This is the politicisation of law and the constitution that US liberals are rightly concerned about. – Is mise,
WILLIAM QUILL,
Dublin 8.
Sir, – Maria Steen observes in her opinion piece, with apparent approval, that the US supreme court’s conservative majority, in Dobbs v Jackson Women’s Health Organization, “voted to return ... power to the representatives of the people” and “take abortion out of the constitution and return it to the legislators”.
Could this be the same Maria Steen who was a vigorous and consistent supporter of the Eighth Amendment of the Constitution of Ireland, the primary objective of which was to take the issue out of the hands of Irish legislators? – Yours, etc,
SEAN RYAN,
Galway.