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Roe v. Wade, 410 U.S. 113 (1973), was a landmark decision of the U.S. Supreme Court in which the Court ruled that the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution provides a fundamental "right to privacy" that protects a pregnant woman's liberty to choose whether or not to have an abortion. However, it ruled that this right is not absolute, and must be balanced against the government's interests in protecting women's health and protecting prenatal life. The Court resolved this balancing test by tying state regulation of abortion to the three trimesters of pregnancy: the Court ruled that during the first trimester, governments could not prohibit abortions at all; during the second trimester, governments could require reasonable health regulations; during the third trimester, abortions could be prohibited entirely so long as the laws contained exceptions for cases when abortion was necessary to save the life of the mother. Because the Court classified the right to choose to have an abortion as "fundamental", the decision required courts to evaluate challenged abortion laws under the "strict scrutiny" standard, the highest level of judicial review in the United States.
Which, in a nutshell, says that the recent abortion laws in Alabama and such are going to get struck down and it's VERY unlikely that cert will be granted should it make it to the Supreme Court.
To strike down Roe, the pro-life side will need to prove that there is no fundamental right to privacy derived from due process and the 14th Amendment.
This is the same 14th Amendment we gun owners want to be stronger and more widely applied, by the way, because that increases our chances to get the 2nd applied to the states in the way that suits us best.
If I lived in one of the states that just banned first trimester abortions, I'd be pissed that my elected officials just committed to wasting my tax money in a sure defeat in court.
If I was liberal, I'd start worrying, hard, about the timing of these laws. The states which recently passed these 1st trimester bans have had Republican majorities and governors for years... why now?
Because New York legalized FOURTH trimester abortion. (Note: there's no fourth trimester).
It's a reaction to New York and, I think, an attempt to get a ruling that if a fetus can be a human, then it is a human; in other words a national third trimester prohibition. These state laws might just be a tactic to force the issue.
PS: The pro-choice side of this has been couched in "if you don't have a uterus then you shouldn't be allowed an opinion" language in several places I've been reading about it.
Dear women:
For millennia your only value to society was to punch out children, preferably boys.
This was wrong, but it is also true.
Somewhere along the line, the fact that it was wrong was realized and men conceded to the concept that women had more value than as incubators and were, in fact, people.
Men voluntarily gave up the power they held over women. The vast majority of us are on your side here and are sick of being treated like the enemy.
Feminists are using language that in any other context would be called sexist and bigoted.
Stop it! If you treat me like an enemy long enough you will find I've become your enemy.