There are a couple of issues here. The SCOTUS is required to let law rule. Occasionally politics gets in the way because humans are involved. When you start trying to let ethics rule you have a serious problem. Whose ethics? The Pope’s? Some group of professors in the Ivy League? Putin?
There is a legitimate ethical argument that abortion is murder. There are also legitimate ethical arguments that it is not. SCOTUS needs to keep this a matter of law, because otherwise when you pick your ethics you pick your outcome and that choice is a personal one. That would mean the law could flip flop with every SCOTUS nominee accepted. We can’t have that.
The other issue is with Stare Decisis. While it is of vital importance, it is not absolute. If it were we’d still have legal segregation due to Plessy vs Ferguson. That ruling was in place longer than Roe has been.
I’m a sucker for this kind of speculation. Plessy was about the state requiring a private company to segregate. But, the reasoning for and against applies to government facilities as well. In particular, it would have led to outlawing segregated schools. The popular push-back would have been huge.
I want to believe that Americans would have just said “Yeah, now that I think about it, segregated schools are wrong too.” But, I don’t think that would have happened.
Late 80s before people worried about getting AIDS from heterosexual sex, but yeah by the 90s condom use in addition to birth control pills was probably a lot more common. And the combination of those two methods is extremely effective.
I also think birth control pills got better, and people discovered positive side effects and women started taking them for the side effects which then had the almost accidental impact of providing birth control during unplanned sexual encounters.
It’s the crack legal reasoning of nullification: if a state doesn’t like legislation or judicial rulings at federal level, it can declare those things unconstitutional with respect to both the U.S. Constitution and the state’s constituion, and ignore them.
This idea has been shot down numerous times by the Supreme Court. In SCOTUS 2022, who the hell knows.
But the chart shows that our abortion rate is still lower than Bulgaria, Seychelles, Mongolia, Hungary, China, Cuba, Latvia, Ukraine, Romania, Belarus, Estonia, Kazakhstan, Vietnam and Russia!
What a terrible heat map. Anyway, I think it’s hard to make a lot of sense out of given big variances in race, income, culture, and population density. Certainly it’s not great.
A pretty misleading graph, IMO. It give the impression that abortion rates are “higher” than birth rates, when the case is that the “lowest point(s)” of birth rates are well above the “highest point(s)” of abortion rates.
Not sure which of the graphs you’re looking at but I didn’t see anything stating that abortions exceeded live births? I agree live births exceed abortions.
I agree heat map is pretty bad but there are some other interesting graphs.
Looking at the variations by country made me think about why different countries ranked the way they did. All the factors you mention come into play in different ways for different countries. I would add public health measures to your list as there is a wide range between countries on pregnancy education and provision of contraceptives, etc.