I have read the abridged Dobbs judgment (which was succinct and straightforward) and then went to Roe briefly and the Fourteenth Amendment to double-check for myself the reasoning and logic.
The Roe precedent
In Dobbs, the Supreme Court held:
The Constitution does not confer a right to abortion; Roe and Casey are overruled; and the authority to regulate abortion is returned to the people and their elected representatives.
On examining the logic of Roe (which, from the perspective of English law, included an analysis discussing Sir Edward Coke, Sir William Blackstone, and the Abortion Act of 1967), it seems that the contemporary concept of "privacy" underpins the framework of abortion which, in turn, stems from the Fourteenth Amendment. It finds that:
No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law ...
The problem has been that to "deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law" does not readily transpose an explicit "right to privacy" within the Constitution – much less a right to abortion. In Isaiah Berlin's Two Concepts of Liberty, he distinguished between positive and negative liberty. Negative liberty is the freedom from coercion, interference, arbitrary authority. Positive liberty is freedom to do things, i.e., a right in a given society that resources shall be provided to enable a person to enjoy that liberty.
The US Constitution was designed and drafted to provide various restraints on the power of governments. Its construction was steeped in that of negative liberty. So, the 1st Amendment, as an example, provides that the government cannot restrict the freedom of one's religion, speech, and whose to whom one associates. The 5th Amendment provides that the government cannot compel a person to reveal their private thoughts. In Roe, the Supreme Court deduced that a right of privacy "emanates" from the aforementioned amendments and the case law. However, I think such a formulation is forced and incongruous with the construction of the Constitution.
Moreover, it is worth noting that Roe did not make abortions legal. It merely held that is was unconstitutional for abortions to be illegal. The finding that the "Constitution does not confer a right to abortion" seems quite plain.
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The Supreme Court as a law-making body
The Court held that the "authority to regulate abortion is returned to the people and their elected representatives". To my mind, this transfers the thorny subject from the legal realm into a political issue for the legislature to grapple with.
In any democracy, judge-made law suffers from an inherent problem of legitimacy and is apt to engender blow-back. In common law systems, the courts are not law-making bodies. They do not exists to create law. Instead, they interpret, weigh, and apply law created by the legislature.
If the US Supreme Court creates a new law establishing a new legal standard; then any law passed by a state conflicting with it are apt to be struck down. Constitutional amendments can override US Supreme Court decisions – but it requires two-thirds majority of Congress. Because the US Supreme Court was not envisaged as a law-making body, there exists no feasible means to change law the Supreme Court had made.
In Lord Sumption's book Trials of the State, his Lordship articulated the effects of judge-made law on controversial political issues and specially referred to abortion debate in the United States and the Roe case;
The chief function of any political system is to accommodate differences of interest and opinion among citizens. Resolving these differences by judicial decision contributes nothing to that end. On the contrary, characterising something as a constitutional right removes the issue from the arena of political debate and transfers it to judges. In the United States, it does this irreversibly, unless the Supreme Court changes its mind, or the constitution is amended. The debate about abortion conveniently illustrates many of these themes. I am in favour of a regulated right of abortion. But I question whether it can properly be treated as a fundamental right, displacing legislative or political intervention. Abortion was once just as controversial in Britain as it is still in the United States […] I suspect, although I cannot prove it, that one reason why abortion remains so controversial in the United States is that it was introduced judicially: i.e., by a method that relegated the wider political debate among Americans to irrelevance. This has distorted American politics by turning Presidential elections into a contest for the power to appoint politically dependable justices to the Supreme Court.
In Roe, the rationale of Justice Blackmun (writing for the majority) was to devise a whole cloth scheme around the trimester system (pregnancy divided into three categories). According to a trimester period, the law may be legal, illegal or up to the state. But, that is fundamentally arbitrary. There is no more good reason for dividing a pregnancy into three categories than four or five (let's say). Because Justice Blackmun's rationalisation took the form a Supreme Court judgment; it meant that, for all practical purposes, everybody was stuck with it. People who may have felt that abortions should be more freely available were hampered by Roe which ossified the debate. It is interesting that Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg also appeared to have also thought that Roe was wrongly decided.
Striking down Roe perhaps may turn out to be the best thing for the abortion debate in America. Now states have to implement policies based on the broad views of the polity. One of the most striking aspects of abortion subject is how the radicals on both ends of the political spectrum have hijacked and dominated the debate for so long.
In truth, as with own position in England, most people are quite reasonable and are prepared to compromise somewhere in the middle. Abortion, for all of its ethical dilemmas, is not going anywhere. I fully expect, over time, the subject on the political landscape to improve and calm itself. In the meantime, America now has to navigate through the political landscape that once animated quondam eras of British life on the abortion debate.
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Update (3rd July 2022):
Boudreaux (see below, from The Sunday Telegraph) commenting:
The ultimate question before the court in both Roe and Dobbs was not the normative one of whether or not American women should have legal access to abortion. Instead, the question was one of fact, namely: does the US Constitution protect the right to abortion? Roe found that it does; Dobbs found that it doesn’t.
Lord Sumption's piece (Politics undermines legitimacy of the US Supreme Court) had some interesting points:
There is no legal principle capable of resolving this debate. The circumstances in which the question arises are too varied to admit of a single answer. The views of individuals will depend on their moral values and on the intensity of their emotional commitment. A judge faced with such a question is no better off. They have no juridical tools at hand with which to resolve the conflict. They have only their personal moral and emotional preferences. Behind the structured legal arguments in last week’s judgments, it is not difficult to discern that the real difference between the justices and their predecessors in 1973 was that they had different preferences. The majority were conservative Republican Catholics, whereas their predecessors were liberals. Nothing else has changed. It is difficult to regard a decision as law that is so sensitive to the feelings of nine individuals. That applies as much to the original Roe v Wade ruling as to the decision to overrule it. Both are politics in solemn tones and black robes. The vice of judicial legislation in a democracy is that it makes law in a way that renders the opinions of the electorate irrelevant. When the courts profess to be interpreting the constitution, the result is also immune from political change, barring a constitutional amendment or a judicial change of heart. (Emphasis mine)
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