Abortion Becomes The New Dred Scott Decision!

By Donald A. Collins | 10 October 2022
Church and State

The U.S. Supreme Court has become a broken institution. (Credit: YouTube / screengrab)

As Mark Twain alleged “History doesn’t repeat itself, but it does rhyme”. Be sure to read the items added to my op ed!

Non-scientific aphorisms won’t save our fragile democracy now under its greatest stress since the Civil War, but George Santayana’s aphorism opined about the danger of not heeding the warnings of history or repeating its mistakes.

Read about its complexity and how following Santayana doesn’t ensure freedom from making new bad historical mistakes here.

“History shows that both those who do not learn history and those who do learn history are doomed to repeat it.”

Getting decisions right is hard but we must never succumb to the failure to follow the humane and scientific course to a better future, which is where rigid phantasmal religious beliefs can take us.

As the rich, powerful, greedy, arrogant and hypocritical Trump GOP insiders who failed to see or worse care about the possibility of terminal damage to our democracy, we can only hope this repetition of the Dred Scott decision can be legislatively upended, but it won’t unless we understand and stop this dire historical echo.

As Wikipedia tells us about the Dred Scott decision of the US Supreme Court in 1857 just before the Civil War,

was not meant to include American citizenship for people of black African descent, regardless of whether they were enslaved or free, and so the rights and privileges that the Constitution confers upon American citizens could not apply to them. The Supreme Court’s decision has been widely denounced, both for its overt racism and for its crucial role in the start of the American Civil War four years later. Legal scholar Bernard Schwartz said that it “stands first in any list of the worst Supreme Court.”

Professor Bernard, you might want to reorder your priority list here, as the slavery dismissed by Dred Scott prevails today in America.

Read the full Wikipedia piece here.

Perfect echo!

Roe helped overcome the vicious inanity of allowing ideology to rule over the personal liberties and safe medical care for half our population.

Roe/Casey was far from perfect, but it helped keep religious zealots from harming women.

Now since June 22nd when Roe was killed, turmoil has prevailed.

And not just for women but also for the rest of us in finding the entire country embroiled.

We are now under the crazy rule of the religious ideologies of 5 (I partly excuse Chief Justice Roberts) Supreme Court members.

Their failure to observe and sustain almost 50 years of Roe’s precedence and our Constitutional principle of keeping the separation of church and state has profoundly affected our democracy.

This Court’s prospective decisions bode evil indeed for contraception and gun safety among many new subjects threatened for ideological treatment in the present term. Sadly, over a prospectively long-term tenure most new Trump appointees are quite young and ideologically rigid.

Certainly, term limits for Justices based on age would in this case might serve only to exacerbate the present imbalance created by Majority Leader Mitch McConnell in rejecting Merrick Garland’s nomination in 2016 thus allowing the already proven (to most Americans) most dangerous President in our history, Donald J. Trump, to select candidates based solely on their religious addiction to right wing anti-abortion theology.

The only solution of course must come from legislation making abortion choice solely a private medical decision.

That makes this midterm election critical in making a crucial but unlikely fully adequate step toward restoring this basic human right which the majority of us support.

Since under half of us per a 2020 Gallup poll don’t belong to a church, synagogue, or mosque, how come religious zealots on our Supreme Court living in a democratic society get to imprison all of us in their fixation? Yes, the fixated GOP.

We can only hope with the ramming of the Dobbs decision into stopping women’s reproductive rights that this in fact repetition of the Dred Scott decision can be legislatively upended, but it won’t unless we understand and stop this dire historical echo.

Former US Navy officer, banker and venture capitalist, Donald A. Collins, a free lance writer living in Washington, DC, has spent over 50 years working for women’s reproductive health as a board member and/or officer of numerous family planning organizations including Planned Parenthood Federation of America, Guttmacher Institute, Family Health International and Ipas. Yale under graduate, NYU MBA. He is the author of “From the Dissident Left: A Collection of Essays 2004-2013”, “Trump Becoming Macbeth: Will our democracy survive?”, “We Humans Overwhelm Our Earth: 11 or 2 Billion by 2100?”, “What Can Be Done Now to Save Habitable Life on Planet Earth?”, “Vote”, “Can Homo Sapiens Survive?” and “Will Choice and Democracy Win?”.

The Messed Up Truth About The Dred Scott Case

Chief Justice Confused By Questioning SCOTUS’s Legitimacy After Roe Decision

How did the Supreme Court become so polarized? l ABC News

Why You Should Be Worried about the Supreme Court | System Error

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