<$BlogRSDUrl$>

Wednesday, June 17, 2015

WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court on Monday refused to hear an appeal from North Carolina officials seeking to revive a state law that had required doctors to perform ultrasounds, display the resulting sonograms and describe the fetuses to women seeking abortions.
The Supreme Court’s one-sentence order, as is the custom, gave no reasons. Justice Antonin Scalia noted a dissent, also without saying why.
The order left in place an appeals court ruling that had held the law unconstitutional as a violation of the First Amendment.
“The state cannot commandeer the doctor-patient relationship to compel a physician to express its preference to the patient,” Judge J. Harvie Wilkinson III wrote in December for a unanimous three-judge panel of the United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit, in Richmond, Va. “This compelled speech, even though it is a regulation of the medical profession, is ideological in intent and in kind.”
Other federal appeals courts upheld similar laws from Texas and South Dakota. Such disagreements among appeals courts often lead to Supreme Court review.

What does abortion have to with election law? In both situations, the right to privacy is involved, and states are trying to compel speech in ways the court has said is unconstitutional. The right to privacy which underlies Roe v Wade has a history  in a trio of civil rights cases, NAACP v Alabama, Bates v Little Rock, and Talley v California.

Recently these cases have been undermined by Citizens United and Doe v Reed, and the "reform" faction has celebrated this undermining. What the reform faction hasn't done is admit that by attacking the right to privacy in election cases, they are attacking the foundation of the abortion cases, in ways that Justice Scalia, for example, is likely to take note of when abortion issues return to the court.

The Constitution does not explicitly mention any right of privacy. In a line of decisions, however, going back perhaps as far as Union Pacific R. Co. v. Botsford, 141 U.S. 250, 251 (1891), the Court has recognized that a right of personal privacy, or a guarantee of certain areas or zones of privacy, does exist under the Constitution. - Roe v Wade.



Comments: Post a Comment

This page is powered by Blogger. Isn't yours?