stolen document

“In the Supreme Court, those who know do not speak, and those who speak do not know,” Ruth Ginsburg, the oldest of nine justices of the US Supreme Court, who left office (and this world) at the respectable age of 87, used to say.

For a long time, the activities of America's main judiciary were surrounded by a thick veil of confidentiality.

The "Nine Elders," as Supreme Court justices were known during the Great Depression, jealously guarded their inner workings from prying eyes, especially from the eyes of the press.

True, in recent years this barrier has gradually begun to crack, but against the backdrop of leaks from the White House and Capitol Hill, the Supreme Court remained an almost impregnable bastion.

And suddenly - a sensation!

Outside the walls of this bastion, someone took out a document classified, if not “top secret”, then certainly “for official use” - a draft opinion of the majority of members of the US Armed Forces on the famous and to some extent fateful for America decision in the Rowe case. vs. Wade" 1973.

In 1969, a young woman named Norma McCorvey discovered she was pregnant.

Since at the age of 22 she was already the mother of two children, had a close acquaintance with alcohol and drugs, and, as her biographers elegantly put it, “began to feel like a lesbian,” the third child was seen by her as a heavy burden.

The problem was that in her home state of Texas, the law allowed termination of a pregnancy only in cases of rape or incest.

Norma stated that she was a victim of violence, but she could not prove this.

The situation seemed hopeless, but then two young lawyers from the University of Texas unexpectedly turned to Norma.

They have long nurtured the idea of ​​a high-profile trial against the state of Texas with its "cave morals" and the dictatorship of "male chauvinistic pigs."

And this required a plaintiff who suffered from the "patriarchy".

And McCorvey became Jane Roe - this is how Anglo-Saxon jurisprudence refers to women whose real name for some reason is not disclosed.

As for Wade, that was the name of the district attorney representing the state of Texas.

The process dragged on for a long time - McCorvey managed to give birth to a child and hand him over to an orphanage.

In 1973, the Supreme Court by a majority (seven to two) overturned a Texas law banning abortion.

The same decision said that during the first trimester of pregnancy, the right to abortion should not be limited in any way, during the second trimester, states can require medical grounds for abortion, and in the third trimester they have the right to prohibit abortions, if it is not related with a threat to the life of the mother.

Thus, the Roe v. Wade case gave women the right to terminate a pregnancy of their own free will for up to 28 weeks (in Russia, for example, abortions at will are done up to 12 weeks, and according to social indications - up to 22).

The decision in Roe v. Wade was a great victory for American feminists and women's rights activists, and later for minority rights activists.

Attitude to "Roe v. Wade" is a litmus test that allows you to accurately determine who is in front of you - a Democrat or a Republican, a liberal or a conservative.

True, the same Ruth Ginsburg, who was not more liberal in the Supreme Court, speaking in 2013 to students at the University of Chicago, criticized Row - but only because this decision, in her opinion, stopped the growth of the political wave across the country, reducing all women's concerns to the right to an abortion.

In turn, Republicans, who consider abortion to be legalized murder, have always sought to overturn both the 1973 ruling and the even more radical decision of the Supreme Court in the Planned Parenthood Fund v. Casey (1992) case.

Their chances of winning have been greatly improved during the Trump presidency, when several conservative justices Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Barrett have joined the Supreme Court.

In January 2020, 207 congressmen and senators sent a document to the Supreme Court calling for a review of the decision on abortion.

Perhaps it could have been done even then, but a pandemic broke out, then the BLM riots began, then Trump was robbed of his election victory ... In general, for some time the Supreme Court was not up to abortions.

And like a bolt from the blue: an internal document, to which only nine judges had access, somehow mysteriously fell into the hands of journalists.

98 pages, including a 31-page historical appendix, 118 references to previous court decisions, books, and other sources.

The influential website Politico, which has read the document, scares readers: the draft "constitutes a decisive and unwavering rejection of the 1973 ruling that guaranteed federal constitutional protection of the right to abortion and the subsequent 1992 ruling."

The author of the document is one of the most conservative judges, Samuel Alito.

“The decision in the Roe case was blatantly wrong from the start,” Alito says.

“We believe that the decisions in the Rowe and Casey case should be overturned ... It's time to listen to the Constitution and return the issue of abortion to the people's representatives.”

The project, of course, does not provide for a total ban on abortions - this is impossible in principle.

All he proposes is that the decision on the legality of termination of pregnancy is left to the jurisdiction of the authorities of a particular state.

But it is precisely this prospect that causes fear and hatred among liberals.

“In such a scenario, about half of the states in the country would probably ban abortion,” progressive journalists lament.

The Guttmacher Institute predicted that 26 states would "definitely or probably" ban abortion.

According to the Center for Reproductive Rights, abortion is "likely to be banned in 24 states and three territories."

This procedure will be banned "in most of the South, most of the Midwest (with the likely exceptions of Illinois and Minnesota), and most of the Great Plains."

In other words, in all the "red", that is, the Republican states.

However, the reversal of Roe v. Wade does not mean that even in the most conservative states, a “patriarchal dystopia” like the one shown in The Handmaid’s Tale will reign.

Most likely, they will pass the same laws as the Mississippi state law banning abortion ... after 15 weeks of pregnancy.

Terrible violation of women's rights, isn't it?

The reaction of the US democratic establishment was not long in coming.

“This will kill and enslave women, despite the fact that the vast majority of Americans believe that abortion should be legal.

What a terrible shame!"

Hillary Clinton wrote on her Twitter.

Fighting girlfriends from the notorious "Squad", representing the extreme left wing of the Democratic Party, saw in Alito's document an attack not only on women's rights, but also on the rights of LGBT people.

“As we warned, the U.S. Supreme Court is not just infringing on abortion, it is infringing on the privacy rights that Row is based on, including same-sex marriage and civil rights,” Alexandra Ocasia-Cortez is sounding the alarm.

“Canceling Row would endanger the lives of women across the country,” echoed Ilhan Omar.

“It would challenge... the opinion of the vast majority of society.

And they won't stop there.

Expand the Court!

We are talking about the old dream of the Democrats - to expand the composition of the Supreme Court to 15 people (of course, at the expense of liberal judges).

Now, out of nine judges, five are conservatives (Thomas, Alito, Gorsuch, Kavanaugh, Barrett), three are liberals (Breyer, Sotomayor, Kagan).

Chief Justice John Roberts, although considered a conservative, in fact more often takes a centrist position.

An article published in Politico claimed that five judges voted to overturn the Roe v. Wade decision, Roberts' opinion is unknown.

The Politico article was published on Monday evening, and almost immediately demonstrators, mostly women, began to gather around the Supreme Court.

Many cried.

“I am in shock,” one of them complained to reporters.

“We really believed that this (the right of women to have abortions. - 

) is untouchable.”

But soon the tears were replaced by rage and hatred.

At night, the crowd, swollen up to several thousand people, began to subtly resemble the "warriors of light" who galloped on the Kiev Maidan.

Only instead of "Moskalyaku on Gilyak!"

Washington protesters unanimously chanted "Fuck Alito!".

On Tuesday, more than a thousand people took to the streets of New York with signs "Abortion on demand and no apologies" and "My body - my choice."

They were joined by New York Attorney General Letitia James herself (of course, a Democrat), who told how she had an abortion when she was just starting to work on the city council.

Proponents of abortion protested especially fiercely in the citadel of liberalism - sunny California.

In San Francisco, they were supported not only by the CEO of Planned Parenthood California, Gilda Gonzalez, but also by State Attorney General Rob Bonta.

Everything went peacefully here, but in Los Angeles, demonstrators gathered in front of the federal courthouse clashed with the police, throwing bottles and stones at them, and also broke several shop windows.

It is possible that if the judges do vote to overturn the decision in Roe v. Wade, this will provoke a new wave of riots, similar to the BLM riots that rocked America in the summer of 2020.

It seems that it is the prospect of BLM 2.0 that those who organized this leak of information want to scare the conservatives of the Supreme Court.

That is why someone hastened to take the document out of the offices of the Supreme Court and hand it over to journalists.

The goal is clear - to raise a wave of indignation, rock the society and force the judges to retreat in front of an angry crowd.

Will the mysterious conspirators succeed?

So far, the judges seem more angry than scared.

Chief Justice John Roberts directed Marshal of the Supreme Court to begin an investigation into the source of the document's leak, stating, "This was an exceptional and egregious breach of trust that is an affront to the court and the community of public servants who work here."

In any case, from rising inflation, skyrocketing gas prices, the war in Ukraine, and the general helplessness of the Biden administration, this show will distract the American public for some time.

The point of view of the author may not coincide with the position of the editors.