Kill Roe

Roe’s case is an important turning point in the movement to legalize abortion rights in the United States and the starting point of the abortion debate in the United States in the past 50 years.Analyzing the main contradictions and important cases in the abortion rights debate in the United States in the last 50 years will not only provide an overall grasp of this important process in American legal history,but also provide an understanding of the struggle between judicial power and legislative power,and the interaction between judicial power and social movements in the United States,represented by the U.S.Supreme Court.This article consists of three parts,in addition to an introduction and a conclusion.Part I discusses the debate between pro-life and pro-choice factions over the constitutionality of banning federal funding of abortion between 1973 and 1989.Antiabortionists attacked the right to abortion by banning federal funding of abortion procedures and prohibiting abortion counseling services,and by enacting a succession of abortion restriction programs represented by the Hyde Amendment.Pro-choice prolifers have sued on the grounds that such legislation is unconstitutional and contrary to the Roe decision.After Roe declared the right to abortion to be constitutionally protected,pro-lifers realized that they could not directly oppose abortion through the right itself,but could instead launch a flanking attack on the right to abortion through medical financing,the manner in which abortion procedures are performed,and the establishment of abortion clinics,in order to make the right to abortion unrealistic and unenforceable.The 1989 Webster case before the Supreme Court is typical,as it ultimately declared the Hyde Amendment constitutional and made funding abortion a political issue to be decided by the legislature.This opened up a false line of attack for the pro-life faction on abortion rights.Part II discusses the debate between pro-lifers and pro-choice advocates over the constitutionality of restricting abortion methods from 1989-2007.Following the Webster victory,pro-life victories in abortion restriction cases,including Casey,made the Roe "three-stage" standard for abortion untenable and eventually replaced it with Justice O’Connor’s "disproportionate burden" standard.The new standard is designed to examine whether government regulations have a significant impact on abortion.The new standard is designed to examine whether government regulations impose a substantial burden on pregnant women to access abortion services.The "disproportionate burden" standard also split the Roe decision into a "symbolic Roe" case,which signaled the constitutionality of the right to abortion,and a "safeguarded Roe" case,which was how to safeguard the right to abortion.The former marked the establishment of the constitutionality of the right to abortion,while the latter was about how to guarantee the implementation of the right.In the 2000 Supreme Court case Steinberg v.Carhart,the invocation of the "disproportionate burden" standard defeated the pro-life plan to limit the enforcement of the right to abortion by banning "partialbirth" abortions;however,in the 2007 case Gonzalez v.Carhart However,in the 2007 Gonzales v.Carhart case,the federal statute banning "partial-birth abortion" was declared constitutional because of the new ban’s more precise language and a change in Supreme Court personnel,and the Supreme Court clarified that fact-finding and final determination of ambiguous issues in medical science is left to the legislature.Part III discusses the debate between pro-life and pro-choice advocates over the constitutionality of increased regulation of abortion clinics between 2007 and 2016.During the term of Democratic President Barack Obama from 2007 to 2016,the prochoice community gained significant political and judicial support.2013 saw the enactment of Texas legislation aimed at increasing regulation of abortion clinics,and the debate over its constitutionality was appealed to the Supreme Court at every level.The pro-choice majority Supreme Court used a "benefit-burden balancing" test to declare the bill unconstitutional while incorporating the evaluation of the statute into the court’s discretion by weighing the burden imposed by the statute against the medical benefits received by the woman,using a strict scrutiny standard.The Court’s decision to declare the Acts unconstitutional was based on a balance between the burden imposed by the Acts and the medical benefits received by women.In both cases,the loopholes or weaknesses of the "undue burden" rule were closed,and the symbolic Roe case was strongly defended.This article argues that behind the right to abortion is a conflict between two values:the right to life and the right to choose.In the face of abortion,exploring which of these two rights is more worthy of protection is more a matter of conflict itself than of resolution.The U.S.Supreme Court has joined just such a conflict of values.Along the lines of balancing the two values,decisions on the right to abortion have been made for nearly 50 years.However,in terms of results,it is impossible to truly reconcile the two unresolvable conflicts by seeking a solution that balances the values.It can be said that the Supreme Court,despite its tendency in each case,has in principle returned the conflict of values to the people and the legislator in its original form,and the conflict has not been resolved,but rather has been accumulating energy.If we want to put this controversy to rest,then at least at the judicial level,we must kill "Roe" and the "guaranteed Roe case" that straddles between the two value judgments.