So many haven’t the faintest idea, as reflected by the deceptive reporting about public opinion.

Just one example: Politico, which was complicit in leaking the first draft of Justice Samuel Alito’s opinion that would overturn Roe v. Wade, put this headline on its deceptive spin on public support for the case:

Poll: Half of voters support maintaining Roe v. Wade:Only 11 percent say abortion should be “illegal in all cases.”

That is a startling false equivalence, designed to show overwhelming support for Roe.

If the reporting were unbiased and consistent, the 11 percent who say abortion should be illegal in all cases must be compared with the 25 percent who want it to be legal in all cases.

Those are the outliers, but if you want to actually know what Americans believe about abortion, you’ll find that polls consistently reveal that they want something in between. But that’s not what’s in Roe and its companion high court case, Doe v. Bolton. In fact, Roe has been redefined by a later decision, Planned Parenthood of Southeastern Pennsylvania v. Casey

Yet, many of the people who are out of the street shouting their demands to politicize the Supreme Court and keep Roe probably haven’t even read Roe. They are out of step with the American public that, through the years, has consistently wanted some restrictions on abortion.

Gallup regularly polls about abortion. Some findings: A large plurality (48 percent) say it should be “legal only under certain circumstances.” Only 24 percent are “satisfied or somewhat satisfied” with “the nation’s policies regarding the abortion issue.” Equal numbers find abortion to be “morally” right or wrong.

Ask the shouters and sign toters if they support abortion in the second or third three months of pregnancy. I imagine that many will say, “Of course, anytime. Nobody can control my body.” That would put them way outside public opinion. Gallup says only 28 percent support of the former and 13 percent of the later.

Asking if you support Roe elicits meaningless answers, as meaningless as being asked if you’re pro-choice or pro-life. These are mere, pointless labels, yet the abortion industry and its media promoters want you to believe that they paint a complete picture of public opinion.

I wish partisans on both sides would actually read Roe and Doe in the original. Alito certainly did, and his first draft demolished Roe’s credibilty and the history it cited as it tried to make it seem like the “right to abortion” is grounded in American tradition.

Abortionists tried to make that argument in Roe, in a failed attempt to show that Roe is only reinforcing a practice that long had been considered to be “right.” You can hear the same  fallacious assertion in the liberal media and from the angry crowd on the street.

He laid out the detailed history and concluded: “The inescapable conclusion is that a right to abortion is not deeply rooted in the Nation’s history and traditions. On the contrary, an unbroken tradition of prohibiting abortion on pain of criminal punishment persisted from the earliest days of the common law until 1973. 

This is important, because it was one of the principle legs of the pro-abortion argument. It’s unlikely this reasoning could be deleted by other justices because it’s fact.

Alito also demolishes the bogus stare decisis argument that is so often cited by pro-abortionists. Citing detailed court history, he concludes that the rule that it can never overturn a bad decision is “not an inexorable command.” He wrote:

When one of our constitutional decisions goes astray, the country is usually stuck with the bad decision unless we correct our own mistake. An erroneous constitutional decision can be fixed by amending the Constitution, but our Constitution is notoriously hard to amend…..Therefore, in appropriate circumstances we must be willing to reconsider and if necessary overrule constitutional decisions. Some of our most important constitutional decisions have overruled prior precedents. 

He provided a long list of such cases, including Brown. v. Board of Education that ended “separate but equal” in schools, and West Coast Hotel Co. v. Parrish, that set aside a law setting minimum wages for women because it “violated the ‘liberty’ protected by the Fifth Amendment’s Due Process Clause.”

I’m still navigating the last half of the 98 pages, but I’ve read enough to know that this is a thoughtful and skillful argumentation that flies in the bald-faced lie that undoing Roe amounts to the politicalization of the court, the end of democracy, and cancelation of all the gains that women have made.

Never mind that the draft would not “ban abortions”; it would give the decision-making back to the people and out of the hands of black-robed, unelected elites who handed down the original Roe to start with. It is the essence of democracy, not its demise.

Not according to the hard-left Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) who unleashed a gawd-awful rant about how “extremist” judges were about to impose their “extremist” views on women. Good Lord, she was a tenured law professor; can’t she do better than that?

I guess she doesn’t have to when she and others believe they can win by talking stupid to people who don’t know any better.

And refuse to learn.

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