Roe's overturn is tech's privacy apocalypse

"The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people."

So what rights are those? That's up to the courts and lawmakers to decide. And they have. Folks disagree with the choices they made and the justifications they gave.

For example, I disagree that a right which has been in place for 50 years, with millions of women exercising that right yearly, is somehow not part of the US' social and moral fabric. But since the founders didn't do it (debatable, there were laws allowing abortions on the books at the founding of the US), it's OK to take that right away.

> the parties actually turned into into a challenge about Roe v. Wade itself

The SCOTUS did that. As noted in Roberts' concurring opinion (which was still one of the 4 votes against), this specific case could have been solved without tearing down the RvW ruling.

"... the State never argued that we should grant review for that purpose [overturning RvW]."

"The Court’s decision to overrule Roe and Casey is a serious jolt to the legal system—regardless of how you view those cases. A narrower decision rejecting the misguided viability line would be markedly less unsettling, and nothing more is needed to decide this case."

The people who have worked for decades to overturn Roe believe in their hearts that abortion is murder. They aren’t going to be okay with “murder” being legal in other states, or “murder” tourism. The end result of all of this is a federal ban on abortion.

In practical terms, we're already seeing problems with state governments getting into beefs with one another. Some states which have outlawed abortion are attempting to make it a crime to go to another state to obtain one. California is running ads in Florida telling residents to move to California to preserve their rights, but California has a housing crisis so severe that people literally cannot afford to move to California.

Like imagine the issues that would come up if Poland was attempting to restrict freedom of movement of women traveling to Germany for an abortion, while Germany is running TV/radio ads in Poland encouraging people and businesses to move to Germany.

All these interstate arguments are supposed to be the domain of the federal government, but states which have outlawed abortion believe the supreme court will side with them and keep the federal government off their backs. Nobody is foolish enough to believe this decision is solely about the constitutionality of abortion bans. Conservative states recognize that the supreme court will now side with them no matter what.

But philosophically, the problem is that abortion (and privacy) is a fundamental human right, and these rights are being denied to Americans. The US is not the EU. We're not Ohioans and Texans and Californians like EU citizens are French, and Germans, and Poles. We are all Americans. We fought a war and then passed the 14th amendment partially on this basis. Individual rights for American should be available to all Americans, no matter what state they reside in.

> What's holding people back from voting, or moving to another state which more closely matches their politician views?

> Similar to the EU it is low friction to move state, right? When plenty of people apparently oppose abortion, why not let them..

It's not that simple for a number of reasons. The simplest is that minors aren't allowed to move on their own, barring certain exceptions, but they can get pregnant. Even after people reach the age of majority (18 in the US), because of the way our economy and health insurance systems evolved, people can be dependent on their parents for shelter and healthcare well into their mid-20s.

But the bigger problem is that the US is a very large but sparsely-populated country. in the most extreme example, Wyoming is a state the size of the UK, but has a population of less than 600,000. The states that outlaw abortion tend to be more sparsely populated, but still cover roughly half of the population, simply because there are so many of them. West coast states are also fairly sparsely populated, but partially because so much of the land is owned from the federal government, and the population centers are crowded near the coast.

If say, 20% of the total US population wanted to move from states that have outlawed abortion to states that haven't, that's a huge migration, and there isn't enough housing available. The US has been building less housing than we need for natural population growth since the 2008 crash.

And, to be fair, a small amount of that population growth in liberal states has been from people fleeing conservative states. But even in the most liberal states, so much of our economy is based around stable/rising real estate prices, which prevents building new housing at the rate that we need it. We're totally unprepared for citizens fleeing states where abortion is illegal.

EDIT: In case it wasn't obvious from the above, many people residing in states where abortion is now illegal cannot afford to move. It would be like asking the average citizen in rural Poland to move to Zurich.

Their logic is dodgy, but that doesn't matter, sadly. The ball is in Congress' court now.

I'd argue whether or not this is sophistry depends on how you view rights. If you only have rights when the government grants you rights, then yes, this is sophistry.

Taking this to the extreme, however, one could main the claim that people are not allowed to do do innocuous actions like jumping jacks unless the government legislates that it's allowed.

However, if you instead take the more reasonable position that individuals have all rights except those curtailed by the government for the sake of maintaining a stable social contract, then it's not sophistry.

In Roe, the court ruled that the right to an abortion, within certain limitations, is not one of the rights that governments can curtail.