Of belittling mockery

I would like to address the “End of the Roe” editorial of last Wednesday. Firstly, the flippant tone with which you treat such a momentous issue is petty. It is plainly wrong to belittle women who will be subject to baldly ideological and largely incompetent state legislatures who will now be able to codify their fate regarding their pregnancies. Fair enough that states shall be “laboratories of democracy,” but that sentiment does little good for women who will find themselves the victims of experimentation.

Which brings to bear a second point: This decision has profound potential to roll back the tide on many individual liberties outside abortion.

Roe was decided based on a legal interpretation of a right to privacy — which you conveniently failed to address in your mockery of liberal outrage — and reinterpreting judicial review to only protect individuals from the states’ encroachment upon the rights enumerated in the Constitution or otherwise deeply rooted in conservative interpretation of the nation’s history and tradition could evoke and threaten the rulings in, for example, Griswold v. Connecticut, Lawrence v. Texas, and Obergefell v. Hodges, and thereby threaten the individual liberties that are enjoyed by the LGBTQ community. These are liberties, as with a woman’s right to decide whether to terminate her pregnancy, that are intrinsic to an individual’s ability to attain meaningful selfhood, a capacity that is unjust to leave to partisan culture warriors.

And finally, outside the legal precedent, this decision is the political reality that individual liberty is now circumscribable by politicians. That is, conservatives now have a clear means to tell their fellow Americans that “your liberties and right to decide your own life only extend as far as I do not find it morally objectionable,” which is a rather un-American limit on freedom.

MATTHEW MAASS Hampton