Alito, from Heather Cox Richardson’s October 5 substack:
“Alito went on to say that he does not anticipate that the court will overturn the 2015 Obergefell v. Hodges decision recognizing the right to same-sex marriage. That case is different from Roe v. Wade, he said, because people have come to rely on Obergefell as they organize their lives.
“One of the important factors we take into account in deciding whether we should reexamine a past decision is the degree to which there has been reliance on the decision,” Alito said. “Obviously a great deal had changed in the country as a result of Obergefell. There was a lot of reliance in various ways on the decision in Obergefell.”
In fact, all but one of the justices who overturned Roe—Thomas declined to answer—said in their confirmation hearings that they considered Roe settled law. Crawford pointed out that people thought Roe was settled law and had organized their lives around it, just as people had organized their lives around Obergefell.
“After Obergefell, people of the same sex got married and entered into contracts…it was much more concrete,” Alito told Crawford. “Whereas with Roe, the argument was made that it had an effect on people’s ideas, women’s ideas about the kind of society that they were going to live in, that this would have an effect on the society. It was much more abstract than what would’ve been involved had we been asked to overrule Obergefell.””
Yes, being forced to carry a pregnancy resulting from a rape is truly an abstraction. Forcing women to continue a pregnancy that increases their mortality risk compared to the alternative is an abstraction. And women don’t organize their lives around unplanned pregnancies. Right.
And from RFK Jr.:
He likes to pretend Americans were much healthier 60 years ago: “I was raised in a time where we did not have a chronic disease epidemic,” Kennedy testified during his confirmation hearing, suggesting that since his uncle’s presidency, the percentage of children with chronic illnesses had surged from 2% to 66%. But U.S. life expectancy has jumped from 69.7 years in 1960 to 79 years in 2024. Children are five times less likely to die in infancy or early childhood than when Kennedy was president, largely due to vaccines.