All other things being equal, from a strategic standpoint, I also prefer for governments to be smaller, and I also support secessionist movements. If anti-abortion state governments were proposing to secede from the U.S. over Roe v. Wade, then I would support them against the Feds in their efforts to go in peace. (Of course, I would also immediately turn around and support the efforts of cities, neighborhoods, or individual women to secede from those states’ asinine forced pregnancy laws.)
But I don’t think that a realistic view of the political situation supports the claim that there is any real issue here between centralism and decentralism. Nobody’s proposing to secede or even to interpose or nullify here. An adverse decision in Roe wouldn’t have made any qualitative change to the relationship between the Feds and the states, or created any constitutional restraints that would tend to counterbalance federal power. It would have merely left the centralized status quo exactly as it was, with the sole difference that on one particular issue (abortion) the state governments would continue to reserve a power that they have absolutely no right to exercise.
To take a parallel case, the Thirteenth Amendment federalized the question of slavery and prohibited slavery in every state. Would you favor repealing it on federalist grounds? If you would, I think you’re nuts–and this even though I also believe that Southern slaveholders should have been left alone to secede from the Union in peace. If you wouldn’t, then what is the salient difference, if any, between the Thirteenth Amendment and Roe?
]]>The fact that both sides are ultimately evil does not mean we can’t favour one over the other.
]]>Could you explain what concrete new powers the ruling in Roe v. Wade claimed to give to the federal government, which it did not already claim and exercise prior to the ruling? And I mean something new that the federal government could do that it could not do before Roe.
Note that nullifying state abortion laws
is not a description of a new federal power. It’s a description of a new restriction on state government power. But I cannot think of any new law that Roe enabled the Feds to pass, or any new agency that it enabled the Feds to establish, or any new action that it enabled the existing Federal agencies to take.
Help me out here. I’m drawing a blank.
Abortion should be a matter of personal choice, not fiat laws.
I agree. You’re aware that state abortion laws count as fiat laws
too, right?
I don’t think we should support ever-expanding federal powers. Abortion should be a matter of personal choice, not fiat laws. Making abortion legal in all states is just as illegitimate as making marijuana illegal in all states.
I think this is perfectly absurd. Illegitimate
as compared to what? What would be an example of a legitimate
action by the federal government?
If the answer is Nothing–the federal government’s very existence is illegitimate, and so is everything the federal government does,
then I’d agree with you, for some meanings of the term illegitimate.
But the same reasoning would apply, for precisely the same reason, to each of the several state governments as well as to the federal government, and so by the same reasoning any change to abortion laws whatsoever, whether at the state or the federal level, is illegitimate.
As is the existence of the abortion laws themselves. But then what would follow from this is that if anarchists attempt to change government policies through lobbying or litigation, there is no reason in principle for them to favor state-level approaches over federal-level approaches, since neither entity has any legitimate authority of any kind. At the most this is a strategic question: when playing the federal mafia off the state mafia, which one is less likely to result in further injustice in this given case? And I think that there is no empirical evidence whatsoever that the answer to that strategic question will always favor state-level approaches over federal-level approaches. Of course there’s an if there: if anarchists attempt to change government policies through lobbying or litigation.
If your claim is that anarchists should never try to change government policies through lobbying or litigation, whether at the state level or at the federal level, then that’s a separate claim, which has little to do with Roe in particular. I’m inclined to think that relying much on lobbying or litigation is strategically foolish — which is why the bulk of this post is devoted not to my (rather qualified) celebration of Roe, but rather to celebrating a group of ordinary women who performed illegal abortions in defiance of Illinois state abortion laws, prior to Roe, without the approval of male law-makers or male judges, precisely because they believed that abortion is a woman’s right and any so-called law that says otherwise can and ought to be trampled underfoot as a usurpation. But if you intend to go beyond the strategic claim to a moral claim about the injustice, illegitimacy, or whatever of using lobbying or litigation as a means of restraining the State, then that’s a rather bold claim that you’ll need to give an independent defense for.
If, on the other hand, your answer is something, rather than nothing — that is, if you mean to use the word legitimate
in a sense where there are some legitimate actions the federal government could take, although existence the entity itself is illegitimate — then I have to wonder what criteria you would use to identify those few federal actions which would be legitimate, and why nullifying state abortion laws doesn’t count under those criteria.