This could go pretty much anywhere, right? Well, it couldn't go to TOD because to rebuild trust you had to have had some in the first place, and that doesn't apply. But it does apply with the Fourth Estate, and no, this is not about the reluctance of major outlets to endorse the political candidate they clearly and consistently support. Nope, this is about how it came to be that this could be an issue at all. They have abandoned objectivity, even knowledge, to make themselves the handmaiden of a political agenda, a political party. It is the words, the adjectives and adverbs, that skew any story favorable to one view, but it is also a casual dismissal of fact.
This occurred recently in a letter to the editor of the AJC. Since the newspaper is a traditional news outlet, with journalists, and journalistic ethics and practices, they cannot cloak themselves in Section 230 like platforms that merely allow others a distribution channel get away with. After all, the newspaper is worthy of our trust, right? This trust extends to their selection and presentation of outside editorial content. They own their decision and it's their headline in boldface. An outside author does not absolve them of their responsibility. To their profession. To their readers. To the truth. A bad choice is more than a breach of trust, it is blatant propaganda. We cannot stop the lies, they will not rebuild trust.
And so they publish a letter: "Roe v. Wade got it right: Put trust in women" which riffs on the factually incorrect assertion that Roe was about a woman's choice to choose elective abortion. It wasn't. Didn't know that, did you? The summary section of the majority opinion clearly states:
For the stage prior to approximately the end of the first trimester, the abortion decision and its effectuation must be left to the medical judgment of the pregnant woman's attending physician.
As Ginsburg noted, Roe does not confer any rights to women, instead it protects the rights of physicians to practice medicine. In Roe, the woman is never mentioned in the absence of the doctor, the doctor however, well, read it for yourself.
When you're thinking about women's choice, you are probably thinking about Casey, the court's attempt to fix Roe. After belaboring the importance, the sanctity of stare decisis, the majority hacked away at Roe, leaving what they contend to be Roe's central tenet: elective abortion. It was an attempt to throw out the bathwater while saving the baby, to douse it with holy water and re-name it a "woman's choice." The text of Roe did not change and the intense hypocrisy of the court's simultaneous adoration of, and disregard for, stare decisis was pure foreshadowing.
As Ginsburg also noted, Roe was a clear case of judicial over-reach on a collision course with the constitution. In abandoning judicial restraint, the court wrote new law, a job best left to elected legislatures. The modifications in Casey (e.g., first trimester changed to viability) served to prove that the judiciary should not be creating law, especially not the Supreme Court as the only remedies to their mistakes are constitutional amendment or the Court itself. The latter is what happened in Dobbs.
Once the initial shock subsides, for many it hasn't and for some it never will, most will realize that Ginsburg was also correct in saying that in Roe the Court should have sent the matter back to the states where our duly elected representatives craft laws to serving the electorate. This is what passes for democracy in the U.S. The impatient see this as untenable, slow and likely to fail (by their definition of failure). But it has worked before. Prior to the '60s & '70s and the women's movement, no-fault divorce didn't exist and most often proof of adultery was required to secure that parting of ways. Hobbled by lack of financial independence, women were at a severe disadvantage. Today every state in the union has no-fault divorce laws on the books. No federal law, no Supreme Court decision required. We would already be there with abortion had Roe not been mishandled. We'd have ratified the Equal Rights Amendment as well.
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