Abortion law in America's like a rude joke on US democracy

Turning it over to the people has resulted in deprivation of rights

- FRANCIS WILKINSON

It is time to heed the Constitution, and return the issue of abortion to the people’s elected representatives," Justice Samuel Alito wrote in his ruling last June overturning Roe vs Wade. Such democratic sentiment was a staple of the US abortion debate long before the American court’s Republican majority overthrew Roe with its ruling in Dobbs vs Jackson Women’s Health Organization. After all, who were these unelected judges making decisions for Americans? Contentious, complicated issues belonged in state legislatures, where elected representatives, close to people, subject to their influence and vote veto, would render a more judicious outcome.

In a concurring opinion in Dobbs, Justice Brett Kavanaugh declared that the court would no longer meddle in the debate. “Instead, those difficult moral and policy questions will be decided, as the Constitution dictates, by the people and their elected representatives through the constitutional processes of democratic self-government."

So, a bit more than a year later, how is “democratic self-government" going?