The truth about Roe vs Wade

As we get back into Roe vs Wade, prompted by the leak of what is said to be the US Supreme Court’s draft decision to throw out that famous judgment, prepare for an avalanche of misinformation. On BBC Radio 4 on Tuesday, the news said that the court’s 1973 decision had ‘legalised abortion’. Not so. Abortion had long been legal in many states of the Union. But until the judgment, different states had been free to adopt different policies. Roe vs Wade decided that within the 14th Amendment to the Constitution and its implied right to privacy lay a constitutional right to abortion and that the amendment’s ‘due process’ clause prevented any state from abridging that right. Critics at the time argued that this discovery of abortion rights (which, like privacy itself, are not mentioned in the amendment) was, to put it mildly, a stretch. Obviously much of the heat in the argument, then and now, depends on what you think about abortion. But the actual issue for the court is about what the Constitution means and, as so often in the United States, about states’ rights. You could therefore, in principle, be in favour of abortion, but against the Roe vs Wade judgment, or indeed – though that would be harder – the other way round. The one thing certain is that overturning Roe vs Wade, though undoubtedly a momentous decision, would not banish abortion from America.

Having been on holiday in Naples at the time, I missed the excitements about Angela Rayner’s legs in parliament, the Mail on Sunday, Mr Speaker, Neil Parish’s erratic search for tractors online etc and cannot be confident about who has said what. So forgive me if I am going over old ground, but the bit about Ms Rayner’s legs seems questionable. If you sit where the Prime Minister sits on the front bench, you are separated from the legs of Ms Rayner, and, indeed, those of Sir Keir Starmer and the entire opposition front bench, by the solid table on which the despatch box rests.