Few court cases have been as controversial in the United States as 1973’s Roe v. Wade decision. It has become one of the major touchstones in American politics ever since. As controversial as it is, the fact that a shift in power on the Supreme Court has overturned Row v. Wade has led to a great deal of political and legal turmoil. A lot of the frustration concerns how a modern court can just overturn a previous court’s decision simply because of a shift in ideology. However, historically speaking, this is not new. There have been reversals in the Supreme Court before that were just as controversial and saw as much an attack against the high court as the recent Roe reversal.First, the law. The decision did not make abortions illegal. It simply put the decision for legality back to the states where it had been before 1973. Elected legislators will now make the decisions, not the courts. The U. S. Supreme Court, in a 5-4 decision, claimed the original Roe v. Wade was not made on Constitutional grounds, as the Constitution does not mention abortion. Nor does any federal law or common law. The idea is that a federal law allowing abortion should be made by Congress, not the courts. Until then, the Supreme Court said it should be a state issue. According to the Tenth Amendment, “The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.”As I said, this is not the first time the Supreme Court overturned a decision from a previous court and one that brought about a similar emotional response. The case was the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education that overturned the 1896 Plessy v. Ferguson case that allowed for segregation. In that infamous 1896 case, the court ruled that segregation was legal if separate and equal accommodations were made. In other words, you could deny Black children admittance to White schools if an equal Black school was provided.There are some similarities between the Brown decision and the current one. In both cases, a Republican president made a new judicial appointment after an extended time of Democratic leadership. With the Roe case, Trump’s appointment of Amy Barrett tipped the balance of the Supreme Court from left to right. The Brown decision was a bit different as ...
