Linda Greenhouse was the New York Times’ liberally slanted Supreme Court reporter for 30 years until 2008, and now writes occasional opinion pieces on her lifelong obsession of abortion. She even participated in an abortion rally in 1989 while a journalist covering the Supreme Court, in defiance of journalistic standards of objectivity, which once was something media outlets pretended to care about.
Greenhouse authored a guest essay for Saturday’s Times, audaciously demanding remorse from the conservative justices who authored last summer’s Dobbs decision which overturned the fatally flawed Supreme Court ruling Roe v. Wade: “Is There Any Twinge of Regret Among the Anti-Abortion Justices?” She compared persecution of Jehovah’s Witnesses during World War II for not saluting the flag or reciting the Pledge of Allegiance after a controversial Supreme Court decision, to the Dobbs decision:
Because Jehovah’s Witnesses believe that saluting the flag or reciting the Pledge of Allegiance amounts to worshiping secular authority, they prohibit their school-age children from engaging in the practice. In 1940, with war raging in Europe and patriotic fervor rising at home, the Supreme Court ruled that the Constitution provided no religious exemption from what many public schools deemed an essential civic duty….A mere three years later, even though the United States itself was now at war, the court reversed itself.
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What brings this historical episode to mind is the approaching anniversary of Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, the decision last June 24 that eradicated the constitutional right to abortion. About 40 percent of states have bans that make abortion illegal or functionally unavailable, though in some of those states the proscriptions have been blocked pending the outcome of court challenges. The crisis in reproductive health care that Dobbs propelled is acute and growing. There have been, in other words, alarming consequences.
A report titled ”Care Post-Roe: Documenting cases of poor-quality care since the Dobbs decision,” published in mid-May by teams of experts from the University of California at San Francisco and the University of Texas at Austin, documents the experience of health care providers in states that have banned or strictly limited abortion for women whose troubled pregnancies required medical intervention that the doctors felt unable to provide.
Note: The report cited by Greenhouse was sponsored by the Texas Policy Evaluation Project, which has a clear liberal (giveaway: “Latinx”), pro-abortion slant. Its findings are described as “preliminary” and are taken from anonymous respondents.
Greenhouse has made kooky comparisons before, as in an April 2010 piece that conflated Arizona’s crackdown on illegals with Nazi Germany.
She continued with barely concealed rage against the justices who took down the ridiculous Roe decision:
And so the question: A year after sowing so much chaos and misery, are any of the five members in Justice Samuel Alito’s Dobbs majority sorry? Even a little? I’m not so naïve as to think there is even a slim chance they would reverse themselves. I just wonder whether they feel even a twinge of regret.
….Valuing fetal life over the lives of women and girls was no doubt a feature, not a bug, in the majority’s view; that was, after all, the point of Dobbs.
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So no, I don’t think the Dobbs justices are sorry. They did what they were put there to do, what they wanted to do, and they were quite explicit in washing their hands of the consequences.
Greenhouse closed with the angry suggestion that people “follow Justice Kavanaugh’s advice and take their sorrow, or their fury, or their despair to the polls.”
