As American as freeways:
Jr, David R Carlin
AS AMERICAN AS FREEWAYS equal," thereby upholding the South's newly enacted Jim Crow laws by finding them to be not inconsistent with the Fourteenth Amendment's equal protection clause. Nearly...
...But pushing in the same direction as the Court were other forces which, in the long run, were likely to prove far more potent than white bigotry...
...Plessy enunciated the notorious doctrine of "separate but v. Board of Education, it destroyed the separate but equal rule by finding racially segregated schools to be "inherently unequal...
...The NPT matrix provides a rare setting to relate these two moral questions in a single framework...
...Granted, such a reversal will entail considerable disruption...
...Or it will require them to play out the ethical quality of declining reliance on deterrence and other possible replacements for it...
...Each of these three shifts embodies ethical as well as empirical questions...
...but these are not likely to lead in practice to the dismantling of our freeway systems...
...Pro-hibit abortion and you throw a monkey wrench into the whole system...
...if it reverses Roe, it will be out of step...
...But the analogy of Roe with Plessy fails at one important point...
...Of course not...
...The critics are correct, I believe, when they say Roe v. Wade was a constitutionally poor decision...
...neither was the dismantling of Jim Crow easy...
...The charge refers to the perceived advantages that derive from being a "nuclear state," and the function of the NPT in legitimating a world of nuclear and non-nuclear states...
...Desegregation made sense economically in the South...
...Nearly sixty years later, in 1954, the Court reversed itself on Plessy...
...for the United States was being hindered in its post-World War II attempt to provide leadership to a largely nonwhite world by the presence of racial segregation in its own back yard...
...1914...
...None of this, admit the critics, will be easy...
...The discussions will push beyond the security agenda to the interdependence issues of political economy...
...The issues of the will both reflect those of the past twenty years and raise all of them to new levels of complexity and possibility for resolution...
...and in those states in which tion is either prohibited or greatly restricted, individuals who had counted on abortion as a kind of sexual safety net will be compelled to alter their behavior so as to reduce the chances of undesired pregnancies...
...If the Court reversed itself on one colossal blunder, Plessy, there is no reason, say the critics, it should not reverse itself on Roe, another colossal blunder...
...Persons who normally pride themselves on their rationality abandon rational argument at this point and pretend that the most important question of all is too trivial to debate...
...1939...
...and inRoe the Court so absolutized that shadowy (or rather, not quite so substantial as to be shadowy) right as to authorize the killing of a fetus without first determining whether the subject in question might not be a human being...
...In Brown ABORTION'S ROOTS IN OUR CULTURE Drolife critics of Roe v. Wade often compare that U.S...
...Cultural values that support a right to abortion, indeed that virtually require such a right, so far from being in decline, are growing in strength...
...When the Court reversed Plessy in 1954, it was in step with the long-term drift of public opinion...
...Just the opposite...
...We want to be free to do as we please, and what we please to do is to spend a lot of money on houses, cars, clothing, furniture, vacations, etc...
...Neither are the many excellent and unrefuted arguments against abortion likely to lead to the dismantling of our abortion system...
...The right to abortion, in other words, is a corollary to our cultural system...
...for the region was bound to remain in a state of permanent backwardness so long as its black population was kept in a condition of ignorance and poverty and so long as its white political leadership was mindless enough or dishonest enough to relish the rhetoric of white supremacy...
...If abortion is not allowed, then the set of value premises from which abortion is derived as a practical conclusion-individualism, consumerism, gender equality, late marriage-has to be called into question...
...The Court had previously discovered an unwritten right of privacy to be present in the Bill of Rights' "penumbra" (whatever that is...
...and we prefer late marriage in order that young people might complete their educations and begin careers before settling down...
...The new forum of superpower politics is really the key exchange affecting the ethics of world order...
...And if the prolife critics have the better arguments legally, they have by far the better arguments philosophically...
...Considered as an abstract proposition, some interesting arguments against freeways can be developed...
...Yet widespread sexual freedom, even in a contraceptive age, will inevitably lead to a considerable number of undesired pregnancies-that is, to a considerable number of situations in which women, the great majority of them young women, will want to have abortions...
...But is our society prepared seriously to call these values into question...
...Now, any society of this sort will inevitably place great value on sexual freedom, which is a compendious symbol and instrument of these values...
...The conventional-nuclear relationship will force those who have analyzed the frailties and dubious benefits of deterrence to become explicit about their views on a return to conventional deterrence (with its dubious European history: 1870...
...A real and radical breakthrough on superpower relations could affect not only bilateral arms control issues, but the European question remaining since Yalta, and the multiplicity of regional conflicts that the superpowers can either intensify by their involvement or aid by their diplomacy...
...When the Court reversed itself on the separate but equal doctrine, it ran into resistance, to be sure, from a formidable force-the most racially bigoted elements of the Southern white population...
...But the specific critique points to a deeper and broader dissatisfaction of many of the non-nuclear states with the daily dynamics of the international system...
...But as far as I can see, there is no historical tide sweeping the prolife party along to eventual victory...
...Supreme Court decision with the Plessy v. Ferguson decision made by the Court in 1896...
...But what's right is right, no matter the social or personal inconvenience...
...Justice must be done, even though America's current "dating" customs perish...
...Our society places great value on both individualism and on high levels of consumption...
...The right to abortion may be bad constitutional law and even worse moral philosophy, but by now, I fear, it is as American as our urban freeways...
...treaty will raise a series of critical questions not only about nuclear weapons, but about the nature of the international system...
...We also subscribe (formally at least, if not always in practice) to the doctrine of equality of the sexes...
...In return for a recommitment to non-proliferation, many of these states will want to raise questions and demands about other aspects of world politics...
...This initiated, or rather accelerated, a process of enormous social and cultural change in race relations, a process not totally completed to this day, more than a third of a century later...
...Desegregation made sense politically...
...The battle over abortion laws will have to be fought in all fifty states...
...for American liberalism, having accomplished its New Deal agenda and then having survived McCarthyism, was free for the first time to turn its full energy and attention to the race problem...
...George Wallace, Orville Faubus, and company might try to resist, but the tide of history was likely to prove too strong for them...
...And desegregation made sense geopolitically...
...It is downright embarrassing, not to mention frustrating, to listen to otherwise intelligent prochoice advocates squirming and tap-dancing to avoid getting pinned down to a discussion on the cardinal question of whether the fetus is a person or not...
...The systemic dimensions of arms control raised by the NPT will offer the opportunity to examine how the East-West security issues of peace are to be linked to the North-South interdependence issues of justice...
...Many of the signers of the original treaty-especially those from developing countries-have come to view it as inherently "discriminatory...
Vol. 116 • July 1989 • No. 13
