In the 14 cases related to abortion from Roe in 1973 on, the court has repeatedly upheld a woman's right to choose. There have been several 5-4 splits on follow up cases over the years. Are you suggesting that in those cases there was at least one Justice that was intentionally siding with the liberals so that the challenge to Roe would fail just so that Republicans in other branches of government could win elections to get judges to overturn Roe? That doesn't make any sense. If they could get seats and judges by dangling the carrot of overturning, why couldn't they just overturn and then dangle the carrot of keeping enough judges so it doesn't swing back.

@JeffMurray That is what I am saying. The Repubs and their allies on the SC know that abortion is a powerful enough issue that making abortion illegal again, as it was before Roe., would kill the Repub party across the nation, esp. in fed elections. They know going that far would be too much in the eyes of female voters, and it would cause most women to become single issue voters on this. The Repub party would suffer the same way the Dems have in the South ever since the passage of the civil rights bills in the 60s, which permanently swung the South to the Repubs.

@TomMcGiverin So women, who care so much about their reproductive rights that they'd become single issue voters to regain their rights aren't concerned enough about that single issue to vote to protect them?? That also doesn't make sense to me.

@JeffMurray You got it. As long as abortion is still officially legal across the country, many women will still vote for Repubs based on other issues, but if abortion becomes completely illegal across the US, they will put that issue above all others and the Repubs will not be able to win federal elections. Dems would win big majorities in congress as well as prez elections and would then make Roe a matter of law with a constitutional amendment.

@TomMcGiverin It's a theory. I don't buy it, though.

Neither do 205 Republican members of Congress who aren't afraid of your theory as a result of overturning Roe...
"More Than 200 Republicans Urge Supreme Court to Weigh Overturning Roe v. Wade - The New York Times" [nytimes.com]

@JeffMurray It's one thing to throw out red meat to your base and pander to them, and it's another to do something so outrageous that it motivates the vast majority of women to vote against your party for generations as a reaction to your party's hostility to their gender. Overturning Roe would be that tipping point, as 1960s civil rights legislation was to Southern whites.

@TomMcGiverin Except that's not what's going to happen. They will chip away slowly until, while abortion may still be available in densly populated areas for a time, large swaths of the country that overwhelmingly vote Republican will lose the last abortion clinic in the state because of TRAP laws, or abortions will be denied on a case by case basis to individuals for various reasons, all while maintaining a political majority. The old "boiling frog" fable and all that...

@JeffMurray Possibly. Still, abortions, like they were before Roe, will always be available to women who are middle class or above. They could always afford to travel and pay for covert abortions. The Repubs have always only been able to restrict abortions for poor women.

@TomMcGiverin Absolutely, and those are the people that need protecting. Someone asked me and my buddy the other day why we were both vehemently anti-death penalty. "Even for someone like Jeffrey Dahmer?!" We had to explain to her, it's not about the Dahmers that we don't put to death, it's about the Brendan Dasseys that we do. It's about that 15 year-old girl in Alabama that got raped by her uncle who has no one on her side, no resources, no transportation, and currently or in the very near future, no clinic within hundreds of miles.