LETTER: ‘Editorial was ultracrepidarian’

Something absent from your self-congratulatory editorial is contemplation of what makes a decent, moral society ("Reproductive rights in SA streets ahead of other countries”, July 1). What I found most galling was your ingestion of the typical and egregiously wrong narrative from the Left in America about abortion rights there.

It was similar a few years ago with the propaganda of the Black Lives Matter campaign. How many of the journalists who virtue-signalled then, read the manifesto of this reprehensible organisation? How many journalists were aware that black-on-black violence and killings in America escaped its concern? It was only certain black lives that mattered.

It was evident that the person who wrote your editorial knows nothing of the governmental structure in the US, or the division of powers between legislature, executive and judiciary, or of jurisprudence. The editorial refers — without mention of the name of the case — to Dobbs v Jackson Women’s Health Organization overturning the historic Roe v Wade judgment.

In America the law is made by representatives in Congress (the legislator) and not by activist judges, despite what the Left wants. Is this person aware that jurists on both the Left and the Right criticised Roe v Wade as being a poor judgment and wrong in law?

Your editorial states: “At the stroke of a pen of the conservative majority of the judges, American women have been deprived of their personal liberty and their reproductive rights, criminalising the attempt to have an abortion and those assisting them.” In its ignorant generalisation this is factually wrong. Dobbs has overturned Roe and returned the matter to the state legislatures.

There are 50 states in America, each with its own legislature elected by the people who reside in that state. There will not be uniformity in how the issue of abortion is approached: California (governed by Democrats) will legislate for abortion into the last trimester; Tennessee (governed by Republicans) will place limits on abortion.

Your editorial also states: “There are fears that there will be further erosion of civil liberties by this same conservative bench, and that it will remove other cherished rights such as the right to same-sex marriages.” Where was this gem sourced? CNN? The New York Times? On what basis are these fears grounded?

In the majority judgment of Dobbs, written by Justice Samuel Alito, it is stated in the first paragraph that “Abortion presents a profound moral issue on which Americans hold sharply conflicting views. Your editorial is quite blind to the profound moral issues. On page 10 of the judgment Alito writes, damningly: “Roe expressed the ‘feel[ing]’ that the Fourteenth Amendment was the provision that did the work, but its message seemed to be that the abortion right could be found somewhere in the constitution and that specifying its exact location was not of paramount importance.”

One need not be a lawyer to understand that this is flagrant nonsense on the part of the justices in Roe and an arrogation of power not theirs to exercise, namely to make law. In Roe, Alito shows, the court ignored historical precedent. As to the dissenting judgment in Dobbs, Alito wrote on page 35: “The dissent is very candid that it cannot show that a constitutional right to abortion has any foundation, let alone a ‘deeply rooted’ one, in the nation’s history and tradition.

In short, the editorial was ultracrepidarian.

Graham Williams

Sandown

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