Was anyone really surprised by today’s Supreme Court decision? When the American people reelected George Bush in 2004, this is what they asked for. I personally think it sucks that Roe v. Wade is being slowly chipped away, but this is what we’re stuck with. We lost this battle two and a half years ago.

What’s stunning to me about today’s decision is, as Talk Left points out, the stunning level of wingnuttery in the majority opinion. From the dissent :

The Court’s hostility to the right Roe and Casey secured is not concealed. Throughout, the opinion refers to obstetrician-gynecologists and surgeons who perform abortions not by the titles of their medical specialties, but by the pejorative label “abortion doctor.” A fetus is described as an “unborn child,” and as a “baby,”; second-trimester, previability abortions are referred to as “late-term,” ; and the reasoned medical judgments of highly trained doctors are dismissed as “preferences” motivated by “mere convenience,”. Instead of the heightened scrutiny we have previously applied, the Court determines that a “rational” ground is enough to uphold the Act. And, most troubling, Casey’s principles, confirming the continuing vitality of “the essential holding of Roe,” are merely “assume[d]” for the moment, rather than “retained” or “reaffirmed,” Casey.

Also worth noting, again from the dissenting opinion, is the incredibly sexist nature of the court’s ruling :

Revealing in this regard, the Court invokes an antiabortion shibboleth for which it concededly has no reliable evidence: Women who have abortions come to regret their choices, and consequently suffer from “[s]evere depression and loss of esteem.” Because of women’s fragile emotional state and because of the “bond of love the mother has for her child,” the Court worries, doctors may withhold information about the nature of the intact D&E procedure. The solution the Court approves, then, is not to require doctors to inform women, accurately and adequately, of the different procedures and their attendant risks. Cf. Casey, (plurality opinion) (“States are free to enact laws to provide a reasonable framework for a woman to make a decision that has such profound and lasting meaning.”). Instead, the Court deprives women of the right to make an autonomous choice, even at the expense of their safety.

This way of thinking reflects ancient notions about women’s place in the family and under the Constitution–ideas that have long since been discredited. Compare, e.g., Muller v. Oregon, (1908) (“protective” legislation imposing hours-of-work limitations on women only held permissible in view of women’s “physical structure and a proper discharge of her maternal funct[ion]“); Bradwell v. State, (1873) (Bradley, J., concurring) (“Man is, or should be, woman’s protector and defender. The natural and proper timidity and delicacy which belongs to the female sex evidently unfits it for many of the occupations of civil life. … The paramount destiny and mission of woman are to fulfil[l] the noble and benign offices of wife and mother.”), with United States v. Virginia, (1996) (State may not rely on “overbroad generalizations” about the “talents, capacities, or preferences” of women; “[s]uch judgments have … impeded … women’s progress toward full citizenship stature throughout our Nation’s history”); Califano v. Goldfarb, (1977) (gender-based Social Security classification rejected because it rested on “archaic and overbroad generalizations” “such as assumptions as to [women's] dependency” (internal quotation marks omitted)).

Congratulations Mr. Rove, the Bushification of the Judicial branch is now complete.