WOMEN  (CONT)

But to this range of individual dilemmas, the pro life argument offers only one solution: Criminalize abortion. To this range of life stories, it offers only one kind of "help": Take the decision out of her hands. Now their argument has been folded into a Supreme Court decision. As Yale Law School's Reva Siegel said, "The opinion imagines that the state knows better than women what they really want and need in matters of motherhood."

It's no wonder that Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, the only woman on the court and a lawyer who made her name overturning laws based on stereotypes, chided Kennedy for reverting to those stereotypes. She reminded him how far the court had come in defending a woman's right to shape her own destiny.

I don't believe that Justice Kennedy is the clone of Justice Bradley. In other abortion and gay rights cases, he's agreed that the court's obligation is "to define the liberty of all, not to mandate our own moral code." But this time he's stuck his toe into some very treacherous waters.

As Siegel said, "If they regulate all women on the assumption that they don't know their own interests, that they lack the ability to make their own decisions, we're back in the 19th century."

It's amazing how quickly the current can shift and the waters flow -- backward.

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