by Robert Pearl
A pair of Supreme Court rulings in June — one on gun rights, the other on abortion — have elicited strong, partisan reactions.
In recent weeks, critics have called out inconsistencies in the court’s decisions: One ruling restricts the ability of states to regulate guns while the other expands the right of states to regulate abortions. The result, opponents say, is that Americans are free to carry guns but forced to carry babies.
Legal scholars observed yet another contradiction. During confirmation hearings and in past decisions, conservative justices extolled the virtues of stare decisis — the legal principle of keeping prior rulings in place. But in June’s monumental 5-4 decision to overturn Roe v. Wade, the majority reversed that decision, which had stood for nearly 50 years.
In the wake of those decisions, the court’s conservative majority has been called radical, hypocritical, even draconian. All that may be true, but what worries me most as a physician is how quickly the highest court in the land has become unscientific and medically negligent.
SCOTUS v. science
A popular defense of the court’s decision to overturn Roe goes something like this: “Some court rulings are wrong, egregiously so, and don’t deserve deference, even if they have stood for decades.”
Those words come courtesy of Ryan Rusak, a political columnist with the Fort-Worth Star-Telegram, who was explaining a controversial subtweet from Republican Sen. John Cornyn.
Cornyn’s idea was that long-standing precedent was also discarded in Brown v. Board of Education, a landmark decision that desegregated schools in 1954. That ruling overturned Plessy v. Ferguson, the infamous “separate but equal” decision from 1896, made nearly 60 years prior.
Although the court indeed discarded the legal principle of stare decisis in both reversals (from Plessy to Brown and Roe to Dobbs), there is a critical difference between the two opinions.
The decision in Brown was based, in part, on decades of scientific progress whereas the reversal of Roe swept decades of science under the rug.
Dogma and originalism rule the court
Today’s court is led by justices who interpret the Constitution through the words of its authors “at the time it was written.” This judicial philosophy of originalism has allowed members of the court to bend or ignore 235 years of facts to fit a desired, often preconceived, set of conclusions.
In doing so, they fail to acknowledge that the Constitution was written when a) the average American’s life expectancy was 38 years, b) married women were considered property of their husbands with no legal identity, and c) the most popular gun on the market had a magazine capacity of one and took three minutes to load.
Nearly two and a half centuries of progress have afforded us greater scientific understanding than our forefathers had. The world is different now — better, in many ways, thanks to science. We can cure disease, access limitless medical information with a tap of the finger and proactively sidestep serious medical risks.
But instead of celebrating and building upon scientific progress, our nation’s highest court is casting it aside.
Throughout history, unnecessary deaths happen whenever people in power deny and ignore science. This moment in history won’t be an exception.
Unscientific decisions have consequences
Research consistently shows that greater access to firearms results in more shooting deaths while restricted access to reproductive health care results in more maternal deaths.
Indeed, guns killed over 45,000 Americans last year. The U.S. is home to 10 times more gun-related deaths than the next four richest countries combined. Shootings have become the leading cause of death among children, killing more kids than cancer.
Taking all these facts into account, Justice Stephen Breyer concluded that “when courts interpret the Second Amendment, it is constitutionally proper, indeed often necessary, for them to consider the serious dangers and consequences of gun violence.”
The same notion is true of reproductive rights. When the United States legalized abortion for all women in 1973, the justices did so knowing that restrictive state laws didn’t eliminate abortions. They just made abortions medically unsafe, exacting a massive toll on women’s health that disproportionately affected lower-income women. Health care professionals know that nearly every death and injury resulting from an unsafe abortion is avoidable when the procedure is performed by a doctor.
In both recent decisions, the conservative court majority either ignored these facts or questioned their relevance. Overlooking scientific facts is medically negligent and is destined to cause death.
