Episode Details

In this episode, we explore the architecture of roe v wade. When you look at the great American monuments, like the Washington Monument or the Golden Gate Bridge, we just see this finished. solid structure. It just looks inevitable, you know, like it's permanent. Oh, totally. You're just appreciating the final product. You don't see the temporary scaffolding or the intense debates over the blueprints or the compromises they had to make on the steel just to actually get it built. Yeah, you just see the bridge. But then if you look at American constitutional law, suddenly that solid monument starts to look a lot more like a like a living, breathing, highly contested construction site. It is the absolute definition of a legal and historical work in progress. Right. Well, welcome to today's deep dive. We are digging into a massive, really fascinating stack of source material today for you. You really are. We're going to offer a comprehensive, historical, down on a technicality without making grand constitutional pronouncements. But the other liberal justices... pushed back hard on that. Yeah. They told Blackman that vagueness just wasn't enough. He needed to ground this in the concept of privacy. So Blackman, who used to be resident counsel at the Mayo Clinic in Minnesota, literally goes back to the clinic's library. He spends a whole week there. A week researching the history of medical procedures, heavily influenced by the historical research his clerks and abortion rights advocates had compiled. Right. So he abandons the vagueness argument, and he pivots to the 14th Amendment. Specifically, the due process clause. Now, just reading the text, the due process clause basically says the government can't take away your life, liberty, or property without fair legal procedures. Yeah, it's about fair trials. Right. So how do you get medical privacy out of that? Well, that requires