Monday, April 8, 2024

Losing and Regaining Rights

AT FIRST, I WAS A BIT TAKEN ABACK. Then, I started thinking about what she had said. Basically, it was this: Roe V. Wade effects more than pregnant women. It effects everybody. The legal concept of individual bodily autonomy and medical privacy as we currently understand it in the United States today derives from this one Supreme Court decision in 1973. Now, its gone. Now, the government (this is her talking) can, in theory, order everybody to become organ donors, or carry a commputer chip ID implant, or open everyne's medical records for official scrutiny....This lady informing me of all this is intelligent, well informed. But,is she correct in this case? I'm still not sure what I think about all this. I suppose I have always assumed that embedded within "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness",deep down, is the concept of bodily autonomy, and perhaps even medical privacy. I suppose I have always assumed that there exists a large body of case law, common law, telling us to what extent, if any, we as American citizens and private individuals own and control our own bodies,including our medical records and circumstances. I'm just guessing that if you listen to what a Harvard legal scholar says about it all, it turns out that it is a complete morass, essentially, undecided, with layers and layers of legislated laws and court cases involved and underpinning the whole mess. All I can say at this point is that I sure as hell hope I own my own body, although, in truth, I have no idea whether I do. And then my thoughts turn to a potential second Trump administration. It is well known by all that Donald Trump and his MAGA mobsters, if returned to power, have an intense desire to gather more power and assigning it to the president, to make the American presidency a much more powerful office, as if it isn't already. Trump and his sycophants want a federal government put in place entirely based upon its loyalty to Donald Trump and the extremist MAGA agenda. Beyond that,to presidencies of the future after Trump is gone, they have perhaps given less thought. I'm starting to have nightmares and fantasies about reporting to my local Social Security office to have the new federally required compupter chip implanted in my right temple, its transmitter informing the government of my every move and where about, the importance of this being that I am a regisered non member of MAGA, therefore supsicious of being "Un-American" by virtue of being "UN -Trump". You have to keep track of dangerous people like that. All I really know for sure is that this Trump far right extremist Supreme Court reversed Roe v. Wade, after telling the American people that Roe v. Wade is sacred, settled American law. If it can do that, and it obviously can, and will, do anything tyrannical in nature. Isn't bodiy autonomy and medical privacy important enough to include in the constitutional bill of rights? Or,can it be argued that the framers,in their original intent, intended that every American citizen possesses individual bodily autonomy and medical privacy as sacred, inherent, inalienable rights? Maybe we should all just vote on this, and everything else. In our modern era of computers, we should be able to build a true direct democracy in America, where we the people decide all important issues by popular vote, rather than the abstruse, arbitrary, whimsical decisions of a small group of elderly lawyers. But maybe that's just too much to ask for.

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