burden standard. i would emphasize, i think, as your honor is alluding to, that no standard other than the rational basis review that applies to all laws will promote an administerable, workable, practical, consistent jurisprudence that puts matters back with the people. i think anything heightened here is going to be problematic. but i would say if the court were not inclined to overrule casey, that the choice would be undue burden standard, untethered from any brightline viability rule. i would like to go to a different topic, back to casey. i assume you ve read casey pretty thoroughly. yes, your honor. and there are two parts. one is they reaffirm roe. put that to the side. the second is the opinion for the court, not for three people, but for the court. and that second part is about
unborn girl s life when she just barely can survive outside the womb, but not a day earlier, when she needs just a little help. that is the world under roe and casey. that is not the world the constitution promises. the constitution places its trust in the people. on hard issue after hard issue, the people make this country work. abortion is a hard issue. it demands the best from all of us, not just a few of us. when an issue affects everyone and the constitution does not take sides on it, it belongs to the people. roe and casey have failed, but the people, if given the chance, will succeed. this court should overrule roe and casey and uphold the state s law. i welcome the court s questions. general stewart, you focus on the right to abortion, but our jurisprudence seems to focus on, in casey, autonomy, in roe,
think that the case is wrong. and i guess what strikes me when i look at this case is that, you know, not much has changed since roe and casey. that people think that it s right or wrong, based on the things that they have always thought it was right or wrong for. so the rationale behind those cases has something to do with the autonomy and the freedom and the dignity of women to pursue their lives as they wish. to protect their bodily integrity. to make the decisions that are most fundamental to the course of their lives. and always in those cases, there was an understanding that there were important interests on the other side, in protecting life or protecting the potential for life, whether people saw it one way or the other way. and that there was a difficult question here and a balance to
all right. what do you say to that. sure, justice breyer. i would say a couple of things. i would say that we have very closely gone through the factors that the casey court itself went through in stare decisis. more than half of our brief is related to stare decisis. we have 30 years in the wake of casey to see what casey has done and what it hasn t done. it s called some bad things in the eyes of some people and some good things in the eyes of some people. your honor go ahead. i m sorry, your honor. what i would emphasize, your honor, is to the extent that i would not say it was the people that called this court to end the controversy. the people, many, many people vocally really just wanted to have the matter returned to them, so they could decide it, decide it locally, deal with it the way they thought best and at least have a fighting chance to have their view prevail, which was not given to them under roe, and as a result, under casey.
right to choose who they re going to marry. i fear none of those things are written in the constitution. they all, like marbury versus madison, have been discerned from the structure of the constitution. why do we now say that somehow roe versus roe and casey are so unusual that they must be overturned? well, justice sotomayor, i would emphasize two things. when you re going beyond the constitution, this court has looked closely no, what i m saying is they didn t go beyond the constitution. your honor, they did not deduce those from the structure of the constitution. they pointed to the 14th amendment and reasoned that privacy in roe, autonomy and similar values in casey led to a right to abortion. that s not how this court traditionally does things, including in the vast run of cases that your honor ran through. the court looks to history and tradition. and here, those decisively reject the proposition that