Kingspawn faults my letter for conflating opposition to Roe and opposition to the right to choose. But that distinction is exactly why I wrote

As reported nine years ago in The New Republic, whose editors oppose the Roe v. Wade decision, Casey Sr. was not offered a chance to speak at the convention nominating Bill Clinton because he had refused to endorse Bill Clinton

and not “As reported nine years ago in the anti-choice New Republic.” The point of that clause, though I’ll grant it could have been stated more clearly or simply dropped, was that TNR is on the right of most Democratic voters on the issue of choice, and revels in decrying the Democratic party’s supposed deafness and meanness to voters (read: TNR writers) to its right on issues where TNR is to the right of the party (read: everything but equal marriage). So a repudiation of a story about the Democratic party keeping down Democrats in the right wing of the party means more when it’s written by a magazine that lives for righteous denunciations of the Democrats for keeping down the right wing of the party.

As for Roe v. Wade, it’s certainly not the best argued or compellingly written of our legal decisions, but the majority is right to recognize that autonomy in certain intimate situations and spaces is central to liberty. The equal protection argument (as my brother points out, we don’t mandate that men donate, say, their kidneys, a procedure far less cumbersome than nine months of pregnancy, to save what we can all agree to be living human beings in need of organs) absolutely should have been made in Roe as well, and the Casey majority’s time would have been much better spent expounding that than floating a stare decisis argument that privileges the legitimacy of the court over the rightness of its jurisprudence.