Regarding the level of sovereignty
It’s a complex issue.
https://www.nytimes.com/live/2022/05/03/us/roe-wade-abortion-supreme-court
The constitutional right to abortion could be negated and it will be left to the states to decide whether it should be legal or not, resulting in a patchwork of different laws across the country unless Congress steps in and sets a single national policy.
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People have a tendency to think their worldview, their mores, ought to be universalized.
There’s a tendency to look askance at the ways of others: “What they do is harmful and should be stopped.”
Various societies have practiced: Factory farming. Circumcision. Segregation of the races. Dueling. Relegating women to unsafe procedures for unwanted pregnancy termination. Cockfighting. Illegality of gay marriage. Infanticide as a means of population control. Slavery. Segregation of the young from the community (schooling). Illegality of divorce.
Members of societies with those practices will often say: “We don’t view [such] as harmful.”
Human society in general will always be a patchwork of norms, customs, rights, and laws.
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Liberals object when international trade pacts prohibit the United States from enforcing environmental and/or labor standards that are relatively more stringent than what the standards are elsewhere. Countries exhibit a patchwork of different laws in this regard. The issue is framed in terms of sovereignty. Liberals chafe at the idea that the World Trade Organization could dictate the extent to which we can restrict certain chemicals or practices. On this basis environmentalists and labor activists wanted the US to renegotiate or withdraw from NAFTA.
Rules-setting at the level of the World Trade Organization can violate reasonable norms of sovereignty.
A case can be made that sovereignty should reside at a lower level than that of the modern mega-states. Let’s say a majority of Californians want to institute a state-based single payer health insurance system and their legislature passes a law to that effect. But then the US Supreme Court strikes it down on the basis of some interpretation of the national constitution (like: a supposed right of a private insurance company to do business in any state within the country).
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Liberals have been antagonistic to the idea of “states rights” since the enforcement of civil rights was accorded to the federal government during the 1950s.
Again, the discussion is complex: Extent/degree of universalism? How granular could/should “local sovereignty” be?
If there was a shift back toward “states rights,” some states might, sooner or later, prohibit gay marriage or marijuana or alcohol or abortion or Islam or guns or cockfighting or fracking or LNG terminals or nukes or private ownership of electric utilities. Some might trend toward segregation or implement a flat tax or a UBI or free tuition at their public universities.
At what level should minimum wage laws be set — municipal, state, nation, global? To what extent does universalism of norms, rights, laws make sense in a confederal structure like the European Union? Should agricultural subsidies be set by the EU or by the country of France?
. . . tensions between advocacy of universalization of rights, expressions of cultural diversity, domains of law-setting.
What if a majority of women in a state want to restrict abortion in their state?
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The latter is a very sensitive issue and quoting the opinion of a man about it can be fraught. Perhaps of interest: A few years ago, Caitlin Flanagan wrote about what she called “the dishonesty of the abortion debate.” Her assessment:
This is not an argument anyone is going to win. The loudest advocates on both sides are terrible representatives for their cause. When women are urged to “shout your abortion,” and when abortion becomes the subject of stand-up comedy routines, the attitude toward abortion seems ghoulish. When anti-abortion advocates speak in the most graphic terms about women “sucking babies out of the womb,” they show themselves without mercy. They are not considering the extremely human, complex, and often heartbreaking reasons behind women’s private decisions. The truth is that the best argument on each side is a damn good one, and until you acknowledge that fact, you aren’t speaking or even thinking honestly about the issue. You certainly aren’t going to convince anybody.
https://www.theatlantic.com/newsletters/archive/2022/05/abortion-debate-roe-v-wade-opinion/629763/
Some people just believe that a “developing person” deserves consideration as a new life begins at conception.
Some indigenous tribes didn’t consider personhood to start until after infancy. They wouldn’t bestow a name until around the age of two or three and had no qualms about infanticide for population control.
The point being that people hold all kinds of beliefs.
In our society, among those who want to restrict access to abortion . . . it’s certainly not all men. So if a majority of women in a state hold the opinion that human personhood starts at conception and therefore abortion should be restricted, they will be resentful if a national law serves to disregard their belief system and morality.
We have to live with each other and sometimes the belief system and morality of a particular community is contradicted by the norms and laws of the broader community. That’s unavoidable. But an important discussion revolves around the scale that makes sense re: “the broader community.” I think the modern mega-states are too large.
