As always, you can find the Dobbs v. Jackson decision here.

Course corrected.

Okay. I got myself under control again. My purpose here isn’t to synthesize information to create broader judgements—it’s to break down complex ideas into their component parts for examination. I lost track of that for a bit. I’m going to continue with the breakdown of sentences until I get to the end of the main argument. Then I’ll come back and drill down on central concepts.

So back to business.

The first sentence in Part II B 1 reads as follows:

“Until the latter part of the 20th century, there was no support in American law for a constitutional right to obtain an abortion.”

This one is going to start out “undetermined,” if only because it’s difficult to demonstrate the non-existence of a thing, generally—even in a case like this, in which there’s a finite (if vast) body of literature to review. I need to mark it undetermined, though, since I’m concerned with what is established in this document—not what is the case in the world at large.

Some relevant questions (when we get to that):

• What exactly does “no support in American law” mean? No decisions? No cases? No filings? No theories?
• SCOTUS was all old white men until Thurgood Marshall showed up in 1967, and it was all male until Sandra Day O’Connor arrived in 1981. How significant is that?

The bottom line is that this claim is undetermined:

• “Until the latter part of the 20th century, there was no support in American law for a constitutional right to obtain an abortion.”