推翻罗诉韦德案后,美国最高法院还会向右走多远_OK阅读网
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推翻罗诉韦德案后,美国最高法院还会向右走多远
Abortion Ruling Poses New Questions About How Far Supreme Court Will Go

来源:纽约时报    2022-06-27 03:40



        WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court’s decision on Friday to end the constitutional right to abortion concluded one battle for now but immediately posed another far-reaching question: whether the judicial ground under rights in other personal matters, including contraception and same-sex marriage, is now also shaky.        华盛顿——周五,最高法院推翻堕胎宪法权利的决定暂时结束了一场战斗,但立即出现了另一个影响深远的问题:包括避孕和同性婚姻等其他个人权利的司法基础现在是否也危在旦夕。
        The lack of a clear and consistent answer among the supermajority of conservative, Republican-appointed justices who control the Supreme Court prompted fear on the left, and anticipation among some on the other side of the ideological divide, that the abortion decision could be just the beginning of a sharp rightward shift on issues that directly touch intimate personal choices.        大多数保守派以及由共和党任命的法官所控制的最高法院都没有明确一致的答案,这引发了左翼的担忧,也让意识形态分歧另一方的一些人有了预期,即在直接涉及个人私密选择的问题上,推翻堕胎权的决定可能只是急剧右转的开始。
        Those reactions were stoked by Justice Clarence Thomas’s concurring opinion, in which he explicitly said that precedents establishing those rights — which relied on the same legal reasoning as the now-overturned Roe v. Wade — should be reconsidered.        克拉伦斯·托马斯大法官的同意意见引发了这些反应。他在意见中明确表示,确立这些权利的判决先例依据的是与“罗诉韦德案”相同的法律论证,而该案现已被推翻,应该对这些判决先例也进行重新考虑。
        The majority opinion by Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. sought to be more reassuring to those who see a judicial assault coming on same-sex marriage and contraception. He declared that a ruling that the 14th Amendment — which forbids the government to take away people’s freedom unfairly — does not protect abortion rights should not be seen as imperiling precedents unrelated to ending fetal life. Yet his legal rationale implicitly called a series of such precedents into doubt.        塞缪尔·阿利托法官撰写的多数人意见希望更多地宽慰那些认为同性婚姻和避孕措施即将被司法针对的人。他宣称,第14条修正案——禁止政府不公平地剥夺人们的自由——不保护堕胎权,但不应该认为这一裁决会危及与终止胎儿生命无关的先例。然而,他的法律依据含蓄地质疑了一系列此类先例。
        The three dissenting liberals on the court said, in essence, don’t be fooled. “No one,” they said, “should be confident that this majority is done with its work.”        法庭上的三位持不同意见的自由主义者实质上表示,不要上当。他们说,“不要相信这个多数派会到此为止。”
        They wrote that precedents being cast aside by the court — Roe v. Wade and Planned Parenthood v. Casey, a 1992 case that reaffirmed core parts of Roe — were part of the same “constitutional fabric” behind “settled freedoms involving bodily integrity, familial relationships and procreation.”        他们写道,被法院推翻的先例——罗诉韦德案和1992年的宾州东南部计划生育组织诉凯西案,后者再次确认了罗诉韦德案的核心部分——是“涉及身体完整性、家庭关系和生育的既定自由”背后的同一“宪法结构”的一部分。
        Then there was Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh, who sought to calm fears among supporters of abortion rights of even harsher and more wrenching changes to come. In his view, he said, states could not constitutionally bar women from traveling to another state to obtain an abortion. Nor could they prosecute people for abortions before Friday’s ruling took effect.        然后是布雷特·卡瓦诺法官,他试图缓解堕胎权支持者,他们担忧即将有更严厉和更痛苦的变化到来。他表示,在他看来,根据宪法,各州不能禁止女性前往另一个州堕胎。在周五的裁决生效之前,他们也不能起诉堕胎者。
        Friday’s opinion had the immediate effect of allowing laws banning or severely curbing access to abortion to snap into place in at least 20 states. But its implications for potential future disputes over abortion and for many other rights proclaimed by the Supreme Court since the second half of the 20th century could also be profound.        周五的意见立即产生了影响,禁止或严格限制堕胎的法律在至少20个州迅速到位。但对于未来关于堕胎的潜在争议,以及最高法院自20世纪下半叶以来宣布的许多其他权利,它也可能造成深远影响。
        Over several generations, the modern court gradually ruled that a series of unwritten constitutional rights existed as part of the 14th Amendment. In addition to declaring a right to abortion, the court struck down involuntary sterilization and laws interfering with who people could choose to live with or marry, along with decriminalizing contraception and same-sex intercourse.        经过几代人的努力,现代法院逐渐裁定,一系列不成文的宪法权利作为第十四修正案的一部分存在。除了宣布公民拥有堕胎权外,法院还废除了非自愿绝育和干涉人们选择生活伴侣或婚姻伴侣的法律,以及将避孕和同性性交非罪化。
        The heart of Justice Alito’s majority opinion is that the 14th Amendment protects only unwritten rights that were already understood to exist in 1868, when it was adopted. Many states then banned abortion, so it was wrong for the Supreme Court, in 1973’s Roe v. Wade, to interpret the 14th Amendment as encompassing a right to abortion, he reasoned.        阿利托大法官撰写的多数意见的核心是,1868年通过的第14修正案仅保护的是当时已知存在的不成文权利。而许多州当时禁止堕胎,因此,他认为,最高法院在1973年的罗诉韦德案中将第14修正案解释为包含堕胎权是错误的。
        The majority bloc in the abortion case — Justices Alito, Thomas, Kavanaugh, Neil M. Gorsuch and Amy Coney Barrett — modestly portrayed itself as getting the Supreme Court out of the business of drawing lines about which regulations go too far on the contentious subject. Under Justice Alito’s opinion, so long as a state legislature has a “rational basis” for imposing a limit or ban on the procedure, the courts will not intervene.        堕胎权裁决中的多数派——阿利托大法官、托马斯大法官、卡瓦诺大法官、尼尔·戈萨奇大法官和埃米·科尼·巴雷特大法官——谦虚地表示,他们不会让最高法院插手划定界限,指出哪些法规在这个有争议的问题上走得太远。在阿利托大法官看来,只要州立法机构有对程序施加限制或禁令的“合理基础”,法院就不会干预。
        But in a blistering but impotent joint dissent, the court’s three remaining Democratic appointees — Justices Stephen G. Breyer, Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan — said the ruling would instead force the Supreme Court to wade further into hotly contested moral and philosophical issues, listing a dozen examples of new questions.        但是,在言辞激烈却无力的联合反对意见中,最高法院剩下的三名民主党任命的大法官——斯蒂芬·布雷耶大法官、索尼娅·索托马约尔大法官和埃琳娜·卡根大法官——表示,该裁决将迫使最高法院进一步涉足争议激烈的道德和哲学问题,并列举了十几个新问题的例子。
        Those included whether and when a state must allow exceptions for a woman’s life and health, what the ruling would mean for in vitro fertilization and miscarriage management, whether a state could bar advertising for out-of-state abortions or helping women get to out-of-state clinics, and whether it could bar women from traveling out of state or receiving abortion medication mailed by out-of-state pharmacies.        这些例子包括,为了女性的生命和健康,州是否以及何时必须允许例外情况;该裁决对体外受精和流产管理意味着什么;州是否可以禁止在该州以外的地点堕胎的广告或帮助女性去该州外的堕胎诊所,以及它是否可以禁止女性出州旅行或接受州外药店邮寄的堕胎药物。
        “The majority does not save judges from unwieldy tests or extricate them from the sphere of controversy,” they wrote. “To the contrary, it discards a known, workable and predictable standard in favor of something novel and probably far more complicated.”        “多数派并没有让法官免于面对难以处理的考验,也没有将他们从争议范围中解脱出来,”他们写道。“相反,它抛弃了一个已知的、可行的和可预测的标准,转而支持新的,而且可能要复杂得多的东西。”
        Against that backdrop, the concurring opinion by Justice Kavanaugh was particularly important because he appears to be the median judge on abortion issues — meaning he controls the fifth vote that decides which side to make into a majority in a closely divided case.        在这种背景下,卡瓦诺大法官的同意意见尤其重要,因为他似乎是堕胎问题的中位法官——这意味着他控制着第五票,在势均力敌的情况下,该票决定了哪一方将成为多数派。
        In addition to declaring that he thinks states cannot bar residents from traveling to another state to obtain an abortion, Justice Kavanaugh strongly suggested that he thinks the Constitution requires abortion bans to include an exception when necessary to save the life of a mother.        卡瓦诺大法官宣布他认为各州不能禁止居民前往另一个州堕胎,除此之外,他还强烈建议,他认为根据宪法,堕胎禁令应该包含一项例外,在必要时挽救母亲的生命。
        The dissenting justices portrayed the prospect that the ruling will not prevent states that want to keep abortion legal from doing so as “cold comfort” for poor women in states that criminalize the procedures and who lack the money to travel to another state.        持不同意见的法官描绘了这样一种前景,即虽然那些希望保持堕胎合法化的州没有被禁止,但在那些将堕胎手术定为刑事犯罪的州,对于没钱去往其他州的贫困女性来说,这是一种“无用的安慰”。
        And, noting that “no language in today’s decision stops the federal government from prohibiting abortions nationwide, once again from the moment of conception and without exceptions for rape or incest,” they wrote that if that happened, women seeking abortions would need to finance travel not to New York or California, but to Canada.        他们还指出,“今天的决定中没有任何措辞阻止联邦政府在全国范围内禁止堕胎,同样是从受孕的那一刻开始,强奸或乱伦导致的怀孕也不例外”,他们写道,如果发生这种情况,寻求堕胎的女性将需要资助前往加拿大,而不是去纽约或加州。
        Friday’s ruling also had implications that stretched far beyond potential future legal fights over abortion, calling into question the entire sweep of court precedents that established unwritten rights as deriving from the 14th Amendment’s protections for liberty.        周五的裁决所产生的影响也远远超出了未来关于堕胎的潜在法律斗争,对所有将不成文的权利确立为源自第14修正案对自由保护的法庭判例提出了质疑。
        Political fights over judicial nominations often dwell in abstractions: Conservatives and Republicans press the view that the laws should be interpreted according to what their text was originally understood to mean. Liberals and Democrats tend to argue that the framers defined rights in general terms to permit future evolution in their scope and meaning by applying them in new ways in response to new societal understandings and conditions.        关于司法任命的政治斗争往往停留在抽象的层面:保守派和共和党人坚持认为,应该根据法律文本最初的含义来解释法律。自由主义者和民主党人倾向于认为,制宪者在一般意义上定义了权利,以便允许未来在其范围和意义上进行演变,以新的方式应用它们,从而回应新的社会理解和条件。
        The abortion rights ruling offered a concrete illustration: The three liberals in dissent acknowledged that no one thought there was a right to abortion in 1868, but also noted that women played no role in ratifying the 14th Amendment because they would not gain the right to vote for another half century. Locking down the meaning of freedoms from the vantage point of an antiquated society, they said, consigns women to the status of second-class citizens.        堕胎权裁决提供了一个具体的例证:持反对意见的三名自由派法官承认,在1868年,没有人认为存在堕胎权,但他们也指出,女性在批准第14修正案中没有发挥任何作用,因为她们在半个世纪后才会获得投票权。他们表示,站在一个过时社会的角度将自由的意义固定下来,会使女性处于二等公民的地位。
        Against the backdrop of that debate, Justice Alito denied that the decision imperiled other precedents in which the Supreme Court proclaimed modern-era rights based on an evolving understanding of individual freedoms protected by the 14th Amendment — including to contraception, sexual conduct with a member of the same sex or same-sex marriage.        在这场辩论的背景下,阿利托大法官否认这一决定危及其他先例,在这些先例中,基于对第14修正案所保护的个人自由不断发展的理解,最高法院宣布了避孕、与同性的性行为及同性婚姻等现代权利。
        He said abortion was different because it involved the destruction of fetal life, which the state had an interest in protecting.        他说,堕胎是不同的,因为它涉及对胎儿生命的破坏,而保护胎儿生命关系到国家利益。
        “To ensure that our decision is not misunderstood or mischaracterized, we emphasize that our decision concerns the constitutional right to abortion and no other right,” he also wrote. “Nothing in this opinion should be understood to cast doubt on precedents that do not concern abortion.”        “为了确保我们的决定不被误解或曲解,我们强调,我们的决定涉及宪法规定的堕胎权,而不是其他权利,”他还写道。“本意见中的任何内容都不应被理解为对不涉及堕胎的先例提出质疑。”
        Even the conservative justices signaled disagreement among themselves over how much stock to put in that statement, however. At one end of the spectrum, Justice Thomas made no secret of his eagerness to press further and overturn those precedents, too.        然而,就连保守派大法官之间也对这一声明的可信度存在分歧。一边是托马斯大法官,他毫不掩饰自己渴望进一步施压并推翻这些先例。
        He said he agreed with Justice Alito’s line insofar as it meant that only abortion was specifically “at issue” in the case decided on Friday. But he went on to call for the court to purge, “at the earliest opportunity,” all other cases that similarly reasoned that various unwritten rights are protected by the due process clause of the 14th Amendment.        他表示,他在一点上同意阿利托大法官的立场,即在周五裁决的案件中,只有堕胎是“待裁决的”。但他接着呼吁最高法院“尽早”清除其他所有以类似理由,认定各种不成文权利受第14修正案正当程序条款保护的案件。
        At the other end of the spectrum, Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. agreed with the majority that a Mississippi law banning abortions after 15 weeks — with no exceptions for rape or incest, including for minors — should be upheld. But the chief justice, who has long favored narrow opinions and incremental change, declared that his five fellow conservatives had already gone too far in overturning Roe v. Wade.        在另一边,首席大法官小约翰·罗伯茨同意大多数人的意见,即密西西比禁止怀孕15周后堕胎——强奸或乱伦情况没有例外,包括未成年人——的法律应该得到支持。但这位长期以来一直支持狭义观点和渐进式变革的首席大法官宣称,他的五位保守派同僚在推翻罗诉韦德案的过程中走得太远了。
        “The court’s opinion is thoughtful and thorough, but those virtues cannot compensate for the fact that its dramatic and consequential ruling is unnecessary to decide the case before us,” he wrote.         “法院的意见是深思熟虑和彻底的,但这些优点无法弥补这样一个事实,即它惊人的、影响深远的裁决对我们面前的案件来说没有必要,”他写道。
        For his part, Justice Kavanaugh echoed and emphasized Justice Alito’s claim that the court’s decision to overrule precedents about abortion does not amount to overruling precedents about contraception and interracial or same-sex marriage, “and does not threaten or cast doubt on those precedents.”        卡瓦诺大法官呼应并强调了阿利托大法官的主张,即最高法院驳回关于堕胎的判例并不等于驳回关于避孕和跨种族或同性婚姻的判例,“而且不会威胁或质疑这些判例。”
        The dissenting justices expressed disbelief at Justices Alito’s and Kavanaugh’s attempts to distinguish abortion from precedents about matters like contraception and same-sex intimacy and marriage. The bottom line, they wrote, was that the reasoning about the 14th Amendment and 1868 was the same for that entire constellation of rulings.        对于阿利托和卡瓦诺大法官试图将堕胎与避孕和同性亲密关系及婚姻等事项的判例区分开来的做法,持不同意见的法官们表示怀疑。他们写道,最重要的是,关于第14修正案及1868年的推定,对所有这些裁决来说都是一样的。
        “One of two things must be true,” they wrote. “Either the majority does not really believe in its own reasoning. Or if it does, all rights that have no history stretching back to the mid-19th century are insecure. Either the mass of the majority’s opinion is hypocrisy, or additional constitutional rights are under threat. It is one or the other.”        “两件事当中,肯定有一件是真的,”他们写道。“要么多数大法官并不真正相信自己的推定;要么如果他们相信的话,所有无法追溯到19世纪中期的权利都不安全。要么多数大法官的意见是虚伪的;要么更多宪法权利受到了威胁。非此即彼。”
                
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