Roe v Wade is primarily about state rights, not abortion.

Obviously, the overturning of Roe v Wade has an enormous impact on abortion legislation. I get that. But in my opinion, the abortion part of Roe v Wade is secondary to the procedural aspect of it. Let me tell you why.

Imagine the Supreme Court had made a decision ruling that states could decide for themselves what kind of foliage to plant along highways, but they have to include one evergreen tree per square acre, because evergreens are protected by the Constitution. Let’s call it Grow v Shade. Some people would be irritated probably, Christmas tree farmers would be highly in favor, a lot of us would be confused about where the Constitution says anything about pine trees. But by and large we wouldn’t care when it happened, we wouldn’t care in the decades following it, and we wouldn’t care when the SCOTUS overturned it.

Those bones are identical to Roe v Wade’s: A dubious Constitutional basis that limits the explicit Constitutional right of states to self-determine whatever is not in the Constitution. The difference is what’s on the outside. Roe v Wade has the skin of a high-stakes, deeply felt, extremely important issue, Grow v Shade has that of niche interests and largely inconsequential effects. But they both would set the same precedence: The federal government can find a weak connection between something they want to be in charge of and take the right away from states to disagree with them, and that is equally dangerous.

The job of the Supreme Court isn’t to decide what to hang on the structures in place, it’s to ensure that the skeleton beneath our rule of law is a good one. That it’s strong, consistent, and forms something beautiful. A bone that allows them to find dubious grounds to exert federal authority is ugly and misshapen, and it needed to go– whether it was dressed up as abortion rights or arboreal rights.

I think that’s why the Justices decided to overturn Roe v Wade. (If even RBG conceded it was bad law, you know there’s something wonky about it.) They understood their role isn’t to advance an agenda or dictate policy, it is simply to maintain good, strong bones.

They succeeded in that today.