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“After nearly two hours of oral argument on Wednesday in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, [Justice Clarence] Thomas and the other members of the court’s six-justice conservative majority seemed poised to uphold a Mississippi law that bans almost all abortions after the 15th week of pregnancy.” SCOTUSblog
Here’s our prior coverage of the case. The Flip Side
The right is optimistic that the Court will overturn Roe.
“Defenders of Roe argued that reversing the case would be disruptive, that women have relied on the precedent to guarantee access to abortion for almost 50 years. Yet [the late Justice Ruth Bader] Ginsburg’s 1992 remarks demonstrate that Roe itself was also disruptive. It completely ruptured the prior legal regime, and our nation has been living with the fallout ever since…
“If the Court reverses Roe, it won’t do so because the majority hates women or views women as second-class citizens. Indeed, a woman would almost certainly be in the Court’s majority, and the Court would leave intact the ability of legislatures to protect abortion rights. Instead it will be because the majority embraces a constitutional order that limits the power of the judiciary to write laws and expands the power of the people to define the heart of liberty for themselves.”
David French, The Atlantic
“A few months after Roe was decided, the (pro-choice) legal scholar John Hart Ely noted that Roe had created a ‘super-protected right’ that ‘is not inferable from the language of the Constitution, the framers’ thinking respecting the specific problem in issue, any general value derivable from the provisions they included, or the nation’s governmental structure,’ and thus answered ‘a question the Constitution has not made the Court’s business.’ Roe ‘is bad,’ Ely concluded, ‘because it is bad constitutional law, or rather because it is not constitutional law and gives almost no sense of an obligation to try to be.’ And that should be enough to justify its dissolution…
“[Justice Sonia] Sotomayor suggested more than once that if the Court were to overturn Roe, it might be seen as acting in a ‘political’ manner. But it was Roe that was ‘political.’ Overturning it, and returning it to the people, would be anti-politics. Unlike, say, jury trials or free speech or the right to bear arms, abortion was never a question for the courts, and for them to dispense with it for good would be a significant win for separation of powers.”
Charles C. W. Cooke, National Review
“Decades of advancements in science and technology have enhanced our understanding that human life begins at conception. We now know, for example, that an unborn child’s heart is actively beating around the fifth or sixth week. Pain receptors begin forming around the seventh week…
“Not only does Mississippi’s law limiting elective abortion after 15 weeks align with new scientific insights, it is in line with the laws in Europe where countries are often considered much more progressive than the U.S. The majority of these European nations restrict elective abortions to 12 weeks. An overwhelming 47 out of 50 European nations either prohibit elective abortions or limit them to 15 weeks or earlier…
“Public opinion also supports limits for abortion that Roe doesn’t allow. A large majority (76%) of Americans consistently say they want abortion limited to – at most – the first three months of pregnancy. Poll after poll confirms these findings.”
Jeanne Mancini, Fox News
The left worries that the Court will overturn Roe.
The left worries that the Court will overturn Roe.
"The justices should have no illusions: A partial or total reversal of Roe would devastate not only the Americans who rely on the abortion rights that have been theirs for nearly 50 years, but also the court itself, undermining its legitimacy… The court’s authority derives not from its ability to enforce its declarations — it lacks any such power — but from the fact that Americans respect its decisions. Those decisions must reflect something greater than mere whim or raw political power in the Senate. The court should overturn precedent only in exceptional circumstances…
“Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh on Wednesday cited landmark cases such as Brown v. Board of Education, which overturned previous court holdings, to argue that the court sometimes makes its most important decisions when it breaks with past rulings. The justices should take no comfort in this strained comparison. If the court substantially reverses or strikes Roe, Americans will not remember it as a moment of overdue progress but as an undue contraction of Americans’ constitutional rights that does deep and immediate harm to millions. That would indeed be a bleak day for the court."
Editorial Board, Washington Post
“In what other context is someone’s body, health and daily life commandeered to save another? No one would countenance a law that said a person who is a bone marrow or organ match is legally obligated to donate to another. There may be a moral imperative (if the person’s life and health would not be impacted), but we do not override an individual’s bodily integrity against his or her will even for noble purposes. We generally do not punish bystanders who refuse to come to the rescue of others in distress, especially when there is any risk to themselves…
“In no other context does ‘innocent life’ eviscerate all other liberties and interests… This is about denying women in particular the power to decide whether to undergo a substantial physical, hormonal, emotional and financial obligation for nine months.”
Jennifer Rubin, Washington Post
“The central premise of Roe, which Mississippi seeks to overturn, is about women’s right to make fundamental decisions about their lives, futures and families. If we lose the ability to control our bodies and our futures, so many of the gains women have made will be undone. At stake are not only indignities and inequities but the rights to self-determination and equal opportunity that would fall along with Roe."
Billie Jean King, Washington Post
"What passes for a compromise on abortion law has changed fundamentally. Roberts thought that the Court would go for superficially preserving Roe while allowing states to ban most (if not all) abortions, but that does not seem to be enough for this Court. Instead, we seem to be headed toward the idea of ‘compromise’ that Kavanaugh hinted at: a Supreme Court that immediately reverses Roe now that its membership has changed, without qualification or apology. That, Kavanaugh suggests, will be the ultimate compromise: a neutral, apolitical Court. Good luck convincing anyone of that.”
Mary Ziegler, The Atlantic
