Senate Set To Vote On 20-Week Abortion Ban, Part Of Decades-Long Effort To Undo Roe [View all]

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The Senate is set to take a procedural vote on a House-passed bill that would ban abortion after 20 weeks of pregnancy, part of a long-running strategy to set up a legal challenge to Roe v. Wade.

In a 2015 article for Mother Jones, Molly Redden delved into the history of state 20-week bans, which were designed from the start to “push the envelope” on Roe:

In 1984, these bills became a formal strategy for defeating Roe. That’s when a Northwestern University law professor named Victor Rosenblum proposed that abortion opponents should seek to pass laws that gnawed at its edges, and hope that judges would let those revisions stand. The so-called incrementalists notched their biggest victory in 1989, when the Supreme Court upheld parts of a controversial Missouri law that required doctors to perform costly viability tests before performing abortions for women who appeared to be at least 20 weeks pregnant. The case, Webster v. Reproductive Health Services, demonstrated just how powerful a weapon a 20-week measure could be. Justice Thurgood Marshall’s papers revealed that the conservative majority in Webster had come within one vote of using the 20-week provision to strike down Roe entirely. The liberal justices went as far as drafting a dissent that read, “Roe no longer survives.”

http://www.rightwingwatch.org/post/senate-set-to-vote-on-20-week-abortion-ban-part-of-decades-long-effort-to-undo-roe/