Roe v. Wade's survival just got a little more unlikely [View all]

[Celerity]

Chief Justice Roberts has been a voice for restraint on abortion. But now the conservatives don't even need his vote.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/05/17/roe-v-wades-survival-just-got-little-more-unlikely/



Until now, many observers of the Supreme Court (myself included) shared a theory about how the court would probably handle Roe v. Wade in the coming years. Though it’s often hard to predict what the justices will do, the theory held that they would attempt to destroy Roe without overruling it. They would chip away at it little by little, using multiple cases under narrow legal justifications most people wouldn’t really understand to erode abortion rights until we reach the same destination as a repeal of Roe. The right to an abortion would exist in states run by Democrats but effectively disappear in states run by Republicans. What they wouldn’t do is just repeal it outright, since that would be too politically dangerous for the GOP.

But maybe they will after all. Or, at the very least, they may gut Roe in such dramatic fashion that it will be the same as repealing it — not just legally, but politically as well. The court has announced that it will be hearing the case of a Mississippi law that was so clearly in violation of Supreme Court precedent that the very fact the court is taking the case is reason to fear:



The Supreme Court has repeatedly said in the past that states cannot ban abortion before “viability," when a foetus can survive on its own outside the womb. But in the Mississippi case, the court said that it will be examining whether “all pre-viability prohibitions on elective abortions are unconstitutional.” If they were to throw out the viability standard, it would be open season for conservative states to regulate abortion rights out of existence. This will be the first abortion case to reach the court since Amy Coney Barrett replaced Ruth Bader Ginsburg, and precisely no one on the right or the left believes Barrett is anything other than a committed opponent of abortion rights. That’s one of the reasons Donald Trump picked her for the job.

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