In October 2020, following four days of hearings before the Senate Judiciary Committee, would-be Supreme Court justice Amy Coney Barrett provided a series of answers to questions various lawmakers still had, and 13 months later, only one of them really sticks out in the mind. Specifically, we are still thinking about the one in which Barrett claimed she couldn’t “offer an opinion” on “hypotheticals,” in response to the question: “Under an originalist theory of interpretation, would there be any constitutional problem with a state making abortion a capital crime, thus subjecting women who get abortions to the death penalty?”
In other words, Barrett—who has called abortion “always immoral” and once signed a letter calling for the end of the “barbaric” Roe v. Wade—did and presumably still does believe there are certain scenarios in which undergoing the medical procedure should be punishable by death. If she didn’t, she could have just answered the question with a “no.” Anyway, just something to think about as the court is asked to gut nearly 50 years of precedent on reproductive rights.
Per Insider:
As Insider notes, the court’s three liberals—Stephen Breyer, Sonia Sotomayor, and Elena Kagan—will obviously strike down the Mississippi law as unconstitutional, while there’s no question that arch conservatives Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito will relish the opportunity to kill Roe. While Neil Gorsuch “has a sparse judicial record on the issue,” he‘s a Trump-appointed conservative who has sided with abortion restrictions during his time on the high court. Though legal experts say it’s difficult to guess where Chief Justice John Roberts will land, he “tends to be a believer in stare decisis, a legal principle that translates to sticking with precedent,” which would suggest he might try to persuade Kavanaugh and Barrett to come to his side and uphold Roe. “But he doesn‘t actually have control,” Ziegler noted, and based on their questions during oral arguments today, it certainly sounds as though Barrett and Kavanaugh have their minds made up.
Per the L.A. Times:
If Roe is overturned, abortion will, in almost all cases, immediately or very quickly become illegal in at least 20 states. As Axios noted on Wednesday, if that happens—and a pregnant person doesn’t want to be forced to carry a child to term and then give it up, as Barrett has so casually suggested they should—the average American would have to travel about 125 miles to reach the nearest abortion provider, and much farther for many. According to data from the Guttmacher Institute, for a Florida resident, the average one-way driving distance under a full abortion ban would be 575 miles, which represents a 6,803% increase. In Louisiana, it would be 666 miles each way. Which, according to the Supreme Court’s conservative goon squad, is a fair price to pay for getting pregnant.
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