Pop Culture

The Supreme Court’s Conservative Goon Squad Seems Poised to Destroy Roe v. Wade

Amy Coney Barrett, for one, has suggested abortion isn’t necessary because people can just carry their pregnancies to term and then put the children up for adoption.

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:

Nine justices [heard] arguments on whether to preserve or undo abortion rights [on Wednesday], but experts say Americans should pay close attention to two members of the court: justices Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett. Legal scholars anticipate that either one of them could have an outsize impact in the case of Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization and determine the fate of reproductive rights in the United States. “If we’re trying to figure out who’s going to cast the deciding vote, it’s going to be one of them,” Mary Ziegler, a law professor at Florida State University and an abortion historian, told Insider.

The closely followed case centers on a 2018 Mississippi law that bans abortions after 15 weeks of pregnancy, challenging the standard held in Roe, which declared that states cannot prohibit abortion before roughly 24 weeks…. The Supreme Court is poised to deliver a ruling on the case by next June, and a combination of guesswork and simple math could leave Kavanaugh and Barrett—both appointed to the bench by former president Donald Trump—holding all the cards, according to legal scholars.

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:

The Supreme Court’s conservatives sounded ready on Wednesday to severely restrict a woman’s right to choose abortion and possibly overturn Roe v. Wade entirely.

“The Constitution is neither pro-life nor pro-choice on abortion,” Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh said, summarizing the argument for overturning Roe v. Wade. He said the court should not “pick sides on the most contentious social debate in American life.”

Justice Amy Coney Barrett said pregnant women who do not want to raise a young child can put the baby up for adoption. If so, she said, the lack of access to abortions should not have a great impact on their lives and careers…. Kavanaugh [also] said some of the court’s greatest rulings had overturned past precedents, including the Brown v. Board of Education ruling in 1954, which overturned past rulings that upheld racial segregation.

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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