How Trump Transformed the Supreme Court

The legal journalist Linda Greenhouse expects the new conservative majority to change American law on abortion, religion, and affirmative action.

By Isaac Chotiner
November 11, 2021

Despite serving only one term in office, Donald Trump was able to appoint three Justices to the Supreme Court, giving it a six-member conservative majority. In September, the Court declined to block enforcement of a controversial Texas law that prohibits abortions in the state after approximately six weeks of pregnancy and allows almost anyone to sue a person who “aided or abetted” an abortion after that point. After a public outcry, the Court heard expedited arguments on the law earlier this month. Later this term, the Court will also consider the legality of a Mississippi law that bans abortions after fifteen weeks, a case that could result in the Court overturning Roe v. Wade. This week, I spoke about the Court with Linda Greenhouse, a lecturer at Yale Law School and a contributing writer for the Times, where she reported on the Court for almost thirty years. She is the author of the new book “Justice on the Brink: The Death of Ruth Bader Ginsburg, the Rise of Amy Coney Barrett, and Twelve Months That Transformed the Supreme Court,” which recounts the time between Justice Ginsburg’s death and the conclusion of the Court’s first term with Justice Barrett.

Continued: https://www.newyorker.com/news/q-and-a/how-trump-transformed-the-supreme-court

Most democracies are expanding abortion access. The U.S. is retracting it

October 21, 2021
Martha F. Davis and Fiona de Londras

Fifty years ago, the United States was a global leader in recognizing women’s reproductive rights. Today, however, much of the rest of the world has caught up or surpassed the U.S. in extending abortion access.

The United States’ closest legal peers — Canada, the United Kingdom, New Zealand, and Australia — have laws that are either in line with or more generous than those here. Like the U.S., other liberal democracies including the Netherlands and Iceland, also protect the right to abortion until or near the point of viability. This is what makes the Supreme Court’s threatened reversal of Roe v. Wade not only dangerous and life-threatening, but legally indefensible.

Continued: https://www.wbur.org/cognoscenti/2021/10/21/supreme-court-abortion-dobbs-texas-martha-f-davis-fiona-de-londras

Opinion – Only women have abortions

Womanhood is a question of material reality, not identity.

Ann Furedi
30th September 2021

Following a barrage of criticism, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) has apologised for revising an iconic speech by the late Supreme Court justice, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, to fit with today’s woke-speak.

At RBG’s confirmation hearing in 1993, a time when anti-choice activism was rife in the US, she was asked about her position on abortion. She did not mince her words:

Continued: https://www.spiked-online.com/2021/09/30/only-women-have-abortions/

30.09.2021

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Cecile Richards marks a year since RBG death with abortion rights battle cry

Former Planned Parenthood president cites Texas law and says Republicans are on brink of ending right to abortion

Martin Pengelly and agencies
Sat 18 Sep 2021

Marking the first anniversary of the death of the supreme court justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Cecile Richards warned that after nearly 50 years, Republicans are on the brink of ending the right to abortion.

“We must fight to fully regain it,” said the former president of Planned Parenthood, a leading provider of women’s healthcare.

Continued: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/sep/18/abortion-rights-campaigner-anniversary-rbg-death

18.09.2021

American Bridge 21st Century

How the Real Jane Roe Shaped the Abortion Wars

The all-too-human plaintiff of Roe v. Wade captured the messy contradictions hidden by a polarizing debate.

By Margaret Talbot
September 13, 2021

Roe v. Wade may be the rare Supreme Court decision that most Americans can name, but it’s also one of the few that many volubly disparage—and not just anti-abortion activists who want to get rid of it altogether. Ruth Bader Ginsburg was a staunch advocate of access to abortion but an open critic of the reasoning behind Roe. She thought the rationale should have centered on preventing sex discrimination rather than on preserving a right to privacy. “The image you get from reading the Roe v. Wade opinion is it’s mostly a doctor’s-rights case—a doctor’s right to prescribe what he thinks his patient needs,” Ginsburg told the legal writer and scholar Jeffrey Rosen, in 2019. “My idea of how choice should have developed was not a privacy notion, not a doctor’s-right notion, but a woman’s right to control her own destiny, to be able to make choices without a Big Brother state telling her what she can and cannot do.”

Continued: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/09/20/how-the-real-jane-roe-shaped-the-abortion-wars

What happens if the Supreme Court throws out Roe v. Wade?

Analysis by Zachary B. Wolf, CNN
Sat July 24, 2021

In some alternate universe, Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg retired during the Obama presidency and Democrats were able to push through a successor to the conservative Justice Antonin Scalia.

In that universe, nobody is talking about an end to nearly 50 years of nationwide access to abortion rights.

Continued: https://www.cnn.com/2021/07/24/politics/what-matters-roe-v-wade-decision-and-breyer/index.html

24.07.2021

Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization

Mississippi asks Supreme Court to overturn Roe v. Wade in upcoming case

By Robert Barnes
July 22, 2021

Mississippi is asking the Supreme Court to overrule Roe v. Wade in order to uphold the state’s restrictions on abortion access, and to renounce the court’s landmark holding a half-century ago that the Constitution protects a woman’s right to obtain an abortion.

The state’s bold request is in a brief filed Thursday that seeks to persuade the court it should approve a law that would ban most abortions after 15 weeks of pregnancy, far earlier than now allowed.

Continued: https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/courts_law/mississippi-abortion-supreme-court-roe-v-wade/2021/07/22/9b30cb8a-eb23-11eb-97a0-a09d10181e36_story.html

USA – The potential silver lining for supporters of abortion rights

The Supreme Court could be on the verge of gutting or overturning Roe v. Wade. But that wouldn’t be the end of the story.

By Mary Ziegler
May 20, 2021

The Supreme Court agreed this week to hear the most significant abortion case in decades, and abortion-rights supporters are panicking.

Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health involves a Mississippi law banning abortion at or after 15 weeks of pregnancy, with exceptions for some medical emergencies and severe fetal abnormalities. Most abortions — over 92 percent, according to the most recent data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention — occur in the first trimester, and if the Mississippi law is allowed to stand, those wouldn’t be blocked. But pro-choice Americans have reason to be concerned. To uphold Mississippi’s law, the court’s conservative six-justice majority would have to overturn at least part of Roe v. Wade and the abortion-rights cases that followed it. That’s because Roe recognized a right to choose abortion before fetal viability — the point at which survival outside the womb is possible — which is usually somewhere between 22 and 24 weeks. Because Mississippi’s ban would kick in much earlier, the court will be able to uphold it only by eliminating Roe’s language about fetal viability or by reversing Roe altogether.

Continued: https://www.bostonglobe.com/2021/05/20/opinion/potential-silver-lining-supporters-abortion-rights/

Trump’s Supreme Court threatens abortion rights for a lifetime to come

When Trump added three anti-abortion conservatives to the Supreme Court, he pretty much guaranteed a roll-back of women’s rights.

May 4, 2021 By Laura Bassett, MSNBC Opinion Columnist

Until now, 2011 was the most brutal year for abortion rights in recent history. In the 12 months after the “red wave” in the 2010 midterm elections, Republicans enacted 92 abortion restrictions across 24 states, kicking off a so-called “war on women” that shut down dozens of abortion clinics across the country and dominated the national political conversation through 2014.

Then Donald Trump happened, and he distracted the nation with his near daily disasters, stunts and scandals. He also added three anti-abortion conservatives to the Supreme Court, one of them replacing feminist icon Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, thus pretty much guaranteeing a rollback of women’s rights.

Continued: https://www.msnbc.com/opinion/trump-s-supreme-court-threatens-abortion-rights-lifetime-come-n1266261

NARAL President Ilyse Hogue says the organization is ‘certainly preparing’ for the end of Roe v. Wade

John L. Dorman
Jan 3, 2021

NARAL Pro-Choice America president Ilyse Hogue said in a recent Daily Beast podcast interview that the organization is working to protect women's reproductive rights in the wake of a sharply conservative Supreme Court that came to fruition during President Donald Trump's tenure.

During an episode of "The New Abnormal" featuring editor-at-large Molly Jong-Fast, the discussion about women's healthcare landed on Roe v. Wade, the 1973 Supreme Court decision that legalized abortion in the US and afforded women a constitutional right to the procedure. For decades, conservatives have sought to overturn the ruling, but lacked a lopsided majority on the Supreme Court, one that they now possess with the installation of Judges Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett to the court.

Continued: https://www.businessinsider.com/naral-president-ilyse-hogue-roe-vs-wade-women-reproductive-rights-2021-01