Cassie Buchman
DEC 1, 2023
(NewsNation) — Thirty years before the overturn of Roe v. Wade, Sandra Day O’Connor, who died Friday at the age of 93, was instrumental in keeping abortion legal at the federal level during her tenure.
In 1973, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled on Roe v. Wade, deciding that abortion was federally protected in a 7-2 vote. The New Yorker writes that there was immediate backlash from the Christian right, with many leaders seeking to reverse the ruling.
Roe v. Wade was never expected to be the case that made history.
By Emily Bazelon
May 20, 2022
For three days in January 1970, they filled the 13th floor of the federal courthouse in Manhattan, women of all ages crowded into a conference room, sitting on the floor, spilling into the hallway. Some brought friends or husbands. One nursed a baby. Another was a painter who also taught elementary school. A third had gone to Catholic school. They’d come to give testimony in the case of Abramowicz v. Lefkowitz, the first in the country to challenge a state’s strict abortion law on behalf of women.
The witnesses in the courthouse were among 314 people, primarily women, brought together by a small team of lawyers, led by Florynce Kennedy and Nancy Stearns, to set up a legal argument no one had made before: that a woman’s right to an abortion was rooted in the Constitution’s promises of liberty and equal protection. New York permitted abortion only to save a woman’s life. Kennedy and Stearns wanted the court to understand how risking an illegal procedure or carrying a forced pregnancy could constrict women’s lives in ways that men did not experience.
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/05/20/magazine/roe-v-wade-abortion-rights.html
Antiabortion activists and their Republican allies are on the cusp of reaching a goal they have sought for decades in tossing out the 1973 Supreme Court ruling legalizing abortion.
By Michael Scherer, Josh Dawsey, Caroline Kitchener and Rachel Roubein, Washington Post
May 7, 2022
Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell still remembers the shock he felt when Donald Trump won the 2016 election. He also recalls what happened next.
“The first thing that came to my mind was the Supreme Court,” McConnell said in an interview this past week, remembering his reaction that night as he watched results from a basement office at the National Republican Senatorial Committee. He soon called Donald McGahn, campaign counsel to the president-elect, who was slated to become the top White House lawyer.
Continued: https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/05/07/abortion-movement-roe-wade/
The first state constitutional protection of reproductive rights hints at the contradictions and fears of a divided movement.
Judith Levine
March 14 2022
IF THE SUPREME COURT overturns Roe v. Wade, 26 states are “certain or likely to ban abortion,” according to the Guttmacher Institute. In December, the court heard arguments in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, addressing Mississippi’s Gestational Age Act banning abortion after 15 weeks’ pregnancy. The law is a deliberate violation of Roe, the 1973 ruling legalizing abortion. Most observers expect the conservative majority to rule in Mississippi’s favor. In that case abortion law would revert to the states, where in vast red swaths of this nation it has been so slashed and shredded that it’s already practically confetti.
Continued: https://theintercept.com/2022/03/14/abortion-roe-wade-vermont-human-right/
The Invisible Hand of Justice Stevens on Abortion
He was a leading if often unseen strategist who helped protect a woman’s right to choose.
By Linda Greenhouse
July 20, 2019
During the days following the death last Tuesday of Justice John Paul Stevens, admirers posted lists of their favorite and not-so-favorite Stevens opinions. Free speech on the internet? A great one. No First Amendment protection for burning an American flag? Not so great. Access to federal court for Guantánamo detainees? Definitely. Upholding an Indiana voter ID requirement? Hmm …
Items on these lists, posted on blogs and websites, ranged widely. Missing, however, were opinions dealing with abortion. That’s surprising, since Justice Stevens wrote opinions in many of the abortion cases that came before the court during his 35-year tenure.
Continued: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/20/opinion/sunday/justice-stevens-abortion.html
How Sandra Day O’Connor’s legacy could make it easier to gut abortion rights
Her most influential abortion decision may contain the seeds of Roe v. Wade’s destruction.
By Anna North
Oct 26, 2018
Sandra Day O’Connor, the first woman ever to serve on the Supreme Court, announced on Tuesday that she will step back from public life after a diagnosis of dementia.
O’Connor’s announcement coincides with a turning point on the Supreme Court. Some of her most influential opinions in her 25 years on the Court had to do with abortion rights. A moderate on a Court that moved to the right during her tenure, she cast a crucial vote to uphold Roe v. Wade in Planned Parenthood v. Casey, and she’s often seen today as a defender of abortion rights.
Continued: https://www.vox.com/2018/10/26/18015604/sandra-day-oconnor-justice-supreme-court-kavanaugh
‘Reversing Roe’ Review: Netflix Documentary Condemns the Politicization of Abortion — Telluride
Ricki Stern and Anne Sundberg’s Netflix documentary unpacks the process by which abortion grew from a personal issue to a political one.
David Ehrlich
Sep 1, 2018
Like any abortion documentary worth the time to watch, Ricki Stern and Anne Sundberg’s “Reversing Roe” doesn’t explicitly argue for or against a woman’s right to choose. And while there’s little doubt that Stern and Sundberg could make a persuasive case for reproductive rights, as several interview subjects do, it’s only so valuable to preach to the choir — especially when a film is released into the apolitical cyberspace of Netflix rather than a handful of arthouse theaters in America’s largest and most liberal cities.
Ultimately, “Reversing Roe” is a productive contribution to its ever-growing genre because it sharply dissects the process by which abortion soured from a private medical issue to a public political one.
Continued: https://www.indiewire.com/2018/09/reversing-roe-review-netflix-documentary-1201999510/
How Abortion Rights Will Die a Death by 1,000 Cuts
Brett Kavanaugh's confirmation to the Supreme Court would mean the demise of not just abortion rights but also a century of progressive reforms.
By Serena Mayeri
Aug. 30, 2018
Judge Brett Kavanaugh’s voluminous record, his opinion of the Supreme Court’s landmark abortion ruling, Roe v. Wade, and his views on legal precedent have deservedly been scrutinized in the lead-up to his confirmation hearings next week. But the Supreme Court’s 1992 decision in Planned Parenthood v. Casey, more than Roe, holds the key to understanding the stakes of Judge Kavanaugh’s potential confirmation.
It is Casey that now protects women’s access to reproductive health care in states whose restrictions on health care providers and patients threaten to close clinics or ban abortions outright. And the political lesson conservatives learned from Casey all but guarantees that a vote for Judge Kavanaugh is a vote not only to endanger abortion rights but to turn back the clock on a century of progressive reforms.
Continued: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/30/opinion/brett-kavanaugh-abortion-rights-roe-casey.html
How anti-abortion activists use cutting edge science to justify ever stricter laws
As neonatal science advances, anti-abortion activists are looking to these new techniques to push for more restrictions
Jessica Glenza
Fri 13 Jul 2018
Dr Edward Bell treats the tiniest babies at University of Iowa children’s hospital, pre-term infants who weigh one pound or less, and whose chances of survival are minute.
One of his pet projects is tracking the smallest in the world, which sometimes attracts attention from abortion opponents. But the visitors he received in August 2016 still surprised him.
Joni Ernst, the fiercely anti-abortion Republican US senator from Iowa, sent her staffers to interview Bell. Of interest was an article published in the New England Journal of Medicine, which reignited debate about whether infants as young as 22 weeks old may survive if aggressively treated.
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