Behind the Scenes at the Dismantling of Roe v. Wade

By Jodi Kantor and Adam Liptak
Dec. 15, 2023

On Feb. 10 last year, Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. showed his eight colleagues how he intended to uproot the constitutional right to abortion.

At 11:16 a.m., his clerk circulated a 98-page draft opinion in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization. After a justice shares an opinion inside the court, other members scrutinize it. Those in the majority can request revisions, sometimes as the price of their votes, sweating sentences or even words.

Continued: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/15/us/supreme-court-dobbs-roe-abortion.html

5 Takeaways From Inside the Overturning of Roe v. Wade

A Times investigation reveals the behind-the-scenes story of how the Supreme Court abolished the constitutional right to abortion.

By Jodi Kantor and Adam Liptak
Dec. 15, 2023

By the time the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade last year, a draft of the ruling had been leaked to the press and the outcome was anticipated. The story behind the decision seemed obvious: The constitutional right to abortion effectively had died with Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, whose replacement, Amy Coney Barrett, was a favorite of the anti-abortion movement.

But that version is far from complete. The New York Times pieced together the hidden narrative behind this titanic shift in the law, drawing on internal documents, contemporaneous notes and interviews with court insiders who had real-time knowledge of the events.

Continued: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/15/us/supreme-court-dobbs-roe-abortion-takeaways.html

Anti-abortion attorneys ascend federal government ranks with Christian right legal training

The conservative Christian law firm Alliance Defending Freedom’s expansive ties include federal judges and most recently Speaker of the House

BY: SOFIA RESNICK
DECEMBER 10, 2023

When Mississippi Solicitor General Scott G. Stewart presented Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization to the U.S. Supreme Court in December 2021, he argued that state lawmakers should be able to ban abortion at any time in pregnancy, not just after so-called “viability,” the point where a fetus could survive outside of a uterus. The U.S. Constitution, he said, does not specifically protect the “purposeful termination of a human life.”

“The viability line discounts and disregards state interests,” Stewart said, according to the transcript of the oral arguments, contending that state lawmakers should be able to draw an earlier line on when they believe human life officially begins.

Continued: https://www.nevadacurrent.com/2023/12/10/anti-abortion-attorneys-ascend-federal-government-ranks-with-christian-right-legal-training/

10.12.2023

Commentary

Alliance Defending Freedom

Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine

Americans United for the Separation of Church and State

Amy Coney Barrett

Andrew Seidel

anti-choice lies

anti-choice misinformation

anti-choice misogyny

Blackstone Legal Fellowship

Center for Judicial Renewal

Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization

Emergency Medical Treatment and Labor Act

Food and Drug Administration

Movement Advancement Project

Young Lawyers Academy

How Ginsburg’s death and Kavanaugh’s maneuvering shaped the Supreme Court’s reversal of Roe v. Wade and abortion rights

By Joan Biskupic, CNN Senior Supreme Court Analyst
Thu March 23, 2023

Editor’s Note: Adapted from “NINE BLACK ROBES: Inside the Supreme Court’s Drive to the Right and Its Historic Consequences,” by Joan Biskupic, to be published April 4 by William Morrow.

Within days of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s memorial service in late September 2020, boxes of her files and other office possessions were moved down to a dark, windowless theater on the Supreme Court’s ground floor, where – before the ongoing pandemic – tourists could watch a film about court operations.

Grieving aides to the justice who’d served 27 years and become a cultural icon known as the “Notorious RBG” sorted through the chambers’ contents there.

Continued: https://www.cnn.com/2023/03/23/politics/supreme-court-abortion-joan-biskupic-nine-black-robes/index.html

Sotomayor felt ‘shell-shocked’ after U.S. Supreme Court’s abortion decision

By Karen Sloan, Reuters
January 4, 2023

SAN DIEGO - Liberal Justice Sonia Sotomayor on Wednesday told legal educators she felt a "sense of despair" at the direction taken by the U.S. Supreme Court during its previous term, during which its conservative majority overturned the constitutional right to abortion.

Sotomayor, who has dissented in major cases including the abortion decision as the court's 6-3 conservative majority has become increasingly assertive, described herself as "shell-shocked" and "deeply sad" after that term ended in June.

Continued: https://www.reuters.com/world/us/sotomayor-felt-shell-shocked-after-us-supreme-courts-abortion-decision-2023-01-04/

04.01.2023

Featured

News

Association of American Law Schools

Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization

Stephen Breyer’s Unique Legacy on Abortion

His Supreme Court successor should keep in mind the power of digging deep into data — and reminding all the justices how their rulings would affect real Americans.

Opinion by MARY ZIEGLER
01/28/2022

Justice Stephen Breyer is scheduled to leave the Supreme Court just as his conservative colleagues are poised to dismantle a key part of his legacy: the court’s approach to a right to choose abortion.

Breyer’s name might not immediately come to mind when anyone thinks about abortion rights. Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, the late feminist icon, was arguably the court’s most eloquent defender of reproductive rights. Justice Sonia Sotomayor has taken on that role in the current court. Justice Anthony Kennedy, who long cast the swing vote in abortion cases, helped both to save abortion rights in 1992 and to water down protections for them, holding that abortion regulations would be unconstitutional only if they created an “undue burden.”

Continued: https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2022/01/28/steve-breyens-supremecourt-replacement-abortion-data-00000019

California governor pushes for gun laws modeled on Texas abortion ban

SUN, DEC 12 2021

California Governor Gavin Newsom said he plans to use a controversial U.S. Supreme Court ruling on strict abortion curbs in Texas to design a law that would allow private citizens to sue some gun manufacturers, distributors and sellers.

The Supreme Court on Friday left in effect the Texas law that enables private citizens to sue anyone who performs or assists a woman in getting an abortion after about six weeks of pregnancy.

Continued: https://www.cnbc.com/2021/12/12/california-governor-pushes-for-gun-laws-modeled-on-texas-abortion-ban.html

12.12.2021

The supreme court’s abortion ruling is even more unsettling than it may seem

In allowing Texas’s outrageous abortion ban to stay in place, the court signaled that it is willing to sacrifice its own legitimacy and power in order to destroy Roe

Moira Donegan
Sat 11 Dec 2021

Don’t be fooled by the supreme court’s nominal hedging on its endorsement of SB8, the Texas abortion ban that deputizes private citizens to sue anyone who assists in an abortion after six weeks’ gestation. In a ruling on Friday, the court held that a lawsuit by Texas abortion providers could go forward – but only on narrow grounds. Only those state officials responsible for licensing medical providers may be sued, the court ordered – no one else involved in the state’s practical maintenance of SB8 is liable. The ruling said, for instance, that the providers could not sue court clerks, those bureaucrats tasked with actually docketing the lawsuits that would enforce SB8.

Continued: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/dec/11/supreme-court-abortion-ruling-unsettling

The arguments about abortion in the US are about one thing: controlling women

Anti-abortionists are intent on enhancing men’s privileges, while women cannot even have rights over their own bodies

Rebecca Solnit
Fri 10 Dec 2021

A lot of people with a lot of power don’t see why women should have jurisdiction over their own bodies. That’s the anti-abortion argument in a nutshell, in that they claim a foetus, or even an embryo, or in some cases even a fertilised egg too small for the human eye to see, has rights that supersede those of the person inside whose body that egg, embryo or foetus might be.

What was clear from the rightwing pundits and conservative supreme court justices who have piped up over the last month as arguments were being heard in the most significant abortion rights case since Roe v Wade, is that in a country whose constitution is supposed to grant us all a lot of rights, they are happy to strip away a right so fundamental it’s unimaginable in other circumstances – or that it would be stripped from other people, namely men.

Continued: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/dec/10/arguments-abortion-us-controlling-women-anti-abortionists-women-rights-over-bodies

Supreme Court thwarts bid to block SB8 on ‘dark day’ for Texas abortion rights

The justices ruled more than 3 months after allowing SB8 to go ahead.

By Devin Dwyer
10 December 2021

The U.S. Supreme Court on Friday said a narrowly tailored challenge to Texas' near-total ban on abortions, SB8, could proceed in federal courts but declined for a second time to put the law on hold.

The decision, authored by Justice Neil Gorsuch, all but foreclosed hope for a sweeping federal court order halting SB8 enforcement in Texas, abortion rights advocates said.

Continued: https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/supreme-court-acts-texas-abortion-law-sb8/story?id=80973461