Inside the Supreme Court’s negotiations and compromise on Idaho’s abortion ban

By Joan Biskupic, CNN Chief Supreme Court Analyst
Mon July 29, 2024

The Supreme Court began the year poised to build on its 2022 decision overturning Roe v. Wade and to deliver a new blow to abortion access.

In January, the court took the extraordinary step of letting Idaho enforce its ban on abortion with an exception only to prevent the death of a pregnant woman, despite an ongoing challenge from the Biden administration arguing that it intruded on federal protections for emergency room care.

Continued: https://www.cnn.com/2024/07/29/politics/supreme-court-idaho-abortion-emtala-biskupic/index.html

USA – The Supreme Court’s Abortion Pill Ruling Should Satisfy Nobody

BY DAHLIA LITHWICK AND MARK JOSEPH STERN
JUNE 13, 2024

On Thursday, the Supreme Court did the bare minimum necessary to operate like an actual court of law, unanimously throwing out an absurd and dangerous lawsuit against medication abortion. The justices do not deserve extra credit for refusing to embrace this deeply unserious litigation, and they should earn no gold stars for maintaining the legal status quo on abortion pills. They merely acted as minimally responsible adults in a room of sugared-up preschoolers, shutting down the lower courts’ lawless rampage over all known rules of standing in desperate pursuit of an anti-abortion agenda. It is chilling to the bone that activist lawyers and judges were able to wreak as much havoc as they did before SCOTUS put them in timeout.

And this bad joke of a case isn’t even over: A lower court has already teed up a do-over that could once again jeopardize access to reproductive care in all 50 states. Don’t call this decision a victory. It is at best a reprieve—an election-year performance of Supreme Court unanimity and sobriety that masks the damage the conservative supermajority has already inflicted, as well as the threats to reproductive freedom that lie ahead.

Continued: https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2024/06/supreme-court-abortion-pill-ruling-2024-comstock-threat.html

13.06.2024

FDA v. Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine

The US supreme court heard one of the most sadistic, extreme anti-abortion cases yet

Idaho’s law requires doctors to treat pregnant women’s health as disposable – and the loss of their lives as an acceptable risk

Moira Donegan
Thu 25 Apr 2024

The risk of stating plainly what Idaho argued at the US supreme court on Wednesday morning is that it is so sadistic and extreme that people might not believe you. Idaho has one of the most restrictive abortion bans in the country. Prohibiting all abortions at any stage of gestation, with no exceptions for rape or incest, the Idaho law allows doctors to perform abortions in cases where the life – but not “merely” the health – of the pregnant woman is at risk.

In practice, this has wound up being a ban on abortions needed to save women’s lives: according to Idaho hospitals, six pregnant women experiencing medical emergencies have had to be airlifted across state lines to hospitals in states with life and health exemptions in the months since Idaho began enforcing its abortion ban. One way to describe this state of affairs is to say that Idaho’s abortion law has come into conflict with medical best practice. Another way to describe it is to say that the law has forced pregnant women to flee the state for their lives.

Continued: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2024/apr/25/supreme-court-idaho-anti-abortion-case

25.04.2024

Opinion

Anya Cook

Elizabeth Prelogar

Emergency Medical Treatment and Labor Act

USA – Justices appear skeptical of call to restrict abortion pill

A decision, likely to come in June, would be a major victory for the FDA’s authority to regulate prescription drugs and for abortion-rights advocates who have sought to protect access to mifepristone.

By ALICE MIRANDA OLLSTEIN and JOSH GERSTEIN
03/26/2024

The Supreme Court on Tuesday appeared skeptical of an effort to restrict access to a widely used abortion pill — with conservative and liberal justices alike raising questions about whether anti-abortion doctors can prove concrete injuries that give them standing to sue and whether a national judicial ruling rolling back availability of the drug is justified.

During the roughly 90 minutes of oral arguments, two conservative justices likely to be pivotal votes in the case — Neil Gorsuch and Amy Coney Barrett — expressed repeated doubts about harms the anti-abortion physicians claimed they’ve faced in treating patients who’ve taken abortion pills and needed follow-up care. Those two justices also questioned whether curtailing access to the drug would address those alleged harms.

Continued: https://www.politico.com/news/2024/03/26/scotus-restrict-abortion-pill-mifepristone-00149039

26.03.2024

News

Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine

Amy Coney Barrett

Chief Justice John Roberts

Elizabeth Prelogar

Erin Hawley

Ketanji Brown Jackson

USA – The Current Attack on Abortion Pills Will Fail. The Next One Will Be So Much Worse.

BY DAHLIA LITHWICK AND MARK JOSEPH STERN
MARCH 26, 2024

There are always a couple of tells when the most conservative Supreme Court in more than a century finds itself adjudicating a truly mortifying and meritless case. One is that it’s coming up by way of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit, a court that so consistently shovels its worst constitutional garbage upward that the high court conservatives are often forced to reluctantly lob it back. Another tell is when the facts of the case are so laugh-out-loud insane that even conservative justices can’t bring themselves to adopt them or the underpinning legal reasoning with a straight face. There’s yet a third tell: when the conservative justices start injecting a bunch of nonsense and randomized pet peeves into oral argument to distract from how embarrassing it would be to discuss the merits of the actual case.

Continued: https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2024/03/mifepristone-supreme-court-alito-national-abortion-ban.html

U.S. Supreme Court puts temporary hold on ruling that limits access to abortion drug

The decision means that, at least for now, women can still obtain mifepristone by mail as the legal battle continues.

April 14, 2023
By Lawrence Hurley

WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court on Friday temporarily blocked a court decision that prevents patients from obtaining the key abortion pill mifepristone by mail.

In a brief order issued by Justice Samuel Alito, the court put on hold in full a decision issued by Texas-based U.S. District Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk that handed a sweeping victory to abortion opponents. Both the Justice Department and Danco Laboratories, which makes the brand version of mifepristone, Mifeprex, had asked the court to immediately step in.

Continued: https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/supreme-court/drugmaker-asks-supreme-court-block-abortion-pill-ruling-rcna79694

There’s a Glaring Weakness in Justice Alito’s Case Against Roe v. Wade

BY KATE SHAW AND STEVEN MAZIE
MAY 27, 2022

It has been more than three weeks since the bombshell leak of a draft opinion in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization—the pending Supreme Court case that could end abortion rights in America as we know them. Justice Samuel Alito’s draft pronounces Roe v. Wade, the 1973 decision recognizing a constitutional right to terminate a pregnancy, “egregiously wrong from the start.”

Laced with contempt for a right that has stood for 49 years, the Dobbs draft overrules Roe along with the 1992 follow-on decision Planned Parenthood v. Casey. The weaknesses of the draft are many: a shockingly narrow view of constitutional rights; an insistence that killing “an unborn human being” poses a “critical moral question” with no acknowledgement that commandeering wombs might raise an ethical quandary, too; reasoning that, despite dubious disclaimers, puts other rights—including contraception, sexual intimacy, and marriage equality—at risk.

Continued: https://time.com/6182093/roe-v-wade-alito-abortion-reliance-interests/

Sarah Weddington, Texan who argued Roe vs. Wade before the Supreme Court, dies at 76

Weddington’s death comes as the U.S. Supreme Court considers the most serious challenge to the landmark abortion rights case in years.

By BeLynn Hollers, Dallas News
Dec 26, 2021

Sarah Weddington, a trailblazer for women’s rights known for her role arguing the landmark Roe vs. Wade case before the U.S. Supreme Court, died in her sleep Sunday morning. She was 76.

Weddington is best known as the youngest person to argue before the high court at age 26 in 1971 -- in one of the most controversial cases in the court’s history, Roe vs. Wade. The milestone ruling in the case that legalized abortion came in 1973.

Continued: https://www.dallasnews.com/news/politics/2021/12/26/roe-vs-wade-lawyer-sarah-weddington-passes-away/

The Supreme Court Gaslights Its Way to the End of Roe

Dec. 3, 2021
By Linda Greenhouse, Contributing Opinion Writer

There are many reasons for dismay over the Supreme Court argument in the Mississippi abortion case, but it was the nonstop gaslighting that really got to me.

First there was Justice Clarence Thomas, pretending by his questions actually to be interested in how the Constitution might be interpreted to provide for the right to abortion, a right he has denounced and schemed to overturn since professing to the Senate Judiciary Committee 30 years ago that he never even thought about the matter.

Continued: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/12/03/opinion/abortion-supreme-court.html

With Roe in question, justices dig into private debate

By MARK SHERMAN and JESSICA GRESKO, Associated Press
Dec 2, 2021

WASHINGTON (AP) — Historic Supreme Court arguments over abortion behind them, the justices soon will begin the work of crafting a decision that could dramatically limit abortion rights in the United States.

They will meet in private before the week ends and take an initial vote on whether to uphold Mississippi’s ban on abortions after 15 weeks of pregnancy. But it will be months before a decision is issued.

Continued: https://apnews.com/article/abortion-us-supreme-court-health-united-states-mississippi-65751e1b9ca7d34f1458ffe9729f82b2

With hundreds of demonstrators outsid