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

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

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