Supreme Court live updates: Justices to hear arguments over Mississippi abortion law challenging Roe v. Wade - The Washington Post
The Supreme Court on Wednesday is taking up the most serious challenge in decades to the constitutional right to abortion established in Roe v. Wade in 1973. The Mississippi law at issue bans most abortions after 15 weeks into pregnancy and has not taken effect because lower courts said it violated Roe and the subsequent decision in Planned Parenthood v. Casey, which said states may not ban abortion before viability, usually between 22 and 24 weeks.
Mississippi has only one abortion clinic in the state, and one of its doctors sued, saying the ban imposes an undue burden on the right to abortion. Mississippi told the court that allowing the 2018 law to stand would “scuttle a half-century of precedent.” The state says the Constitution does not protect a right to abortion and that the court’s precedents are “grievously wrong, unworkable, damaging and outmoded.”
Here’s what to know:
- In accepting the case Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, the court said it will decide whether all prohibitions on abortion before viability are unconstitutional. Abortion opponents believe this is their best chance in decades.
- The justices could overturn Roe or find another way to uphold the Mississippi law. The state suggested the court could hold that the law does not impose an “undue burden” on a significant number of women because the Mississippi clinic performs abortions only up to 16 weeks.
- Past court rulings, public appearances and other public comments by the nine justices give insight into their thinking on abortion and court precedents.
- Mississippi is represented by recently hired Solicitor General Scott G. Stewart, a former law clerk to Justice Clarence Thomas. The abortion provider is represented by attorney Julie Rikelman, litigation director for the Center for Reproductive Rights. U.S. Solicitor General Elizabeth B. Prelogar will also argue on behalf of the abortion provider.
If the Supreme Court overturns Roe v. Wade when it rules on the Mississippi case in 2022, the legality of abortion will be left to individual states. While some states have moved to protect access in recent years, legislatures in others passed a record number of abortion restrictions in 2021.
Of those, nine states still have pre-Roe abortion bans on their books that would become enforceable again. (Texas’s is permanently enjoined by a court order.) Twelve states have passed post-Roe “trigger laws” — bans that would take effect if it were overturned. Only 14 states and the District of Columbia have policies that explicitly protect the right to abortion.
Although the Supreme Court will begin hearing oral arguments Wednesday on Mississippi’s new ban on most abortions after 15 weeks of pregnancy, the case probably will not be decided for months. The timing of the decision will be up to the justices; if there are multiple dissents — likely on a court tilted 6 to 3 in conservatives’ favor — the decision will take longer.
In general, the most controversial, difficult Supreme Court cases are often not resolved until the very end of the term that finishes in late June, and this case, a direct challenge to Roe v. Wade, is as controversial as they come. While Roe v. Wade has been settled law for nearly a half-century, some Republican officials have been open about seizing the opportunity to strike down the landmark 1973 decision. If Roe v. Wade is overturned, it would have consequences for laws in states across the country.
On Tuesday, White House press secretary Jen Psaki told reporters that President Biden believes the Mississippi case presents “a grave threat” to women’s fundamental rights, including the constitutional right to safe, legal abortions.
Republican senators, led by Sen. James Lankford (R-Okla.), said Tuesday evening that they hope Dobbs will give states individual control over abortion laws by addressing Roe v. Wade’s viability standard, which they argued is flawed.
“When they created this viability standard, courts have struggled to be able to actually interpret that and apply it,” Lankford said. “I believe this court will take up the legal argument, will take up the scientific examination, and will relook at Roe v. Wade in a whole new way, and will return this country to what it was pre-1973, where each state made their own decisions to be able to protect the lives of every single child.”
Lankford, a conservative Republican who is facing a primary challenge from the right, organized a news conference alongside Mississippi Republican Sens. Cindy Hyde-Smith and Roger Wicker to express hope that the Supreme Court will help overturn Roe by returning “lawmaking to legislators.”
“I’m proud that my state of Mississippi is in the heart of this landmark case,” Hyde-Smith said. “[Dobbs] is the crucial opportunity for our Supreme Court to overturn Roe v. Wade and return the abortion issue to the political process and away from unelected activist judges.”
Mississippi is asking the Supreme Court on Wednesday to affirm its legislature’s judgment that it should be practically impossible to obtain an abortion in the state after 15 weeks of pregnancy.
But the state’s goals are more ambitious than that, significantly raising the stakes on the most important challenge to abortion rights in decades.
Mississippi also has a six-week ban on abortions that has been put on hold by lower courts. And if the Supreme Court agrees with the state’s assertion that Roe v. Wade should be overturned, the state already has decided to ban the procedure altogether, except in cases of rape or “preservation of the mother’s life.”
When the abortion doctor lost his medical license in 2004, Nancy Atkins wasn’t sure how she could keep going. Malachy DeHenre had been the only doctor at the clinic Atkins owned in Jackson, Miss.
Recruiting OB/GYNs to perform abortions anywhere was difficult, but in Mississippi, Atkins had learned, it was nearly impossible. The state had the toughest regulations and the most ardent antiabortion protesters. One activist even regularly told people that killing an abortion provider might count as “justifiable homicide.”
Seventeen years later, Atkins isn’t surprised that her state is the one that some legal observers believe is poised to overturn or seriously undermine Roe v. Wade. On Wednesday, the Supreme Court will hear arguments in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, a challenge to Mississippi’s law banning most abortions after 15 weeks.
The first question on Wednesday is likely to come from the court’s longest-serving justice, Clarence Thomas, the only justice who has directly called for the court to overturn the landmark 1973 Roe v. Wade ruling that guaranteed the right to an abortion.
“The power of a woman to abort her unborn child” is not a liberty protected by the Constitution, according to a dissenting opinion Thomas joined 30 years ago, just months after joining the court.
Thomas is now the most senior member of the court and sitting with more justices who think like him than at any other point in his career. His longevity means that he decides who writes the court’s opinion when he is in the majority and Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. is on the losing side. That is a bit more commonplace now as the court has grown more conservative. With five justices to his right, Roberts’s vote is no longer always key.
Thomas’s influence has grown outside the courtroom as well. His former clerks — there are more than 125 of his “kids,” as Thomas calls them — held many high-ranking positions in the Trump administration, including for a time the role of the administration’s top lawyer at the Supreme Court. Ten have lifetime appointments in the federal judiciary.
While the U.S. Supreme Court listens to oral arguments in the long-awaited Mississippi case that could end the constitutional right to an abortion, Texas is on Day 92 of a near total ban on abortion.
“These cases — Texas and Mississippi — go hand in hand,” said Bhavik Kumar, a family physician and abortion provider in Houston. “What’s unfortunate for me as a physician is we are seeing people every day who need help. Every day for 92 days, people who need to leave our state to get an abortion because they are tethered to an abusive relationship or because of rape or incest or because they can’t provide for a child.”
For over three months in Texas, the nation’s second-largest state, a majority of Supreme Court justices allowed a maverick Texas law to take effect. That law bans nearly all abortions after six weeks of pregnancy.
Many legal experts predicted that the Supreme Court would announce a decision on the Texas case ahead of the hearing on the Mississippi measure.
Restrictions on abortion rights have increased in the past decade as policymakers in mostly Republican-led states have sought to provoke a Supreme Court challenge to Roe v. Wade by banning abortion before viability. But federal judges have generally blocked early-stage abortion bans before they took effect, citing the precedent set by Roe.
In reviewing the new Mississippi law, which would ban almost all abortions after 15 weeks of pregnancy, the Supreme Court said it would examine whether “all pre-viability prohibitions on elective abortions are unconstitutional.”
At the center of the Supreme Court’s most consequential reproductive rights case in decades is Mississippi’s last abortion clinic, known as the “Pink House” for its bubble-gum color.
“Maybe they can’t afford a child. Maybe they were abused, or can’t go home. When you deny them the right to have an abortion and they have to have one, where will they go now?” said a clinic doctor who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he fears for his safety. The doctor travels from another state because local physicians will no longer perform abortions there.
Diane Derzis, who owns the Pink House, has been fighting for reproductive rights since she was belittled by a doctor during her own abortion in 1974.
Derzis says her clinic is a safe place for women with few options, providing them an essential service at a critical moment. And abortion access is even more important for the poor, she said, since the state offers little support for new mothers and families.
More on the fight over abortion access in the U.S.
The latest: On Dec. 1, the Supreme Court will also hear arguments in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Center, a case from Mississippi that legal observers say could overturn the legal right to an abortion established by Roe v. Wade and Casey v. Planned Parenthood. A ruling is expected sometime in 2022.
More coverage:
source: https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2021/12/01/supreme-court-mississippi-abortion-live-updates/
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