WASHINGTON (AP) — The Supreme Court’s three liberal justices suggested Wednesday that it would severely damage the court’s legitimacy if it agrees to reverse the decades-old abortion decisions that declared a nationwide right to end pregnancies.
Justice Elena Kagan said during arguments on a crucial Mississippi case that the court doesn’t easily overturn past decisions. That prevents people from thinking “this court is a political institution” and “will go back and forth depending on changes to the court’s membership.”
Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Stephen Breyer also suggested overturning the court’s abortion precedents could damage the court.
“Will this institution survive the stench that this creates in the public perception that the Constitution and its reading are just political acts?” Sotomayor asked. She later added: “If people actually believe that it’s all political how will we survive? How will the court survive?”
Related Story: Dem senator warns Supreme Court of ‘revolution’ if Roe v. Wade is overturned
The high court is hearing historic arguments in which the justices are being asked to overrule the court’s landmark 1973 Roe v. Wade ruling and its 1992 ruling in Planned Parenthood v. Casey, which reaffirmed Roe.
The state of Mississippi is telling the justices those two decisions should be overturned and that a state law that bans abortion after 15 weeks should be upheld.
The court’s six-member conservative majority was relatively quiet in the early portion of the arguments.
However, Chief Justice John Roberts’ questioning was perhaps more favorable to the state’s position.
“Why is 15 weeks not enough time?” he asked.
It’s possible the justices just uphold the Mississippi law and says nothing more, but abortion rights supporters say that would still effectively overturn the landmark decision.
Mississippi also is asking the court to overrule the 1992 ruling in Planned Parenthood v. Casey, which reaffirmed Roe. The arguments can be heard on the court’s website.
Supporters of both sides in the abortion debate filled the sidewalk and street in front of the court, their dueling rallies audible even from inside the building. Some carried signs reading “Her Body Her Choice” and “God Hates the Shedding of Innocent Blood.” The court stepped up security measures, including closing off some streets around the building.
The case comes to a court with a 6-3 conservative majority that has been transformed by three appointees of President Donald Trump, who had pledged to appoint justices he said would oppose abortion rights.
The court had never agreed to hear a case over an abortion ban so early in pregnancy until all three Trump appointees — Justices Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett — were on board.
A month ago, the justices also heard arguments over a uniquely designed Texas law that has succeeded in getting around the Roe and Casey decisions and banning abortions in the nation’s second-largest state after about six weeks of pregnancy. The dispute over the Texas law revolves around whether the law can be challenged in federal court, rather than the right to an abortion.
Despite its unusually quick consideration of the issue, the court has yet to rule on the Texas law, and the justices have refused to put the law on hold while the matter is under legal review.
The Mississippi case poses questions central to the abortion right. Some of the debate Wednesday is likely to be over whether the court should abandon its long-held rule that states cannot ban abortion before the point of viability, at roughly 24 weeks.
More than 90% of abortions are performed in the first 13 weeks of pregnancy, well before viability, according to the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Mississippi argues that viability is an arbitrary standard that doesn’t take sufficient account of the state’s interest in regulating abortion. It also contends that scientific advances have allowed some babies who were born earlier than 24 weeks to survive, though it does not argue that the line is anywhere near 15 weeks.
Only about 100 patients per year get abortions after 15 weeks at the Jackson Women’s Health Organization, Mississippi’s lone abortion clinic. The facility does not provide abortions after 16 weeks.
But the clinic argues that the court doesn’t normally assess constitutional rights based on how few people are affected, and that the justices shouldn’t do so in this case.
Joined by the Biden administration, the clinic also says that since Roe, the Supreme Court has consistently held that the “Constitution guarantees ‘the right of the woman to choose to have an abortion before viability.’”
Erasing viability as the line between when abortions may and may not be banned would effectively overrule Roe and Casey, even if the justices do not explicitly do that, the clinic says.
Justice Clarence Thomas is the only member of the court who has openly called for Roe and Casey to be overruled. One question is how many of his conservative colleagues are willing to join him.
Among the questions justices ask when they consider jettisoning a previous ruling is not just whether it is wrong, but egregiously so.
That’s a formulation Kavanaugh has used in a recent opinion, and Mississippi and many of its allies have devoted considerable space in their court filings to argue that Roe and Casey fit the description of being egregiously wrong.
“The conclusion that abortion is a constitutional right has no basis in text, structure, history, or tradition,” Mississippi says.
The clinic responds by arguing that the very same arguments were considered and rejected by the court nearly 30 years ago in Casey. Only the membership of the court has changed since then, the clinic and its allies argue.
In its earlier rulings, the court has rooted the right to abortion in the section of the 14th Amendment that says states cannot “deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law.”
Same-sex marriage and other rights, based on the same provision but also not explicitly mentioned in the Constitution, could be threatened if Roe and Casey fall, the administration argues. Mississippi and its supporters dispute that those other decisions would be at risk.
Abortion arguments normally would find people camped out in front of the court for days in the hope of snagging some of the few seats available to the public. But with the courthouse closed because of COVID-19, there will be only a sparse audience of reporters, justices’ law clerks and a handful of lawyers inside the courtroom.
A decision is expected by late June, a little more than four months before next year’s congressional elections, and could become a campaign season rallying cry.
Associated Press writer Parker Purifoy contributed from Washington.
Copyright 2021 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed without permission.
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The moral question aside, the ruling itself was **** and everybody knew it at the time, the discenting justices, Constitutional scholars. Unlike a bad law which can be repealed, an opinion by the Supreme Court can be altered only if a similar case is brought before it. Now is the time to fix it and put it where it belongs in the legislative branch, Federal or state, to be decided.
Huh??
The legislative branch is made up of the House and Senate, known collectively as the Congress.
The Supreme court only decides if a law is constitutional or not.
This should be left entirely up to the States and citizens.
Amendment 10 – The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.
#6 of the 10 Commandments of GOD – “Thou Shalt Not Kill”
Life is a gift from GOD. One has the right to throw that gift away, but at what cost??
IT needs to be put in the Shredder.. OF ETERNITY!
Speaking of the “moral question”…. what kind of insane lunatic sociopath would wave and hold up a sign stating that they proudly had an abortion!? … I mean really… like it’s some kind of treat… like going to Disney Land.
Well, see how the left, over the past 5 or so years, started CELEBRATING having abortions.. THEY HAVE NO morality..
What I never heard (in the questioning or oral arguments), is at what point do the RIGHTS of the baby/fetus start?
Abortion advocates (for the most part) seem to think that they don’t exist – unless the MOTHER wants the baby to be born.
So called “late term” abortion (up to the point of live birth [and, in some cases, BEYOND birth]) asserts that the baby HAS NO RIGHTS.
Many religious pro-life advocates assert that LIFE begins at conception (arguably, THAT would be the moment where the baby’s RIGHTS begin, as well).
The whole “viability” threshold seems to be the CURRENT dividing line between the woman’s “right” to end a pregnancy, and the baby’s RIGHT TO LIFE.
NEXT, I expect the pro-abortion side to argue that “viability” is ONLY at the point when the baby can survive WITHOUT medical assistance (incubator/ventilator), and that it is the “right” of the mother to decide IF a pre-maturely delivered baby is to receive the medical procedures necessary to allow it to live (outside of the womb) or not.
“Three liberal justices suggested Wednesday that it would severely damage the court’s legitimacy if it agrees to reverse the decades-old abortion decisions that declared a nationwide right to end pregnancies.” ,,,,And have to admit they were wrong in the first place. “Love means never having to say you’re sorry”, but sorry means you blew it when it comes to real love or real law and just refuse to admit it. Stoning unfaithful women was established law for centuries longer than Roe v Wade has existed. Same thing with yes fault divorce. By the gist of three liberal judges’ arguments, we made mistakes overturning these precedents and established laws and should go back to the stone ages.
AND what ‘reputation’ do they think will be damaged, IF THIS SCREWED UP BRAINLESS ‘right’, they pulled out of a hat, is allowed to stand!
Quite right. I have long asked, what happens when tech allows babies conceived outside the womb (already done, aka “test tube babies”) and premature babies to meet such that a woman never needs to carry a child – the child being conceived and incubated entirely outside of “natural” means? Where is the “line” then? Only at conception. When a genetically distinct and human life begins.
ANd how can they justify still allowing the bull argument of “HER BODY HER CHOICE”, while at the same time, WE HAVE NATIONWIDE VACCINE MANDATES causing millions of folks to be FORCED TO GET THE bloody jab, or lose their job.. WHERE IS THEIR “My body my choice”??
Pro-Choice women may have a right to choose, but the bad choice occurs when she chooses to expose herself to a pregnancy by copulating with a man capable of impregnating her, but unworthy and incapable of being the father of her child, or the desire of her heart. The choice occurs when she throws away that right to self-choose by imbibing in mind numbing alcohol or drug celebrations of immediate gratifications in sex which lead to collective long-term problems of single parenthood, unwanted children, and fleeced American taxpayers, whose children are taught that if it’s ok to take human life in the womb, progresses it in maturity as the right to take innocent life on the streets. The government has no right to force morality abiding citizens of integrity to be forced to embrace or sanction the immoral acts of others and take on the moral guilt of financially enabling a bad secular soul-destroying abortive correction of a bad Secular sexual choice. With great freedom comes great personal responsibility or it is no longer freedom. SELF-GOVERNMENT means THE PEOPLE either learn the concepts of responsible individual self-governing, or collectively as a nation gets destroyed as the innocent go down with the guilty. The courts have no right to place innocent blood on the hands of righteous God-fearing law-abiding Americans in the contribution of government money or government law assisted murder in the womb to assist in this Democrat inspired debacle.
The time for a woman’s right to choose comes before the sex act, not after.
The ‘it’s my body’ argument died with Biden’s vaccine mandate.
I don’t care how many Democrat senators threaten the court or how many crazy women are going to burn down police stations, it’s time to protect unborn babies at the federal level.
And no matter what they decide it will not be the end of murdering babies in the womb. The law will revert to the states and most will probably make all forms of abortion legal. Then we all will have choice, the choice of living in a state that protects life or a state that legalizes murder.
I do care who does what, such as those ‘burning down cop shops’.. AS WE TAX VICTIMS are on the hook to Repair/rebuild them..
I won’t debate the right or wrong of abortion. I will debate the ruling. Please show me where in the Constitution it speaks of abortion. Since this is not a Constitutional issue, it should never have been heard much less ruled upon. The SCOTUS continue to prove they do not rule on the Constitution, they rule on politics and emotion.
ESPECIALLY since no where in the constitution, is the phrase “RIGHT TO PRIVACY” mentioned, which is iirc, WHERE they came up with this balloney in the first place..
I think that right comes after the “right to not be offended”.
Which in their ‘new constitution’, totally replaces Freedom of speech, in the first amendment.
The question is simple are we a REPUBLIC or a Democracy ?
After the last election we became a banana Republic.
I like the picture. That loudmouth pointing at a sigh saying “I had an abortion”. My first thought was, well your mother should have as well and saved you the bother.
Let’s keep killing babies so Elena Kagan doesn’t lose any credibility for reversing a bad decision she had nothing to do with. Of what value is a baby’s life (or 60+ million of them) when compared to the embarrassment that she might have to endure?
This country has put up with the stench of Obama appointed Judges, neither of which was qualified to be on the court, for the last 12 years.
AND those appointed by Clinton and bush.