The Supreme Court’s decision on Monday to hear arguments in a Mississippi abortion case kicked off what could become the biggest abortion fight in decades.
The case, Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, concerns the state’s ban on abortion after 15 weeks. The court in taking up the case said that it would consider the question of “whether all pre-viability prohibitions on elective abortions are unconstitutional.” The implications of its decision will be large, according to advocates and lawmakers on both sides of the abortion debate.
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“This is a landmark opportunity for the Supreme Court to recognize the right of states to protect unborn children from the horrors of painful late-term abortions,” said Marjorie Dannenfelser, president of the Susan B. Anthony List, one of the largest anti-abortion advocacy groups.
The SBA List, along with many other anti-abortion organizations, has been pushing since last year for the court to grant certiorari, especially after the Senate confirmed former President Donald Trump’s third Supreme Court nominee, Justice Amy Coney Barrett. But when the court continued to list and relist the case for its Friday conferences without any movement, some opponents of abortion began to fear that even with a 6-3 conservative majority on the court, their cause was not getting positive attention.
Now that the court is hearing the case, the script is flipped. In a tweet responding to the decision, NARAL Pro-Choice America President Ilyse Hogue claimed that the acceptance of the case’s petition was the result of a Republican plot to overthrow the abortion precedent set by Roe v. Wade.
“Never forget that McConnell and others mocked us and gaslit us through the Kavanaugh fight for claiming that legal abortion was in jeopardy,” she wrote. “They knew. They lied. We knew.”
Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren also sounded the alarm that Roe’s precedent could be in danger and urged the Senate to take action to protect abortion in case the Supreme Court’s 1973 pronouncement comes into question.
“This shouldn’t just be up to the Supreme Court,” Warren said. “Congress can — and must — pass a law to protect the right to a safe and legal abortion, no matter what Trump’s justices say.”
Nebraska Sen. Ben Sasse, on the other hand, told the Washington Examiner that the case presents the court with an opportunity to show it is not in the business of essentially legislating contentious issues such as abortion.
“The Supreme Court shouldn’t invent new laws — as they did in Roe — because Supreme Court justices aren’t super-legislators,” he said. “Across the country, and in Mississippi, the American people have worked to limit Roe and Casey’s radically pro-abortion status quo. The Supreme Court now has an opportunity to affirm this American system and recognize that states can enact compassionate, common-sense, pro-life legislation.”
In recent years, abortion opponents at the state level have pushed to trigger a Supreme Court battle over a law challenging the national abortion precedent set by Roe and confirmed in the 1992 case Planned Parenthood v. Casey. Last summer, the court dealt a blow to the movement with its decision in a major Louisiana abortion case involving hospital admitting privileges. In the case, Chief Justice John Roberts joined the court’s liberal wing to find that a law all but outlawing abortion was unconstitutional.
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Anti-abortion advocates are hopeful though that the court will decide in their favor on the question of viability. Pointing to more restrictive early stage abortion laws in other countries, March for Life President Jeanne Mancini said that if the court finds that pre-viability prohibitions are unconstitutional, there’s broad public support in many states to tighten abortion laws.
“Currently the United States is one of only seven countries, including China and North Korea, that allows abortions through all nine months of pregnancy,” she said. “An overwhelming majority of Americans agree that this goes way too far.”
