Justice Sonia Sotomayor bases part of her abortion jurisprudence on demonstrably faulty suppositions about the developing science of pregnancy and contraception.

When the Supreme Court decided Roe v. Wade in 1973, the average point of fetal viability was around 28 weeks, a little more than six months of gestation. Title X, the law providing federal funding for family planning for low-income women, had been signed into law by Richard Nixon only three years earlier, and unmarried women had secured the legal right to buy birth control just the year before. Even by the time the court decided Planned Parenthood v. Casey in 1992, which upheld the essential holding of Roe and used fetal viability as the benchmark for abortion protection, the Food and Drug Administration still hadn’t approved emergency contraception or the long-acting reversible contraceptives with near-zero failure rates like hormonal IUDs.