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Live Updates: Abortion Access Plummets As Roe v. Wade Ruling Takes Effect - The New York Times

Live Updates: Abortion Access Plummets As Roe v. Wade Ruling Takes Effect - The New York Times

Live Updates: Abortion Access Plummets As Roe v. Wade Ruling Takes Effect - The New York Times
Jun 25, 2022 10 mins, 42 secs

As more trigger laws banning abortion take effect, the country is rapidly sorting into two — a half where abortion is still legal, and a half where it is now outlawed or severely restricted.

The consequences of the Supreme Court’s decision overturning the right to abortion cascaded across the country on Saturday, as millions of Americans began to grapple with one of the swiftest, most expansive transformations to reproductive rights in 50 years.

As more trigger laws banning abortion took effect, the country was rapidly sorting into two — a half where abortion was still legal, and a half where it was now outlawed or severely restricted.

After the Supreme Court handed control over abortion restrictions back to the states, at least nine states that are home to roughly 40 million people quickly put bans in place.

In Tennessee, the attorney general made an emergency motion asking a federal appeals court to allow the state to immediately begin enforcing its abortion ban, rather than wait 30 days for the law to take effect.

But anti-abortion groups celebrated the court’s decision as one that would save millions of lives, and called it the culmination of a half-century of activism and organizing.

“Jill and I know how painful the devastating decision is for so many Americans,” he said, adding that the administration would focus on states’ decisions and “how they administer it and whether or not they abide by their own laws.”.

In 10 of the 26 states that have already banned abortion or are most likely to do so in the wake of the Supreme Court decision overruling Roe vs Wade, more voters favor abortion rights than oppose them, according to a tracking poll by civiqs.com that has surveyed nearly a quarter million registered voters since 2016.

PARIS — The French government expressed support on Saturday for a bill enshrining the right to abortion in France’s Constitution in the wake of the United States Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v.

Macron’s party in the lower house of Parliament, who told France Inter radio on Saturday that the Supreme Court’s decision was “catastrophic for women around the world” and that lawmakers should move to prevent any future “reversals” on the issue.

But left-wing parties have said that they would support efforts to enshrine the right to abortion in the Constitution, which would give a bill enough votes to pass the initial stages of that process.

As the Supreme Court’s reversal of abortion rights sank in among Americans on Friday, protests swelled in Washington, D.C., and in city centers, town plazas and parks across the United States.

Outside the Supreme Court, a divided crowd that had begun gathering early in the day had swelled to thousands of mostly outraged abortion rights demonstrators by evening, clashing with small groups of joyful anti-abortion activists who blew bubbles and celebrated the end of the federal guarantee of access to a safe and legal means of ending a pregnancy.

In Washington State, some 500 abortion rights demonstrators occupied a city block in Seattle, disrupting traffic, and in Oregon, another 1,500 converged on downtown Portland.

Natalie Huckabay, 19, a Little Rock native who attends college in Tennessee, said she had registered to vote in response to the decision, which she called “terrifying.”.

“This is only the first thing they’re coming for,” Keturah Herron, a Democratic state representative, told the crowd, reminding that reproductive rights would be on the fall ballot in the form of a state constitutional amendment to enshrine a sweeping ban.

WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court’s decision on Friday to end the constitutional right to abortion concluded one battle for now but immediately posed another far-reaching question: whether the judicial ground under rights in other personal matters, including contraception and same-sex marriage, is now also shaky.

The lack of a clear and consistent answer among the supermajority of conservative, Republican-appointed justices who control the Supreme Court prompted fear on the left, and anticipation among some on the other side of the ideological divide, that the abortion decision could be just the beginning of a sharp rightward shift on issues that directly touch intimate personal choices.

Those reactions were stoked by Justice Clarence Thomas’s concurring opinion, in which he explicitly said that precedents establishing those rights — which relied on the same legal reasoning as the now-overturned Roe v.

He declared that a ruling that the 14th Amendment — which forbids the government to take away people’s freedom unfairly — does not protect abortion rights should not be seen as imperiling precedents unrelated to ending fetal life.

Yet his legal rationale implicitly called a series of such precedents into doubt.

The three dissenting liberals on the court said, in essence, don’t be fooled.

They wrote that precedents being cast aside by the court — Roe v.

In his view, he said, states could not constitutionally bar women from traveling to another state to obtain an abortion.

But its implications for potential future disputes over abortion and for many other rights proclaimed by the Supreme Court since the second half of the 20th century could also be profound.

In addition to declaring a right to abortion, the court struck down involuntary sterilization and laws interfering with who people could choose to live with or marry, along with decriminalizing contraception and same-sex intercourse.

Many states then banned abortion, so it was wrong for the Supreme Court, in 1973’s Roe v.

Gorsuch and Amy Coney Barrett — modestly portrayed itself as getting the Supreme Court out of the business of drawing lines about which regulations go too far on the contentious subject.

Breyer, Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan — said the ruling would instead force the Supreme Court to wade further into hotly contested moral and philosophical issues, listing a dozen examples of new questions.

The dissenting justices portrayed the prospect that the ruling will not prevent states that want to keep abortion legal from doing so as “cold comfort” for poor women in states that criminalize the procedures and who lack the money to travel to another state.

Friday’s ruling also had implications that stretched far beyond potential future legal fights over abortion, calling into question the entire sweep of court precedents that established unwritten rights as deriving from the 14th Amendment’s protections for liberty.

The abortion rights ruling offered a concrete illustration: The three liberals in dissent acknowledged that no one thought there was a right to abortion in 1868, but also noted that women played no role in ratifying the 14th Amendment because they would not gain the right to vote for another half century.

Against the backdrop of that debate, Justice Alito denied that the decision imperiled other precedents in which the Supreme Court proclaimed modern-era rights based on an evolving understanding of individual freedoms protected by the 14th Amendment — including to contraception, sexual conduct with a member of the same sex or same-sex marriage.

He said abortion was different because it involved the destruction of fetal life, which the state had an interest in protecting.

“To ensure that our decision is not misunderstood or mischaracterized, we emphasize that our decision concerns the constitutional right to abortion and no other right,” he also wrote.

But he went on to call for the court to purge, “at the earliest opportunity,” all other cases that similarly reasoned that various unwritten rights are protected by the due process clause of the 14th Amendment.

For his part, Justice Kavanaugh echoed and emphasized Justice Alito’s claim that the court’s decision to overrule precedents about abortion does not amount to overruling precedents about contraception and interracial or same-sex marriage, “and does not threaten or cast doubt on those precedents.”.

The Supreme Court decision that overturned Roe v.

Even though the Constitution makes no mention of abortion, the Court held that it confers a broad right to obtain one.

Even if the arrival of new justices on the Supreme Court shifts its ideological balance, the court is not supposed to revisit and overturn every precedent with which a new majority disagrees.

Here is Justice Alito’s bottom line: The Constitution does not prevent state legislatures from banning abortion.

Many legal scholars have reasoned that Roe should have been argued as an equal-protection right for women, along the lines that Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg would present as a lawyer before the Supreme Court shortly after Roe was decided.

In so doing, the Court overruled the infamous decision in Plessy v.

587 (1896), along with six other Supreme Court precedents that had applied the separate-but-equal rule.

Arguing that respect for precedent does not preclude the Supreme Court from ever overturning one of its past rulings, Justice Alito points to a long line of rulings that did so — starting with the most venerated landmark civil rights decision in American history, the 1954 case striking down racial segregation in schools.

And to ensure that our decision is not misunderstood or mischaracterized, we emphasize that our decision concerns the constitutional right to abortion and no other right.

The claim by Justice Alito that this ruling does not jeopardize other modern-era rights that derived from the same legal reasoning — like sex between consenting adults of the same sex and the right of same-sex couples to marry — has been widely criticized as unpersuasive since the time it appeared in the leaked draft.

Within minutes of the Supreme Court’s overturning of Roe v.

Wade on Friday, the attorney general in Missouri issued an opinion banning abortion in his state.

In Ohio, Candice Keller, a former state representative who sponsored a law banning abortion after six weeks of pregnancy, broke down in tears of joy.

The overturning of Roe on Friday, stunning even as it was long predicted, set off waves of triumph and of despair, from the protesters on either side massing in front of the Supreme Court, to abortion clinics and crisis pregnancy centers, and in texts with friends and bursting social media feeds.

Jackson is the home of the clinic, known locally as the Pink House, at the center of the Supreme Court’s decision.

In Kansas City, Mo., one of them, Mallorie McBride, said she was “shocked and horrified” at the Supreme Court decision.

“It’s also like, what else will happen after this?” said Briana Perry, 30, a board member of Healthy and Free Tennessee, a reproductive rights network in Nashville.

“Not only when it comes to reproductive rights, but other rights that we have that we thought we were secured through Supreme Court rulings that are now in question.”.

The Supreme Court’s decision calls abortion “a profound moral issue on which Americans hold sharply conflicting views.” But while Americans have become more likely to say that abortion is morally acceptable, the issue is very much a political one.

James Bopp Jr., general counsel to the National Right to Life Committee, who has crusaded against abortion since the Roe decision in 1973, called Friday’s ruling “a total victory for the pro-life movement and for America.” Still, he said, the job for anti-abortion forces was “half-done.” The group was assembled for its convention in Atlanta when the decision was announced, and had already drafted model legislation to ban abortion in every state, with exceptions only for risks to the life of the mother.

Troy Newman, the president of Kansas-based Operation Rescue, which staged a long campaign of blockades outside abortion clinics, said the decision still left too much latitude for states like his, largely led by Democrats, to allow abortion.

NARAL, Planned Parenthood Action Fund and other groups pledged to spend $150 million in the 2022 midterms to elect supporters of abortion rights to state houses and Congress.

She has donated to candidates who support abortion rights, attended marches and written to her legislators.

Her state senator is Jason Rapert, a lead sponsor of Arkansas’s trigger law that outlawed abortion on Friday.

The Supreme Court decision is only going to cause pain and difficulty for people, he said.

Tisdale said that the Supreme Court’s decision was “an exciting time,” but that her work had to continue

The decision by the conservative majority to end the constitutional right to abortion — overturning landmark rulings like Roe v

Pressed on whether she would vote to overturn decisions protecting abortion rights, Judge Barrett gave no hint of how she might rule

Trump’s first nominee to the Supreme Court, refused to say how he would rule on abortion

Supreme Court

Alito said he would approach the issue of abortion with an open mind

Wade is an important precedent of the Supreme Court

Appearing before the Senate Judiciary Committee in September 1991, Judge Thomas sidestepped declaring his views on abortion and declined to state whether Roe had been properly decided

“The Supreme Court, of course, in the case of Roe v

Wade has found an interest in the woman’s right to — as a fundamental interest a woman’s right to terminate a pregnancy,” he said

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