The Supreme Court will hear a Mississippi case, Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, that could significantly reshape the country’s abortion laws, which since 1973 have been defined by Roe v. Wade. The court will decide:
Whether all pre-viability prohibitions on elective abortions are unconstitutional.
The Mississippi law, called the Gestational Age Act, was passed in 2018 by a Republican-controlled state legislature. With a few exceptions, the law bans abortions after 15 weeks. Opponents immediately challenged the law, as the state law made abortions more restrictive than federal law.
This challenge has been decades in the making and we have the most conservative Court in 90 years, including relatively new Associate Justices Amy Coney Barrett and Brett Kavanaugh, the latter of whom spent his formative college years liking beer and forgetting the women he sexually assaulted, and the former of whom is a conservative Catholic who appears to cleave to her religious training when it comes to wombs-not-her-own.
Of course, not all Catholics cleave to that teaching:
Should the Court decide in favor of the Mississippi law, one scary result could be states will make their own laws about abortion. From a 2020 New York Times analysis, that could mean 22 states would outlaw abortion entirely. And that? Is simply unacceptable.
It's really awful we are at risk of moving backward on this women's health issue. Women's bodies, women's choice. Men, shut up if you can't tolerate hearing what women want for their own bodies!
I used to think it was too far fetched but I think it’s only a matter of time before a woman who bore a child as a result of being raped is sued for parental rights by the man who raped her. I wonder where Kavanaugh and Coney Barrett would come down on that.