Roe v Wade

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      Sarah Weddington, attorney who won Roe v Wade abortion case, dies aged 76

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      Sarah Weddington, attorney who won Roe v Wade abortion case, dies aged 76Texan lawyer and Linda Coffee won landmark 1973 case, safeguarding right now under threat from US supreme court

      How dismantling Roe v Wade would threaten other rights
      Sarah Weddington, an attorney who argued and won the Roe v Wade supreme court case which established the right to abortion in the US, has died aged 76.Susan Hays, a Democratic candidate for Texas agriculture commissioner, announced the news on Twitter on Sunday and the Dallas Morning News confirmed it.“Sarah Weddington died this morning after a series of health issues,” Hays wrote. “With Linda Coffee, she filed the first case of her legal career, Roe v Wade, fresh out of law school. She was my professor … the best writing instructor I ever had, and a great mentor.“At 27 she argued Roe to [the supreme court] (a fact that always made me feel like a gross underachiever). Ironically, she worked on the case because law firms would not hire women in the early 70s, leaving her with lots of time for good trouble.”The court ruled on Roe v Wade in 1973. Nearly 50 years later the right it established is under threat from a supreme court packed with hardline conservatives, in part thanks to a Texas law that drastically restricts access and offers incentives for reporting women to authorities.In 2017, speaking to the Guardian, Weddington predicted such a turn of events. “If [Neil] Gorsuch’s nomination is approved, will abortion be illegal the next day? No. One new judge won’t necessarily make much difference. But two or three might.”After steering Gorsuch on to the court – and a seat held open by Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell when Barack Obama was president – Donald Trump installed Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett. Barrett replaced the late Ruth Bader Ginsburg, a champion of women’s rights.Weddington found her way to Roe v Wade soon after graduating from law school at the University of Texas. Represented by Weddington and Coffee, Norma McCorvey became the plaintiff known as “Jane Roe” in Roe v Wade. McCorvey became an evangelical Christian and opponent of abortion. She died in 2017.In her Guardian interview, Weddington discussed arguing the case in federal court. “I was very nervous,” she said. “It was like going down a street with no street lights. But there was no other way to go and I didn’t have any preconceived notions that I would not win.”She won, but the case continued.“Henry Wade, the district attorney, unwittingly helped us,” she said. “At a press conference, he said, ‘I don’t care what any court says; I am going to continue to prosecute doctors who carry out abortion.’ There was a procedural rule that said if local elected officials continue to prosecute after a federal court had declared a law unconstitutional, there would be a right to appeal to the supreme court.”‘Historical accident’: how abortion came to focus white, evangelical angerRead moreBefore the court in Washington, Weddington said: “It was impossible to read the justices’ faces. The attorney on the other side started by saying something inappropriate about arguing a case against a beautiful woman. He thought the judges would snicker. But their faces didn’t change a bit.“I had to argue it twice in the supreme court: in 1971 and again in 1972. On 22 January 1973 I was at the Texas legislature when the phone rang. It was a reporter from the New York Times. ‘Does Miss Weddington have a comment today about Roe v Wade?’ my assistant was asked. ‘Why?’ she said. ‘Should she?’“It was beginning to be very exciting. Then we got a telegram from the supreme court saying that I had won 7-2 and that they were going to air-mail a copy of the ruling. Nowadays, of course, you’d just go online.“I was ecstatic, and more than 44 years later we’re still talking about it.”Weddington later revealed that she had an abortion herself, in 1967. “Just before the anaesthesia hit,” she said, “I thought: ‘I hope no one ever knows about this.’ For a lot of years, that was exactly the way I felt. Now there’s a major push to encourage women to tell their stories so people will realise that it is not a shameful thing. One out of every five women will have an abortion.”Weddington predicted: “Whatever else I do in my life, the headline on my obituary is always going to be ‘Roe v Wade attorney dies’.”In fact she achieved much more, as Hays detailed in her tweets on Sunday. “Those career doors shut to her led her to run for office, getting elected as the first woman from Travis county in the [Texas legislature] in 1972 (along with four other women elected to the House: Kay Bailey, Chris Miller, Betty Andujar and Senfronia Thompson).“She was general counsel of the United States Department of Agriculture under [Jimmy] Carter and enjoyed her stint in DC. Federal judicial nominations for Texas were run by her as a high-ranking Texan in the administration.“A Dallas lawyer she knew sought a bench. She had interviewed with him while at UT law. He’d asked her, ‘What will we tell our wives if we hire you?’ She told him he was wasting their time and hers and walked out of the interview. He did not get the judgeship.“Ever the proper preacher’s daughter, she would never tell me who the lawyer was. People don’t know that about Sarah. She was such a proper Methodist minister’s daughter. One of the few people I couldn’t cuss in front of.”Hays also paid tribute to Weddington as a teacher and a member of a “Great Austin Matriarchy” that also included the former Texas governor Ann Richards and the columnist Molly Ivins.In her Guardian interview, Weddington indicated she was at peace with being remembered for Roe v Wade. “I think most women of my generation can recall our feelings about the fight,” she said. “It’s like young love. You may not feel exactly the same, but you remember it.”TopicsRoe v WadeAbortionUS politicsUS healthcareUS supreme courtUS constitution and civil libertiesLaw (US)newsReuse this content More

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      The supreme court’s abortion ruling is even more unsettling than it may seem | Moira Donegan

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      The supreme court’s abortion ruling is even more unsettling than it may seemMoira DoneganIn allowing Texas’s outrageous abortion ban to stay in place, the court signaled that it is willing to sacrifice its own legitimacy and power in order to destroy Roe Don’t be fooled by the supreme court’s nominal hedging on its endorsement of SB8, the Texas abortion ban that deputizes private citizens to sue anyone who assists in an abortion after six weeks’ gestation. In a ruling on Friday, the court held that a lawsuit by Texas abortion providers could go forward – but only on narrow grounds. Only those state officials responsible for licensing medical providers may be sued, the court ordered – no one else involved in the state’s practical maintenance of SB8 is liable. The ruling said, for instance, that the providers could not sue court clerks, those bureaucrats tasked with actually docketing the lawsuits that would enforce SB8.For providers, it seems that the best possible outcome for the suit now is that they may be able to secure an injunction preventing medical providers from being delicensed. These perplexing limits placed by the court on which parties can be sued to challenge SB8 ensures that though the suit against the law will be at least partly allowed to go forward, it will be largely toothless.In the meantime, SB8 will remain law. Women in Texas are effectively banned from securing a legal abortion in the state, even though the still-standing Roe v Wade decision says that they have a right to one. It’s likely that SB8 will remain in effect at least for the duration of Roe’s lifetime – meaning that Texas women will not be able to obtain legal abortions after six weeks for the foreseeable future. Many of the initial media responses to the court’s opinion emphasized that since the suit was allowed to go forward, on technical grounds, the ruling was a narrow win for the abortion providers. But in reality Friday was a massive win for the rightwing Texas government, and for anti-choice forces nationwide.That SB8 has been allowed to take effect – now for the second time – by the supreme court reflects the justices’ eagerness to gut abortion rights. The fact of the matter is that the court is already set to overturn Roe and allow states to ban abortion outright. That much was clear to anyone who listened to last week’s oral arguments in Dobbs v Jackson Women’s Health, a case surrounding the constitutionality of a 15-week ban in Mississippi, which devolved into grim misogynist spectacle as the Republican appointees held court on the supposed ease of giving infants up for adoption and their own robust comfort with overturning long-settled precedent.That ruling is scheduled to come down in late May or early June. When it does, a slim majority of states are expected to ban abortion, either immediately or very soon thereafter. That means that soon SB8 – and the copycat bills that it has inspired in states like Florida and Arkansas – won’t be necessary for the anti-choice lobby to achieve their aims. Instead of concocting an elaborate enforcement process in which rogue anti-woman vigilantes enforce their abortion bans, the states will be able to enforce their bans themselves.SB8, then, and the supreme court’s embrace of it, can be understood not only as a harbinger of the justices’ deep contempt for the abortion right, but also of their childish impatience to exert this contempt upon American women. They can’t even wait six months. They want to ban abortion right now. In pursuit of this goal, the supreme court has proven itself willing to undermine its own capacity to oversee state laws, to enforce federal supremacy, and to protect constitutional rights.The anti-choice substance of the court’s decision in SB8 was not surprising; its embrace of Texas’s tactics perhaps was. Aside from its direct attempt to undermine women’s rights, SB8 also took aim at judicial authority. By banning abortion long before viability, the law flouted the supreme court’s precedents in Roe and Planned Parenthood v Casey. But that much a slew of vehemently anti-choice justices would probably forgive: all six of the Republican appointees clearly believe that Roe was wrongly decided, and at least five of them (all but Roberts, who seems more trepidatious) appear eager to overturn it. But in its novel enforcement mechanism, SB8 sought specifically to evade judicial review – not just to give the court an opportunity to overturn its own precedent, but to make it so that within Texas borders supreme court precedent didn’t matter.In her dissent, Justice Sonia Sotomayor compared SB8 to the views of John C Calhoun – a nineteenth-century pro-slavery campaigner who argued that states have the right to nullify federal laws that they do not like. America fought its civil war in no small part over this question. By first allowing the SB8 to go into effect, in September, and then by gutting the lawsuit against it this Friday, the supreme court has, shockingly, endorsed a scheme to undermine its own power, and granted a state the ability to evade federal precedent. Nullification, it seems, is back in style.For years, court watchers have wondered whether the justices’ institutionalist instincts would overcome their misogynist ones: if the Court had to choose between maintaining its own power and legitimacy, and overturning Roe, which would it choose? Now, it seems, we have our answer.
      Moira Donegan is a Guardian US columnist
      TopicsUS politicsOpinionRoe v WadeUS supreme courtLaw (US)AbortioncommentReuse this content More

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      How dismantling Roe v Wade could imperil other ‘core, basic human rights’

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      How dismantling Roe v Wade could imperil other ‘core, basic human rights’Supreme court appears inclined to severely curtail or overturn Roe v Wade after hearing Mississippi case, which could have affect gay rights, contraceptives and fertility treatments Constitutional scholars in the US said a litany of rights, from same-sex marriage and sex to birth control and in vitro fertilization, could come into question if the country’s highest court moves to overrule or weaken Roe v Wade.The supreme court last week heard arguments in the case Dobbs v Jackson Women’s Health Organization, which centers on whether the state of Mississippi can ban abortion at 15 weeks gestation, roughly nine weeks before bans are permitted under current law.The Mississippi case is widely regarded as the most important abortion rights case since Roe v Wade, when the supreme court effectively legalized abortion nationally in 1973. A decision in the Dobbs case is expected June 2022.Although supreme court opinions are notoriously difficult to predict, a majority of justices on the conservative-leaning court appeared inclined to severely curtail or overturn Roe v Wade, which protects abortion rights in states hostile to the procedure.Legal scholars warned that the impacts of such a move would likely be widespread, because abortion rights are rooted in the same implied constitutional right to privacy that is the foundation for other intimate personal decisions Americans now take for granted.Gay rights, contraceptives, certain fertility treatments and even interracial marriage, “are imperiled because they’re all rooted in that right to privacy,” Melissa Murray, a law professor at New York University law school and an expert in constitutional, family and reproductive rights law, told the Guardian.“All of this has been implied because they’re understood to be core, basic human rights,” said Murray. “You don’t need the state to recognize them because they are vested in you by virtue of being a human.”Currently, states are prevented from banning abortions before a fetus can survive outside the womb, a concept known as “viability”. But at the hearing on 1 December, a majority of justices appeared ready to uphold Mississippi’s law, which would require either invalidating the “viability” standard or overturn Roe v Wade entirely.In arguments, justices pointed to several ways they may reinterpret the Roe v Wade decision. Some, such as Justice Clarence Thomas, were skeptical there is a right to privacy and were swayed by the lack of an explicit reference to the right in the constitution, a concept known as “textualism”.“If we were talking about the second amendment, I know exactly what we’re talking about,” said Thomas. “If we’re talking about the fourth amendment, I know what we’re talking about because it’s written. It’s there.”That argument could be paired with one pushed forward by conservatives, such as Mississippi solicitor general Scott Stewart, who argued a right to abortion is not grounded in the “history or tradition” of the country.“A right to abortion [is] not grounded in the text,” said Stewart. “It’s grounded on abstract concepts that this court has rejected in other contexts as supplying a substantive right”.The theory underlying that right to privacy is called “substantive due process”, or the doctrine that the constitution protects both the procedures of due process, such as how criminal law is applied, and “substantive” guarantees of life, liberty and property.“If you ask where rights come from in the US constitution there’s basically two general answers,” said Mary Ziegler, a law professor at Florida State University and a historian who has studied abortion rights since Roe v Wade. “There’s the rights spelled out in the text of the constitution,” such as rights to bear arms or against unreasonable search and seizure, “and there’s other rights, like the right to marry and the right to parent that are not in the text of the constitution”.Those are rights established by substantive due process. For example, in 1965 the court struck down birth control bans for married couples in Griswold v Connecticut. In 1967 with Loving v Virginia, the court invalidated anti-miscegenation laws that barred interracial marriage. In 1972 in Eisenstadt v Baird, the court found people who were not married also had a right to birth control. In 1973, the court recognized a right to terminate a pregnancy.“These rights of parental autonomy are underpinnings of the right to privacy, marriage is included in this,” said Murray. “In a later case, the state says marriage [and] procreation are basic civil rights of man.”Cases based in substantive due process continued into the modern era, when in 2003 the court invalidated anti-sodomy statutes in Lawrence v Texas, and established a right to same-sex conduct. In 2016, the court found same-sex couples also had a right to marry in Obergefell v Hodges.Attorneys for Jackson Women’s Health Organization responded on the principle of substantive due process when quizzed on this principle by Thomas.“If I were to ask you what constitutional right protects the right to abortion, is it privacy? Is it autonomy? What would it be?” asked Thomas.“It’s liberty, Your Honor,” said Julie Rikelman, litigation director for the Center for Reproductive Rights, which represented the abortion clinic.Briefs to the court in Dobbs directly challenge that principle, such as from the conservative, anti-abortion group Texas Right to Life. Attorneys for the group, the conservative legal activists Adam Mortara and Jonathan Mitchell, argued the court does not necessarily need to overturn decisions protecting gay rights.“But neither should the court hesitate to write an opinion that leaves those decisions hanging by a thread,” wrote Mortara and Mitchell. “Lawrence and Obergefell, while far less hazardous to human life, are as lawless as Roe.” The same brief argued women could control their reproduction by refraining from sex. Neither Mitchell nor Mortara responded to an interview request.Until the supreme court issues a decision, it is unclear exactly how rights protected by substantive due process might be affected. However, scholars consider same-sex and reproductive rights to be the most vulnerable because there is an active political campaign to circumscribe them. By contrast, there is little contemporary criticism of interracial marriage.If Roe v Wade is overruled, “It will be on the ground it was a right that was untethered from constitutional text,” said Murray. If that view prevails on the court, rights to contraception, gay rights and in vitro fertilization could also be quickly implicated, since, “all of these things are untethered from constitutional text and historically were not available in the US”.What’s more, the history of abortion rights may provide a roadmap for other rights to be hobbled, even if substantive due process prevails.Murray offered the example of a 2017 case, in which three conservative justices, led by justice Neil Gorsuch, argued states could restrict birth certificates of same-sex parents. Gorsuch argued there appeared to be nothing unconstitutional about a “biology-based birth registration regime” where only one same-sex parent would be listed on the certificate.“It is a really good example of how they have dismantled Roe piecemeal and incrementally could be applied to these other rights,” said Murray.TopicsRoe v WadeUS supreme courtLaw (US)US politicsAbortionfeaturesReuse this content More

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      ‘Historical accident’: how abortion came to focus white, evangelical anger

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      ‘Historical accident’: how abortion came to focus white, evangelical angerA short history of the Roe decision’s emergence as a signature cause for the right Public opinion on abortion in the US has changed little since 1973, when the supreme court in effect legalized the procedure nationally in its ruling on the case Roe v Wade. According to Gallup, which has the longest-running poll on the issue, about four in five Americans believe abortion should be legal, at least in some circumstances.Yet the politics of abortion have opened deep divisions in the last five decades, which have only grown more profound in recent years of polarization. In 2021, state legislators have passed dozens of restrictions to abortion access, making it the most hostile year to abortion rights on record.This schism played out in the US supreme court on Wednesday, when the new conservative-dominated bench heard oral arguments in the case of Dobbs v Jackson Women’s Health Organization, the most important abortion rights case since Roe.In somber arguments, justices questioned whether the state of Mississippi should be allowed to ban nearly all abortions at 15 weeks gestation, nine weeks earlier than the current accepted limit. While the ruling, expected by the end of June next year, is far from a foregone conclusion, justices in the conservative majority appeared to signal their support for severely restricting abortion access, a right Americans have exercised for two generations.The divisive question among the conservative majority appeared to be whether abortion should be restricted to earlier than 15 weeks, weakening Roe, or if the precedent set in Roe should be overturned entirely.Summarizing Mississippi’s argument, the conservative justice Brett Kavanaugh, who was controversially nominated to the court by Donald Trump in 2018, said “the constitution is neither pro-life nor pro-choice … and leaves the issue to the people to resolve in the democratic process.” If the issue is returned to the states, 26 states would be “certain or likely” to ban or severely restrict abortion access.The religious right in the US has been laying the foundations of this decisive challenge to abortion rights for years. According to historians and researchers, it has taken decades of political machinations for the campaign to reach this zenith. The movement has intersected with nearly every major issue in American politics for the last five decades, from segregation to welfare reform to campaign finance.The conservative anti-abortion movement “was a kind of historical accident”, said Randall Balmer, a professor of American religious history at Dartmouth University and author of the recently released book Bad Faith: Race and the Rise of the Religious Right.It wasn’t until Republican strategists sought to “deflect attention away from the real narrative”, which Balmer argues was racial integration, “and to advocate on behalf of the fetus”, that largely apolitical evangelical Christians and Catholics would be united within the Republican party. Balmer argues that advocacy was nascent in 1969.Although the supreme court decision in Brown v Board of Education called for an end to racial segregation in schools in 1954, many schools continued de facto segregation 14 years later.Then, the supreme court weighed in again, and ordered schools to integrate “immediately”. This prompted white southerners to form “segregation academies”, whites-only private Christian schools which registered as tax-exempt non-profit charities. African American parents in Mississippi sued, arguing this was taxpayer-subsidized discrimination. They won, and in 1971, tax authorities revoked the non-profit status of 111 segregated private schools.In Balmer’s view, revoking the non-profit status of segregated private schools catalyzed evangelical Christian leaders, but even in the early 1970s defense of racial segregation was not a populist message. However, defense of the fetus could be.Republican operations began to test abortion as a vessel for the collective anxieties of evangelical Christians, and Roe as a shorthand for government intrusion into the family after the sexual revolution of the 1960s. Eventually, abortion became the reason for evangelicals to deny the Democratic president Jimmy Carter, himself an evangelical Christian, a second term.Evangelical opposition to abortion “wasn’t an anti-abortion movement per se”, said Elmer L Rumminger, an administrator at the then whites-only Christian college Bob Jones University, said in Balmer’s book. “For me it was government intrusion into private education.”At the same time, the anti-feminist Republican activist Phyllis Schlafly was connecting anxiety about women’s changing roles in society with abortion. In a 1972 essay, she described the feminist movement as “anti-family, anti-children, and pro-abortion,” and the writing of contemporaneous feminists as “a series of sharp-tongued, high-pitched whining complaints by unmarried women”.By the 1978 midterm congressional elections, Paul Weyrich, one of the architects of modern conservatism, was testing abortion as a campaign issue with evangelical Christians with a small fund from the Republican National Committee. Roman Catholic volunteers distributed hundreds of thousands of leaflets in church parking lots in Iowa, New Hampshire and Minnesota, and their efforts prevailed. Four anti-abortion Republicans ousted Democrats.The groundwork laid by Schlafly and Weyrich made “Roe shorthand for a host of worries about sex equality and sexuality”, wrote Mary Ziegler, a law professor at Florida State University and author of After Roe: The Lost History of the Abortion Debate.“Even as late as August 1980, the Reagan-Bush campaign wasn’t certain abortion would work for them as a political issue,” said Balmer. However, as Reagan sailed to victory, he was carried in part by religious voters hooked on the promise of a constitutional amendment to ban abortion. When a constitutional amendment failed, a new strategy took hold: control the supreme court.Historians said segregation was only one part of a complex and multifaceted movement, which has long seen itself as a human rights campaign. By the 1970s, “there was an anti-abortion movement which was influential and pretty effective in the states that was ready for the new right to work with,” said Ziegler.In the coming years, Reagan would recast the politics of reproduction through a new racist prism, as he introduced the mythical stereotype of the “welfare queen”. The image allowed politicians to portray “all single mothers as persons of color and all persons of color as dependent on public assistance”, wrote the reproductive rights activists Loretta Ross and Rickie Solinger in their 2017 book Reproductive Justice: An Introduction.The image divorced family wellbeing and welfare support from abortion access and rights. Thus, the “broad middle ground” of issues that anti-abortion and pro-choice voters agreed on became “firmly partisan”, said Julia Briggs, author of How All Politics Became Reproductive Politics, and professor and chair of women, gender and sexuality studies at University of Massachusetts, Amherst.By the 1990s, anti-abortion activists had professionalized. So called “right to life” organizations rallied the base, and religious law firms dedicated themselves to fighting abortion in courts. The supreme court weighed in on abortion again in 1992, in another watershed case called Planned Parenthood of Southeastern Pennsylvania v Casey. The case allowed states to restrict abortion, as long as such restrictions did not create an “undue burden” on the right to abortion and served the purpose of either protecting the woman’s health or unborn life.States hostile to abortion passed “Trap” laws, or targeted regulations of abortion providers, which required abortion clinics to become the “functional equivalents of hospitals”, according to legal scholars. States instituted 24-hour waiting periods for abortion, state-mandated inaccurate information and invasive sonograms.Many clinics went out of business as they struggled to meet the expensive new requirements, and pregnant people struggled to obtain abortions as they had to travel further and spend more to find a provider.These laws would also play an outsized role in the Dobbs hearing. Conservative justices debated whether they could keep the “undue burden” standard while jettisoning a central tenet of Roe, that women can terminate a pregnancy until a fetus can survive outside the womb, or “viability”.“Why is 15 weeks not enough time?” asked Chief Justice John Roberts, a conservative, in the hearings.The politics of reproduction spurred new debates on acceptable restrictions on birth control, stem cell research and sex education during the George W Bush administration. But it was the election of Barack Obama, America’s first Black president, that supercharged Republican opposition.In 2010, the Tea Party swept the midterm elections. More extreme candidates entered Congress and statehouses through the practice of challenging incumbents in districts gerrymandered to be reliably Republican. And, in a decision not typically thought of as an anti-abortion victory, the chief counsel for National Right to Life successfully argued a supreme court case that would unleash vast sums of dark money into American elections – Citizens United v Federal Election Commission.“The anti-abortion movement, over time with other conservative allies, worked to change things like the rules of campaign finance for the conservative movement,” said Ziegler. “Anti-abortion lawyers played an integral part in cases like Citizens United.”By the time Donald Trump ran for president, evangelical Protestants had become more anti-abortion than the Catholic voters who were once the bedrock of anti-abortion advocacy. Seventy-seven per cent of white evangelical Christians say the procedure should be illegal, compared with just 43% of Catholics, according to the Pew Research Center.Trump harnessed the anger of white evangelicals for a victory in 2016, with a mix of hardline anti-abortion politicsand xenophobic nativism. Trump abandoned his 1999 stance as “very pro-choice”, saying there should be “punishment” for women who have abortions, and promised to nominate conservative supreme court justices who would “automatically” overturn Roe v Wade.Today, overwhelmingly white “Christian nationalist” voters believe their religion should be privileged in public life, a goal to be attained “by any means necessary”, according to social researchers such as Indiana University associate professor Andrew Whitehead.Supreme court decisions are notoriously difficult to predict, but abortion rights activists believe Wednesday’s hearing shows that conservative justices are ready to significantly weaken or perhaps overturn Roe v Wade. If that happens, young, poor people of color will disproportionately suffer, forced to carry unwanted pregnancies to term. Such an outcome is so severe human rights advocates have said state abortion bans would violate United Nations conventions against torture and place the US in the company of a shrinking number of countries with abortion bans.On Wednesday, the court’s three outnumbered liberal justices argued neither the science, the enormous consequences of pregnancy nor the American polity had changed since the court last decided a watershed abortion rights case. But, because of the work of anti-abortion politicians, the makeup of the court’s bench had.“Will this institution survive the stench that this creates in the public perception that the constitution and its reading are just political acts?” asked the liberal justice Sonia Sotomayor. “I don’t see how it is possible.”TopicsAbortionRoe v WadeUS politicsRaceUS supreme courtfeaturesReuse this content More

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      Ending Roe v Wade is part of a long campaign to roll back democracy itself | Jill Filipovic

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      Ending Roe v Wade is part of a long campaign to roll back democracy itselfJill FilipovicThe demise of abortion rights is the outcome of years of Republican work to make it harder for people to vote and stack the bench with rightwing judges American democracy is at the breaking point, and a supreme court ready to gut or overturn Roe v Wade is the latest warning sign. A radical minority is accumulating ever more power, and they’re threatening to undermine equal rights under the law, basic human freedoms, and democracy itself.Republicans are quietly rigging election maps to ensure permanent rule | David PepperRead moreOn Wednesday, the supreme court heard arguments in a case challenging Mississippi’s ban on abortions after 15 weeks of pregnancy, even for rape and incest survivors. Under the longstanding legal framework of Roe v Wade and Planned Parenthood v Casey, two of the supreme court cases that shape abortion rights in the US, states cannot outlaw abortion before the point of fetal viability, when the fetus can survive outside of the woman’s body (states can put restrictions on abortion before that point, so long as those restrictions don’t pose an “undue burden” on women seeking abortions). The Mississippi law violates that longstanding supreme court precedent.Yet the court agreed to hear it anyway, which was the first bad sign – why hear a case that so clearly flies in the face of what the court has already ruled? Wednesday’s oral arguments only contributed to the sense of doom, as a majority of the justices seemed ready and willing to overturn Roe.This didn’t happen by accident. The rightwing stranglehold on the courts has been a long-term project achieved by devious means. Republicans blocked Barack Obama from appointing dozens of judges to the federal bench, leaving those slots open for Donald Trump to fill. He stacked the courts with conservative reactionaries, many of whom were so unqualified that they failed to get the basic endorsement of the American Bar Association (ABA). Instead of appointing qualified candidates over rightwing stooges, the Trump administration simply cut the ABA out of the judicial vetting process.The most egregious of these Republican blockades came when Obama tried to appoint Merrick Garland to the supreme court seat vacated by Antonin Scalia. The right cried foul: it was wrong to change the balance of the court, they said, and it was an election year and therefore unfair to allow Obama a supreme court appointment; voters should decide the next president to pick a supreme court judge.A majority of voters wanted Hillary Clinton to have that role. But our undemocratic and archaic electoral college rules handed the victory to Donald Trump – the second time in less than two decades that the winner of the majority vote lost the White House.Trump, who ran on a promise of appointing anti-abortion judges who would overturn Roe v Wade, set about doing just that. He appointed Neil Gorsuch to the seat that should have been Garland’s. Then he appointed Brett Kavanaugh, despite the judge facing credible accusations of sexual assault. Finally, and most insultingly, Trump and his Republican Senate allies rammed through the appointment of the explicitly anti-abortion Amy Coney Barrett to the seat vacated by the feminist icon Ruth Bader Ginsburg – in his last year of office, and despite the supposed rule about a president letting the voters decide before an election.Trump voters – a minority of Americans in both 2016 and 2020 – are about to get what they want: an America in which women and girls are forced into pregnancy, childbirth and motherhood; an America in which women are second-class citizens, not entitled to control over the very bodies they live in, forced to risk their lives in the name of “pro-life” misogyny.The rest of us are stuck dealing with these minority religious views imposed on us.Strong majorities of Americans support abortion rights and do not want to overturn Roe. And in any case, the supreme court is supposed to be a bulwark against tyranny, an institution that defends and upholds constitutional rights, not one that punts those rights to the states.This court is not that. And that’s because of the shameful rightwing devastation of American democracy. Three members of the conservative supreme court majority, after all, were appointed by a traitorous president who fomented an attempted coup against the United States, and who has continued to undermine the electoral process by claiming that the last election, which he lost fair and square, was stolen. His party has devolved into a cult of personality, so tied to one narcissistic tyrant that it didn’t even bother releasing a political platform in the last presidential election. And because the Republican party knows it will lose if it has to play on an even playing field, its members have been systemically undermining voting rights for years.The demise of abortion rights in the US is the outcome of years of anti-democratic organizing to make it harder for people to vote, gerrymander districts, pull power from various elected offices when Democrats win them, and stack the bench with rightwing judges who will allow it all to happen.It’s terrifying. And of course forcing women into subservience and traditional roles is part of this process – that’s been the strategy in authoritarian nations throughout history, and it’s a pattern we’re seeing play out now, as the same nations that are scaling back democratic norms and processes are also going after women’s rights.That American women are facing a hostile supreme court and are looking at a future without abortion rights – and potentially without the constitutional right to contraception – isn’t a matter of law or “life”. It’s a sign of a democracy in decline.
      Jill Filipovic is the author of OK Boomer, Let’s Talk: How My Generation Got Left Behind
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      Kavanaugh signals support for curbing abortion rights as supreme court hears arguments on Mississippi case – live

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      4.48pm EST

      16:48

      While House Republicans aren’t doing much when it comes to admonishing far-right congresswoman Lauren Boebert for her Islamophobic comments about congresswoman Ilhan Omar, House progressives will be pushing Democrat leaders for action:

      Manu Raju
      (@mkraju)
      House progressives plan to ratchet up calls to strip Lauren Boebert from her committee spots bc of her comments on Ilhan Omar — and will soon go public with a letter to that effect, per two sourcesDem leaders have not made a decision yet on how to proceed.

      December 1, 2021

      4.18pm EST

      16:18

      House Republicans went full high school drama yesterday on Twitter, with Majorie Taylor Greene calling Nancy Mace “trash” and Mace calling Greene “batshit crazy” via emojis.
      This comes because far-right congresswoman Lauren Boebert made Islamophobic remarks about Democrat congresswoman Ilhan Omar, who has since received death threats related to these remarks. Republican congressman Adam Kinzinger called Boebert “trash”, and called out House minority leader Kevin McCarthy for his silence on her remarks.
      It appears McCarthy has finally weighed in – but not directly about the bigoted bullying. Instead, he’s just telling everyone in his party to behave.

      Andrew Solender
      (@AndrewSolender)
      GOP Rep. Don Bacon paraphrases McCarthy’s message on GOP infighting this AM: “Stop it. Quit acting like you’re in high school.”If McCarthy’s private talks w/ MTG don’t work, “at some point, the conference as a whole is gonna be frustrated, speak up… I know that’s bubbling.”

      December 1, 2021

      Andrew Solender
      (@AndrewSolender)
      “I’m not here to be a burden, but at some point you have to defend yourself too” – Bacon on attacks from MTG & co.“We’re not here to get the most clicks, to be TV celebrities. We’re here to govern, and you don’t do that by calling each other names, tearing each other apart.”

      December 1, 2021

      Updated
      at 4.19pm EST

      3.31pm EST

      15:31

      Stacey Abrams announces that she is running for governor of Georgia

      Democrat Stacey Abrams, who many have credited for being among those who helped turn Georgia blue in 2020, has announced that she will be running for governor once again.
      “If our Georgia is going to move to its next and greatest chapter, we are going to need leadership,” Abrams said in her announcement video. “Leadership that knows how to do the job. Leadership that doesn’t take credit without also taking responsibility. Leadership that works hard. Leadership that measures progress not by stats but by our ability for everyone to move up and thrive. Leadership that understands the true pain folks are feeling and has real plans. That’s the job of governor.”

      Stacey Abrams
      (@staceyabrams)
      I’m running for Governor because opportunity in our state shouldn’t be determined by zip code, background or access to power. #gapolBe a founding donor to my campaign:https://t.co/gk2lmBINfW pic.twitter.com/z14wUlo8ls

      December 1, 2021

      Updated
      at 3.33pm EST

      3.24pm EST

      15:24

      More on government funding, the continuing resolution and a possible government shutdown: House majority leader Steny Hoyer, who told reporters yesterday that he planned to pass a CR in the House today, now doesn’t think it’s possible.

      Chad Pergram
      (@ChadPergram)
      From colleague Jason Donner. Hoyer when asked if they could pass the CR to avoid a gov’t shutdown today: “I don’t think so.”

      December 1, 2021

      Chad Pergram
      (@ChadPergram)
      Hoyer on an interim spending bill to avert a shutdown. Says “Schumer and McConnell are negotiating.” He adds “It’s incomprehensible today that we can’t pass a simple CR.”

      December 1, 2021

      3.20pm EST

      15:20

      Whew, a lot happening today. Let’s hop back to Congress, where a handful of Republicans are threatening a government shutdown over the vaccine mandate for the private sector.
      To recap: In September, Joe Biden announced a federal mandate that all companies in the US with 100 employees or more must ensure either that their workers are fully vaccinated against Covid-19 or that they test negative for the coronavirus at least once a week. The deadline for this is 4 January.
      Conservatives across the country have taken issue with this, ranging the gamut of being fully anti-vax to arguing that vaccinations are a deeply personal issue, one in which the government should not be involved. There have been several challenges in courts that have sided against the mandate – the White House has since been urging private companies to act on their own to set their own vaccine mandates, as many have already.
      On top of all this, the federal government runs out of funding on 3 December – yep, two days from now. Congress must pass a stopgap funding bill, also known as a continuing resolution (CR), to prevent a government shutdown that would put hundreds of thousands out of work right before the holidays.
      Since early November, some Republican senators have made it clear that they will not vote for any short-term funding of a federal government with a vaccine mandate. Other conservative members of Congress have since joined in.
      Here’s a quick update on the situation:

      Manu Raju
      (@mkraju)
      Here’s what Sen. Roger Marshall (one of a handful of conservatives who are threatening a brief government shutdown) want before agreeing to a quick vote on the continuing resolution. He told us he wants language in CR that would prohibit OSHA from enforcing vaccine mandate. BUT

      December 1, 2021

      Manu Raju
      (@mkraju)
      Marshall would be OK with a quick final passage vote if there’s an amendment to that effect with a 51-vote threshold. But Ds are likely to insist on a 60-vote threshold. So would he object to a quick vote to pass the funding bill if the amendment were set at a 60-vote threshold?

      December 1, 2021

      Manu Raju
      (@mkraju)
      “We’ll see,” he said. “There’s a long time between now and Friday. But at a minimum, I think at a minimum it deserves a 50-person vote.”At GOP lunch, a number of senators told Marshall and Lee that their goal won’t be achieved if there’s brief shutdown. So I asked him about that

      December 1, 2021

      Manu Raju
      (@mkraju)
      And he said: “Yeah, I think the folks back home want to know how hard we’re fighting for them, that the jobs back home are as important as keeping the federal government open. That’s the hypocrisy up here. It just seems like we have rules for back home that don’t apply here.”

      December 1, 2021

      Updated
      at 3.31pm EST

      2.59pm EST

      14:59

      The Guardian’s David Smith was out front of the supreme court during the oral arguments in the Dobbs v Jackson Women’s Health Organization.
      Anti-abortion supporters waved models of fetuses and held prayer circles, while pro-choice advocates waved signs reading, “abortion is healthcare” and “protect abortion access”.
      Read more here:

      Updated
      at 3.04pm EST

      2.34pm EST

      14:34

      Joanna Walters

      Joe Biden smiled wryly earlier when asked by reporters whether he thought the former president, Donald Trump, put him at risk when Trump had received a positive coronavirus test just three days before the first presidential debate in the 2020 election campaign, according to a new book by former chief of staff Mark Meadows, which was reported exclusively by Guardian US this morning.
      “I don’t think about the former president,” Biden said. That was his only word on the topic.
      Top health official Anthony Fauci said a little later, at the White House briefing, that he had not been aware of that positive test for Trump at that time. Trump subsequently tested negative, according to the Meadows book, but shortly after revealed publicly that he had coronavirus, following which he was admitted to hospital.
      Speaking generally, Fauci said: “If you test positive, you should quarantine yourself.”
      Trump had not done that and had not only stood a few feet from Biden, in person and unmasked, for that first debate, but he continued to travel and hold events in close proximity to people.

      2.16pm EST

      14:16

      Joanna Walters

      Anthony Fauci is continuing to answer media questions at the White House. The top US public health official and chief medical adviser to Joe Biden, said that the molecular profile of the Omicron variant suggests it might be more transmissible than previous strains – and might have a higher risk of evading vaccine protection.
      He emphasized, however, that it is still too early to say what will happen in the pandemic with the emergence of the Omicron variant.
      Fauci urged those who have consistently adopted protection protocols, such as wearing a face mask in indoor settings with crowds, to continue to do so and said those who have stopped such practices should resume.
      Fauci said: “Do the things we have been saying every single day, not just for ourselves but internationally.”
      He said, however, that long term he believes there is “an end game” to the coronavirus pandemic.
      “There is no doubt that this will end, I promise you that, this will end,” he said.
      Fauci has now finished his section of the briefing and left the media room at the White House.

      Updated
      at 3.10pm EST

      2.06pm EST

      14:06

      Joanna Walters

      Anthony Fauci, the director of the national institute of allergies and infectious diseases and chief medical adviser to the US president, has taken the podium in the White House press briefing room.
      He has confirmed what we all just found out – the first case of the omicron strain of coronavirus has been identified in the US.
      “We knew it was just a matter of time,” Fauci said.
      The case was confirmed moments ago by the Centers of Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the federal health agency, and was identified in California.
      Fauci just said that the case was confirmed by the CDC and the California and the San Francisco health authorities.
      “This is the first case of Covid-19 caused by the omicron variant detected in the US,” said Fauci.
      He said the case involved an individual who returned to the US from South Africa on 22 November and tested positive for coronavirus on 29 November.
      Fauci added that the individual was fully vaccinated but to his knowledge had not received a booster shot. He said the patient has experienced mild symptoms.“We feel good that this patient had only mild symptoms and seems to be improving,” he said.
      He said the patient was isolating and those whom they had come into close contact with had been reached and tested and shown to be negative for coronavirus.
      Fauci reiterated that as many people as possible should get vaccinated and, if they have been vaccinated, get boosted if eligible.
      He told people not to wait to see if there will be a new vaccination designed to deal specifically with variants.
      “Right now I would not be waiting. If you are eligible … get boosted now.”
      It is not yet known for certain if the current vaccines combat omicron, Fauci said. Many experts are optimistic that they provide protection but confirmation of protection or the level of protection are awaited.

      Updated
      at 3.05pm EST

      1.52pm EST

      13:52

      First confirmed case of Omicron Covid variant in US

      Joanna Walters

      The federal authorities have identified the first confirmed case of the Omicron coronavirus variant in the United States.
      We are awaiting a live briefing from the White House from Anthony Fauci, chief medical adviser to Joe Biden and the top infectious diseases public health official in the US, and press sec Jen Psaki. We’ll bring you that.
      But meanwhile, this news is breaking across various wires services and TV news that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have the first confirmed US case of Omicron, identified in California.
      The dominant variant in the US at this point is still the Delta strain, which emerged and spread across the country from the summer.

      Updated
      at 3.08pm EST

      1.39pm EST

      13:39

      Biden reiterates support for the right to abortion in US

      Joanna Walters

      Joe Biden gave a simple endorsement of reproductive rights in America moments ago as he remarked after the high-stakes hearing at the Supreme Court in Washington, DC, earlier today. More

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      in US Politics

      How America’s broken democracy led to our abortion crisis | Meaghan Winter

      by

      OpinionUS politicsHow America’s broken democracy led to our abortion crisis Meaghan WinterThe majority of Americans support legal abortion. Redistricting has allowed extremism to flourish without fear of repercussion Mon 25 Oct 2021 06.29 EDTLast modified on Mon 25 Oct 2021 14.28 EDTAmerica is at a crossroads when it comes to abortion. In 2021, state legislatures have passed an unprecedented 106 anti-abortion bills. State lawmakers in five states are preparing legislation similar to Texas’s SB 8, an effective total abortion ban that enshrines a new kind of vigilantism directed at medical providers and private citizens.In this dangerous moment, supporters of legal abortion must understand that raising our voices is not going to change anything unless we also push for major, immediate democratic reforms including ending the filibuster, enshrining federal voting rights, expanding the supreme court and establishing fair redistricting.I understand why those goals may simultaneously seem too wonky to follow and too ambitious to achieve. But we cannot fight for abortion rights without first repairing our democracy, because we will continue to lose.The conservative movement and its ideological and corporate patrons have locked in structural power at nearly every level of government, and our lawmakers don’t need to be responsive to public opinion or even long-enshrined civil and human rights. If we’re going to have any chance of protecting ourselves and each other, on numerous urgent fronts, we need to agitate for immediate, ambitious democratic reforms that will ensure that our courts uphold our rights, and our elected officials are responsive to the will of the people. Otherwise, our rallies are collective screams into the void.Many abortion rights supporters have moved away from calling themselves “pro-choice” and instead have embraced the reproductive justice model, which defines itself as a movement to ensure the human right to bodily autonomy and to parent or not parent in a safe and sustainable community. Current threats to our democracy make crystal clear that the struggles for reproductive freedom, voting rights and economic, racial and climate justice are inextricably linked.When I first began reporting on abortion, in 2013, when I’d ask abortion rights advocates why extreme anti-abortion state lawmakers seemed unafraid of running afoul of the majority of the American public, which supports legal abortion, they would answer, “gerrymandering”.As I soon learned, because Republicans have gerrymandered districts in states across the nation, it no longer matters whether their policies defy most voters’ beliefs and needs, because incumbents’ seats are safe almost no matter what.What we’re seeing now accelerated after the 2010 election, which had existential ramifications for our democracy only now becoming visible. Ahead of that election, during an all-important redistricting year, the Republican party and conservative and corporate donors heavily invested in state-level elections so that they could gerrymander and give themselves a competitive advantage for a decade. It worked. They flipped legislative chambers across the country, and states started ramping up their envelope-pushing anti-abortion bills, as well as voting restrictions designed to make it more difficult for voters to throw them out of office.In 2020, Democrats failed to flip a single state-level chamber. Republicans now control 30 legislatures during yet another redistricting year, jeopardizing any chance of a progressive agenda in many states as well as Democratic control of Congress next year.As states begin passing ever more extreme abortion restrictions and even bans, there’s little reason to believe that the courts will stop them unless Congress gets serious about reforming the court system.During the Trump administration, Republicans installed an unprecedented number of federal judges, many of them open ideologues with little experience on the bench, reshaping the judiciary for a generation. And, in case you’ve forgotten, McConnell blocked Obama’s nominee Merrick Garland, changed the Senate rules for confirming justices to push through Neil Gorsuch, ushered through the confirmation of Brett Kavanaugh despite credible accusations of sexual assault against him, and rushed through the confirmation of Amy Coney Barrett while voting in the 2020 election had already begun.The radical takeover of the courts was not a random fluke but the result of careful plotting and hundreds of millions of dollars investment by rightwing ideologues and billionaires – the same kind of long-term strategizing to change the rules of the game their allies used to gerrymander states and congressional districts.In other words, the same movement of extreme, partisan donors and strategists behind the ever-more radical state laws has also installed federal judges and supreme court justices who are poised to uphold those laws. The issue isn’t whether expanding the supreme court will throw into doubt the court’s legitimacy. The supreme court is already partisan and ideological and therefore illegitimate. What’s needed now is a major and swift corrective.That brings us to Congress. What about a federal law enshrining abortion rights? To achieve that – and so much more, including expanding the supreme court – Congress needs to end the filibuster, the rule that requires 60 members of the Senate to pass legislation instead of 50. Our current Senate delivers nothing close to fair representation, which, as I write this, is on painful display as Republicans have filibustered yet another urgently needed voting rights bill, while two Democratic senators representing small states have killed provisions in the Build Back Better package that are “pro-life” in the most literal sense – in support of healthcare and a viable planet. To have any chance of achieving reproductive justice in this country, we need to agitate for our members of Congress to end the filibuster now.It’s time to re-examine what we consider pragmatic. Sticking with the status quo means surrendering to the profound irony that a movement that branded itself as “pro-life” has helped usher in a ruling class committed not only to stripping away the social safety net but also doubling down on fossil fuels and imperiling the very existence of life on Earth.Trying to advocate for reproductive justice without also demanding that our lawmakers immediately reform our voting laws, Congress and the courts that have been rigged by corporate and authoritarian interest groups isn’t practical or hopeful – it’s misguided if not delusional. Instead, supporters of abortion rights must join the chorus calling to end the filibuster and expand the supreme court.
      Meaghan Winter is a freelance magazine writer and author of the book All Politics is Local: Why Progressives Must Fight for the States
      TopicsUS politicsOpinionAbortionRoe v WadecommentReuse this content More