Justice Neil Gorsuch took 10 minutes to approve Dobbs abortion opinion – report

The conservative supreme court justice Neil Gorsuch took just 10 minutes to approve without changes a 98-page draft of the opinion that would remove the federal right to abortion that had been guaranteed for nearly 50 years, the New York Times reported.

According to the paper, Samuel Alito, the author of the opinion in Dobbs v Jackson, the case that struck down Roe v Wade, from 1973, circulated his draft at 11.16am on 10 February 2022.

Texas’ Devious Plan To Silently Kill Roe v. Wade

Wednesday, the Texas attorney general’s office sent the Supreme Court a blueprint for overruling Roe v. Wade without actually having to write the words “Roe v. Wade is overruled.” It is a heavy-handed, oafish appeal to the darkest fears of abortion opponents. It is also an absolutely brilliant bid for the one vote that matters in a major abortion case, Justice Anthony Kennedy’s.

Federal Appeals Court Begs Supreme Court To Overrule Roe v. Wade

The big headline arising from a decision handed down by a federal appeals court on Wednesday is that abortion rights in North Dakota are saved. The court struck down the most stringent abortion ban in the nation — a restriction so stringent that significant numbers of pregnant women would find it impossible to exercise their right to choose in North Dakota if the provision had gone into effect.

Yet, while the three members of the United States Court of Appeals for the Eight Circuit that heard MKB Management Corp. v. Stenehjem — all of whom are George W. Bush-appointees — reluctantly concluded that existing Supreme Court precedent requires them to strike down the North Dakota law, they devoted the bulk of their opinion to an extended attack on what remains of Roe v. Wade. Indeed, much of the opinion does little more than repeat arguments commonly found in anti-abortion literature.

The Fifth Circuit Just Stuck A Knife In Roe v. Wade

On Tuesday, a panel of three George W. Bush-appointed judges handed down a sweeping endorsement of the tactics anti-abortion lawmakers adopted in recent years in an effort to prevent abortion clinics from operating. With one narrow exception, the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit’s decision in Whole Woman’s Health v. Cole is a total defeat for abortion providers who hoped to overcome a Texas law that will shut down most of the state’s abortion clinics. Worse for women seeking an abortion, the Fifth Circuit’s opinion would give many other states broad discretion to restrict access to abortion if its reasoning is ultimately adopted by the Supreme Court.

Meet the Alabama Judge Who Figured Out How to Unravel Roe v. Wade

ProPublica profiles Alabama Supreme Court Justice Tom Parker, whose “rulings over the last nine years have fueled the biggest threat to abortion rights in a generation.”

Parker is a religious man, who, in 2005, said, “The very God of Holy Scriptures, the Creator, is the source of law, life, and liberty.”

Ruth Bader Ginsburg: Roe v. Wade Ruling Flawed

CHICAGO — One of the most liberal members of the U.S. Supreme Court, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg could be expected to give a rousing defense of Roe v. Wade in reflecting on the landmark vote 40 years after it established a nationwide right to abortion.

Instead, Ginsburg told an audience Saturday at the University of Chicago Law School that while she supports a woman's right to choose, she feels the ruling by her predecessors on the court was too sweeping and gave abortion opponents a symbol to target. Ever since, she said, the momentum has been on the other side, with anger over Roe fueling a state-by-state campaign that has placed more restrictions on abortion.

After Tiller: 40 Years After Roe v. Wade, Abortion Providers Continue Work of Slain Kansas Doctor

Forty years after the landmark Roe v. Wade case that legalized abortion, the new documentary "After Tiller" follows the only four doctors left in the United States who are known to provide abortions in the third trimester. In 2009, their colleague, Dr. George Tiller, was assassinated while attending church in Wichita, Kansas. The four doctors depicted in the film have also braved threats, harassment and the emotional weight of the stories they hear to provide women with a desperately needed medical procedure. We’re joined by the directors of "After Tiller," Lana Wilson and Martha Shane.

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This Is 'Roe' at 40

Just two years ago, as Roe v. Wade headed into its late thirties, it seemed to be losing its luster. States were hacking away at abortion rights, passing ninety-two new restrictions in 2011 alone—nearly triple the number of any other year on record. Americans appeared ready to tolerate all manner of barriers to abortion access, from parental notification laws and restrictions on late-term procedures to laws crippling the ability of clinics to provide care by subjecting them to absurd requirements (such as having five-foot-wide hallways, as one Virginia law demanded). These new burdens added to the weight of a decades-long and alarmingly successful campaign by the right to stigmatize women seeking abortions and to persecute abortion providers. As a result, 87 percent of US counties lack an abortion provider, and several states have only a clinic or two staffed by a doctor who flies in from another state. “It’s never been this frightening before,” one longtime clinic worker recently told The Washington Post.

This is Forty: The Anniversary of Roe v. Wade

Forty years ago this Tuesday, on January 22, 1973, the Supreme Court issued its ruling in Roe v. Wade. Nine months later, Reader’s Digest published an essay by Alan Guttmacher, an obstetrician and gynecologist, called “Why I Favor Liberalized Abortion.”

Guttmacher was born in 1898. His father was a rabbi, his mother a social worker. In 1916, when a nurse named Margaret Sanger opened the nation’s first birth-control clinic, in Brooklyn, and was promptly arrested, Guttmacher was eighteen years old and a sophomore at Johns Hopkins. He formed his ideas about contraception and abortion in the nineteen-twenties. “I graduated from medical school firm in the belief that abortion was a simple, straightforward matter: bad guys did it; good guys did not,” Guttmacher explained, but “four years of hospital residency, and several experiences during my early years of practice, radically changed my attitude.” When he was a young doctor, Guttmacher’s patients included a mother of four (“the second person I ever saw die”) who, “screaming vainly for life,” died after what was probably a self-induced abortion: there was not a thing he, or anyone, could do to save her.

Criminalizing Pregnancy: As Roe v. Wade Turns 40, Study Finds Forced Interventions on Pregnant Women

A new study shows hundreds of women in the United States have been arrested, forced to undergo unwanted medical procedures, and locked up in jails or psychiatric institutions, because they were pregnant. National Advocates for Pregnant Women found 413 cases when pregnant women were deprived of their physical liberty between 1973, when Roe v. Wade was decided, and 2005. At least 250 more interventions have taken place since then. In one case, a court ordered a critically ill woman in Washington, D.C., to undergo a C-section against her will. Neither she nor the baby survived. In another case, a judge in Ohio kept a woman imprisoned to prevent her from having an abortion. We’re joined by Lynn Paltrow, founder and executive director of the National Advocates for Pregnant Women. "We’ve had cases where lawyers have been appointed for a fetus before the woman herself, who’s been locked up, ever gets a lawyer," Paltrow says. "[We’ve had] cases where they’ve ordered a procedure over women’s religious objections. And one court said pregnant women of course have a right to religious freedom — unless it interferes with what we believe is best for the fetus or embryo." The new study comes on the eve of the 40th anniversary of Roe v. Wade, the landmark Supreme Court decision on the right to abortion — a right that has been under siege ever since.

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In 1959, when I was a precocious smarty-pants still in grade school, I wrote a fake letter to Doris Blake, the New York Daily News advice columnist. I pretended to be a teenage girl "in trouble." I spun a tale of a liquor-soaked prom night and passing out in the back of a car. I included a cast of entirely fictional characters—a worthless boyfriend, a mentally unstable mother, a strict, brutal father. I ended my letter with: "Now I think I am pregnant. Please help me. I am desperate."

I'm not sure what I expected, but my letter was not printed, and no advice was forthcoming. The silence was utter. Possibly Miss Blake, like Nathanael West's Miss Lonelyhearts, had a drawer where such letters were tossed. If so, the other letters in that drawer were no doubt a lot like mine—except that they were not written by wiseass children. They were real. And for the writers of those letters, the silence was real. And I remember thinking: Gee, what if I really were that girl I made up? What would I do?

One summer night some years later, when I was not quite 18, I got knocked up. There was nothing exciting or memorable or even interestingly sordid about the sex. I wasn't raped or coerced, nor was I madly in love or drunk or high. The guy was another kid, actually younger than I, just a friend, and it pretty much happened by default. We were horny teenagers with nothing else to do.

Nature, the ultimate unsentimental pragmatist, has its own notions about what constitutes a quality liaison. What nature wants is for sperm and egg to meet, as often as possible, whenever and wherever possible. Whatever it takes to expedite that meeting is fine with nature. If it's two people with a bassinet and a nursery all decorated and waiting and a shelf full of baby books, fine. If it's a 12-year-old girl who's been married off to a 70-year-old Afghan chieftain, fine. And if it's a couple of healthy young oafs like my friend and me, who knew perfectly well where babies come from but just got stupid for about 15 minutes, that's fine, too.

In the movies, newly pregnant women trip, fall down the stairs, and "lose the baby." Ah. If only it were that easy. In real life, once that egg is fertilized and has glided on down the fallopian tube, selected its nesting place, and settled in, it's notoriously secure, behaves like visiting royalty. Nature doesn't give a fig about the hostess's feelings of hospitality or lack of them. If the zygote's not defective, and the woman is in good health, almost nothing will shake it loose. Anyone who's been pregnant and didn't want to be knows this is so.

 

Roe v. Wade Still Under Siege, 39 Years Later

On January 22, 1973, the Supreme Court voted to protect a woman's right to have an abortion in the early stages of her pregnancy. Before the landmark Roe v. Wade decision, abortion was banned in two-thirds of states, and an estimated 1.2 million women a year resorted to illegal, often dangerous back-alley abortions.

Now, 39 years later, conservative lawmakers are making unprecedented moves toward reversing Roe v. Wade, and the legality of abortion is as precarious as it's ever been.

By all accounts, 2011 saw a remarkable wave of legislative attempts to limit women's reproductive rights. Some states brazenly challenged Roe with laws that would never have been considered before evangelical and Tea Party candidates swept state legislature elections in 2010. At least six states -- Alabama, Louisiana, North Dakota, Ohio, Mississippi and Oklahoma -- seriously considered laws that would ban abortion altogether.

None of these measures passed, in some cases because anti-abortion activists worried that they were so extreme that the inevitable court battles would only end up reaffirming Roe, but the states did enact more subtle limits on abortion that had a higher likelihood of standing up in court.

So-called "fetal pain" bills swept the Midwest in 2011, as five states joined Nebraska in banning abortions after 20 weeks of gestation. These bills directly challenge the Supreme Court precedent set forth in the 1992 case Planned Parenthood v. Casey, which effectively amended Roe to say that states cannot ban abortion before the fetus is considered viable outside the womb -- usually around 22 to 24 weeks.