Jessie Hill, a professor at Case Western Reserve University School of Law, called Alito’s insistence that abortion is somehow different an “afterthought.” “There’s no way it won’t open the courthouse doors to further challenges related to the right to privacy and other intimate rights.” I think this will have farther-reaching implications than that,” said Nicole Huberfeld, a health law professor at Boston University School of Public Health. Wade,’ I just don’t see how that’s possible.
“Even though Alito very carefully says, ‘This is just about Roe v. But that ham-fisted attempt didn’t exactly reassure the experts who spoke to VICE News. Planned Parenthood, the 1992 Supreme Court decision that upheld Roe, the nation’s highest court will somehow get out of the business of dictating reproductive health law to the rest of the country. “Nothing in this opinion should be understood to cast doubt on precedents that do not concern abortion.”Īlito’s is essentially trying to argue that, by dispensing with Roe and Casey v. “We emphasize that our decision concerns the constitutional right to abortion and no other right,” Alito wrote. Planned Parenthood, the 1992 Supreme Court decision that upheld Roe, claiming that the other privacy cases don’t involve “the critical moral question posed by abortion” abortion is “unique,” in Alito’s view,” because it “destroys what those decisions called ‘fetal life.’” He attempted to draw a distinction between those cases and Roe and Casey v. In fact, in his draft majority opinion leaked this week, author Justice Samuel Alito specifically mentioned all of these cases. (“Sodomy” is often used as a shorthand for same-sex sex-but in reality, the word refers to any kind of anal or oral sex, meaning that states can use sodomy laws to police people’s sex positions.) Hodges, which legalized same-sex marriage nationwide. Texas decision, which abolished sodomy laws, which in turn led to 2015’s Obergefell v. This notion of a right to privacy, and the way it intertwines with the nature of liberty, also contributed to seminal victories for the LGBTQ rights movement: It was the bedrock of the 2003 Lawrence v.
famously declared, “If the right of privacy means anything, it is the right of the individual, married or single, to be free from unwarranted governmental intrusion into matters so fundamentally affecting a person as the decision whether to bear or beget a child.” In the opinion for the latter case, Justice William J. Connecticut) and to unmarried people (in 1971’s Eisenstadt v. “If your rights have not been understood as automatic for the last 200 years, or if your rights are not explicitly stated in the Constitution, this court is basically saying you do not have those rights.”īy the time of the Roe decision, the Supreme Court had already concluded that contraception should be available to married people (in 1965’s Griswold v. “Even if you’re somebody who doesn’t care very much about abortion rights, you should be worried about what’s coming down the pike,” said Grace Howard, an assistant professor of justice studies at San Jose State University. Pull out one block, like Roe, and you threaten to topple the whole thing, experts say. Over the decades, the Supreme Court has built a Jenga tower of legal reasoning around the existence of that right to privacy and how rights may be extrapolated from the Constitution.
In Roe, the justices ruled the right to an abortion arose out of a right to privacy, which isn’t explicitly spelled out in the Constitution but rather assembled through the guarantees of the 14th Amendment. Any sort of civil rights or constitutional rights that people have won over the last 50 years is open for discussion. “So everything’s up for grabs, in my mind. “This is potentially the first of many decisions where the Supreme Court rolls back fundamental civil rights that have been built up by the court and by Congress since the civil rights movement,” said Carrie Baker, director of the Program for the Study of Women and Gender at Smith College.