Must Read: War on Women; How States Can Ban Abortion Even With ‘Roe’
The Supreme Court granting states the power to ban abortion with Roe still standing seemed outlandish even just a few years ago, but the appointment of John Roberts as chief justice shifted the equation. Roberts specializes in decisions that reverse the spirit of precedent while leaving intact the letter of it, like when he squashed large chunks of Brown v. the Board of Education while claiming to uphold it. To make it legal to ban abortion in the states, all the Court needs is a law that eliminates legal abortion while dodging the logic of Roe v. Wade.
Many state legislatures appear to be doing just that, writing legislation which Nancy Northup, the president of the Center for Reproductive Rights, describes as ‘part of an ongoing effort around the country to choke off women’s access to abortion by any means necessary—either by forcing doctors out of practice, banning procedures outright or demeaning women.’ The mildest version of this strategy, already passed into law by states such as Indiana and Nebraska, is to use bogus science to justify banning abortions after twenty weeks, on the fictional grounds that fetuses can feel pain at that gestational age. These bans borrow the logic of Planned Parenthood v. Casey, where the court suggested that scientific advances that keep premature babies alive at younger gestational ages could justify banning abortion at earlier in the pregnancy. Antichoice legislators have pounced on this logic, making bogus scientific claims that fetuses can feel pain to pull the line back well before viability.