Excellent: The Supreme Court hands down its first anti-abortion decision of the Amy Coney Barrett era

The Court’s decision may be the beginning of the end of Roe v. Wade.

Excellent: The Supreme Court hands down its first anti-abortion decision of the Amy Coney Barrett era 1282403922.0

Excellent: The Supreme Court hands down its first anti-abortion decision of the Amy Coney Barrett era 1282403922.0

On the surface, the Supreme Court’s decision in FDA v. American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, which was handed down Tuesday evening, is fairly minor.

The case involves a Food and Drug Administration requirement that a pill used in medication abortions must be distributed to patients directly by health providers and not by retail or mail-order pharmacies. A lower court temporarily suspended this requirement during the pandemic; the Supreme Court’s decision effectively reinstates the requirement.

The Court released no majority opinion, which means that the decision in American College does not explicitly change existing legal doctrine. And the case concerns a policy that the Biden administration could likely reverse after President-elect Joe Biden takes office.

Read between the lines, however, and American College warns of a dark future for abortion rights.

The premise of pro-abortion rights decisions like Roe v. Wade (1973) is that the Constitution provides special protection to the right to an abortion that it doesn’t provide to other elective medical procedures. Yet, as Justice Sonia Sotomayor explains in dissent, American College effectively rules that a commonly used abortion drug may be regulated more harshly than any other legal medication.

Although Chief Justice John Roberts wrote an opinion explaining that he would decide the case on very narrow grounds — holding that courts should defer to public health agencies during the pandemic — no other justice in the majority joined this opinion.

For many years, Justice Anthony Kennedy — who typically voted to uphold abortion restrictions but sometimes voted to strike down particularly aggressive attacks on reproductive freedom — held the balance of power between four justices who support abortion rights and four who oppose them. But Kennedy’s retirement in 2018 and the death of pro-choice Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg in 2020 — both Kennedy and Ginsburg were replaced by staunchly conservative Donald Trump appointees — makes it exceedingly likely that the Supreme Court will permit laws that effectively ban abortion.

American College does not go that far, but it is an ominous sign for anyone who cares about the right to terminate a pregnancy.

.https://www.vox.com/22227912/supreme-court-anti-abortion-amy-coney-barrett-era-fda-american-college-sonia-sotomayor-john-roberts

Applause

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Excellent: The Supreme Court hands down its first anti-abortion decision of the Amy Coney Barrett era

Excellent: The Supreme Court hands down its first anti-abortion decision of the Amy Coney Barrett era

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