Supreme Court Justice Elena Kagan has said on Wednesday that abortion is now “part of the fabric of women in this nation” as she attempted to defend the 1973 Roe v. Wade legal precedent during the Dobbs vs. Jackson Women’s Heath case.
Kagan took a hard line with Mississippi Solicitor General Scott Stewart, who showed during oral arguments at the Court to defend the state’s controversial 2018 law that bans abortion, including in the case of rape or incest, before 15 weeks.
She said that the Supreme Court has to avoid the idea that it is simply a political body (without acknowledging that Roe itself created the expectation), and argued that not much changed after Roe and the Planned Parenthood case in 1992 to change the ideas at stake.
In reply, Stewart said that if nothing had changed, that was a point against the Roe case, since it “has no basis within the Constitution.”
He pointed to Justice John Marshall Harlan’s dissent in the Plessy vs Ferguson case, a case in 1896 that the Court allowed racial segregation, and Harlan stated: “In respect to civil rights, all citizens are equal in the law.”
The rights that are in question, he said, belonged not just to women but also to unborn babies, and that the American people, not judges, should decide this balance.
Solicitor General Elizabeth Prelogar also took a similar approach as Kagan, saying that abortion was recognized since Roe as being a “fundamental” right, one that should never be subject to state legislatures, but guarded throughout the nation.
Kagan and Justice Sonia Sotomayor both mentioned the idea that women had the right to body integrity. Similarly, Prelogar said that abortion restrictions were akin to “forcing” a woman to carry a child to birth, against her rights and will.
This comes at a time when the American people, including many Democrats, have grown sickened by the countless leaks and insider information about abortion corruption involving the selling of aborted fetuses and parts. The far-left have taken their love of abortion to unspeakable places in the past ten years, and now it seems that their time could be up.
Author: Scott Dowdy