LIVE AUDIO: Supreme Court Hears Abortion Case

NPR reports:

An epic argument at the U.S. Supreme Court on Wednesday: At issue is whether to reverse the court’s nearly half-century-old Roe v. Wade decision and subsequent decisions declaring that women have a constitutional right to terminate a pregnancy.

Until now, all the court’s abortion decisions have upheld Roe‘s central framework — that women have a constitutional right to an abortion in the first two trimesters of pregnancy when a fetus is unable to survive outside the womb, until roughly between 22 and 24 weeks.

But Mississippi’s law bans abortion after 15 weeks. A separate law enacted a year later would ban abortions after six weeks, and while the six-week ban is not at stake in this case, the state is now asking the Supreme Court to reverse all of its prior abortion decisions and to return the abortion question to the states.

CNN reports:

Amid the wave of excitement among conservative organizers over the prospect of reversing access to abortion for the first time in nearly 50 years — since Roe v. Wade affirmed a constitutional right to the procedure in 1973 — there are growing fears about how the conservative legal movement will fare if its own appointees on the bench stop short of dismantling the landmark abortion ruling.

Many of these groups considered it a betrayal when Justice Neil Gorsuch, the first of former President Donald Trump’s three appointees to the court, penned the majority opinion last year in Bostock v. Clayton County, which added sexual orientation and gender identity as protected classes under Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act.

I’ll bump up this post shortly before 10AM.