On Friday, May 14, Pastor Patrick Mahoney, a Christian activist who has been on the front lines of the pro-life movement for more than 40 years, felt compelled to leave his home in Virginia and travel to Washington, D.C. This was unusual for him, since he usually avoided being in Washington on Fridays because of the traffic.
But that day, he felt a divine pull to go to DC and spend time praying about a case that had been filed in the Supreme Court in June 2020 but had yet to receive a response. Then, to his shock, on Monday, May 17, he learned that the Court had decided to hear that very case, out of the blue.
As New York Times explains“The law at issue, Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, No. 19-1392, was passed in 2018 by the Republican-dominated Mississippi Legislature. It banned abortions if the “probable gestational age of the unborn child” was determined to be more than 15 weeks. The law included narrow exceptions for medical emergencies or “serious fetal abnormality.”
This case would therefore constitute a direct challenge to the 1992 Act. Casey the ruling that upheld Roe v. Wadeand a direct challenge to Roe That’s why pro-abortion critics Dobbs raised this very issue, indicating that they saw a real threat posed by his bill.
However, to dispel any doubt, Mississippi Attorney General Lynn Fitch clearly stated this in detailed submission of documents to the Court last month. There, she argued that “nothing in the constitutional text, structure, history, or tradition supports a right to abortion” (p. 12).
And without hiding anything, she wrote:Roe AND Casey are therefore inconsistent with a straightforward, constitutionally based answer to the question posed. The question, then, is whether the Court should overturn these decisions. It should. you decided to get up case for annulment of judgment Roe AND Casey is overwhelming.
Roe AND Casey are blatantly wrong. The conclusion that abortion is a constitutional right has no support in the text, structure, history, or tradition” (pp. 12-13).
Naturally, this has made the protests by pro-abortion activists even louder. As NPR notes reported“Abortion rights advocates immediately seized on the state’s argument, noting that Mississippi has so far portrayed its appeal as much more limited.
“Mississippi has said the quiet part out loud. The goal of its blatantly unconstitutional abortion ban is for the Supreme Court to overturn 50 years of precedent and allow states to ban abortion,” said Alexis McGill Johnson, president of Planned Parenthood Action Fund.
The stakes could not be higher, as both sides of the abortion debate fully recognize this. What will be the outcome?
Father Mahoney pointed out to me during interview in the firing line that if the Court simply intended to deny Mississippi’s motion, there would be no reason to agree to hear the case. That’s because, to quote NPR again, “lower courts have invalidated that law, as they have in a dozen other states, because it conflicts with the Supreme Court’s decision in Roe v. Wade and subsequent decisions of supreme courts over the years.”
This would suggest that some judges are considering overturning lower court rulings, opting to leave the law in place. And they could do so without dealing with Roe v. Wade. If that happens, it would reopen the door to a flood of pro-life state laws that have been passed in recent months. If Dobbs can sustain, then perhaps these banknotes can sustain as well.
This would include many of the heartbeat bills currently being passed, which would ban abortions as soon as an embryo or fetal heartbeat can be detected. (According to Wikipedia(Eleven states have proposed heartbeat bills since 2018; as of 2019, such bills have passed, including bills in Ohio, Georgia, Louisiana, Missouri, Alabama, Kentucky, South Carolina, and Texas. None of those bills have become law, however, because they are held up by the courts.)
This would therefore fundamentally undermine Roe without directly addressing it. On the other hand, the Court could actually apply this bill to challenge Roe directly, which would be absolutely groundbreaking.
That’s why on July 29th dozen “Republican governors have signed an amicus curiae brief… urging the U.S. Supreme Court to overturn the landmark Roe v. Wade ruling” (in connection with Dobbs).
They were he joined “44 senators and 184 members of the House of Representatives said in a brief that the court should use the upcoming Mississippi case to ‘release its grip on abortion policy’ and leave abortion legislation to the states to decide.” Even more senators and state representatives also signed on.
This is truly a breakthrough moment.
As for public opinion, the Court also takes this into account, Gallup reported in June 2018, “Six in 10 American adults believe abortion should be legal in the first three months of pregnancy. But support drops by about half, to 28%, for abortions performed in the second three months and by half, to 13%, in the last three months.”
This means that fewer than three in ten Americans support abortion after 15 weeks of pregnancy, which is precisely the issue raised by Dobbs. (For the record, America is an exception in allowing elective abortions after 20 weeks of pregnancy. See Here (for details.)
Interestingly (and tragically), Pastor Mahoney told my listeners that when the Court held a private, test vote on the 1992 Act, Casey The verdict was 5-4 against, with Anthony Kennedy having the deciding vote.
But as confirmed release private papers of Judge Harry Blackmun in 2004 (Blackmun was the author Roe), “The Supreme Court in 1992 was poised to effectively overturn the landmark Roe v. Wade ruling legalizing abortion, but Justice Anthony M. Kennedy got cold feet and the vote went the other way.”
This means that if Kennedy had stayed in his position, Roe would have been overturned almost 30 years ago. (How many tens of millions of babies have been killed in the womb since then?)
It also means that it has taken 30 years for a case of this magnitude to reach the Supreme Court, and if the justices were to get it wrong again, the consequences would be catastrophic.
That is why a massive, apolitical prayer rally has been planned for October 2 in Washington, D.C., in front of the Supreme Court building, just before the start of the next session (see Here (for details).
May God hear the cries of his people. May God hear the hushed cries of the unborn.
