State after Republican-controlled state is passing extreme abortion bans and some extremist anti-choice organizations wish they would slow their roll a little bit. Not because they don’t want to force women into back alleys, Mother Jones reports, but because the strategy doesn’t look like it’s working.
The whole plan was to pass an extreme restriction—like the six-week bans passed by states like Georgia, Ohio, Mississippi, and others—and get divided decisions at the appeals court level so that anti-abortion forces could push it up to the Supreme Court. But no federal appellate court has taken that bait, and as a result the Supreme Court has no excuse to hear such a case, no matter how eager Brett Kavanaugh may be.
And since six-week bans aren’t likely to make it to the Supreme Court to give it the chance to overturn Roe v. Wade that is the whole reason for such state laws, the chief legal officer of Americans United for Life says “we think there are other more productive means of the state expressing its respect for life.” Those “other more productive means” include a range of smaller restrictions on reproductive freedom, like the Louisiana admitting privileges law that will be the first abortion case of the Kavanaugh era—laws that are narrow enough that some appeals court will say they pass muster, setting up a circuit split.
But, in addition to the hope that they can successfully shoot the moon, the Guttmacher Institute’s Elizabeth Nash says that “states are looking to try to jockey for most anti-abortion state in the country.” So despite the abysmal court record of extreme bans, Republican-controlled states like Florida are still teeing up their own such laws—and it’s not like states aren’t also passing the kinds of more tailored (yet still punitive) restrictions that have a chance of landing in the Supreme Court. And all the while Donald Trump and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell are packing the courts with the lifetime judges who may eventually deal the death blow to reproductive freedom in the U.S. for a generation.
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