Suppose the Supreme Court reverses Roe v Wade this term. Then what?
The Dobbs case. The Supreme Court has already heard arguments on Dobbs v Jackson Women’s Health Organization, a case centering on a law Mississippi passed in 2018. That law bans all abortions after 15 weeks, in direction violation of the 24-week standard the Court laid out in Roe v Wade in 1973 and affirmed in Planned Parenthood v Casey in 1992. This is the first major abortion case to hit the court since Amy Comey Barrett’s arrival gave conservatives a 6-3 majority. A ruling is expected before the Court’s current term ends in June.
Based on the justices’ general philosophies, and on their comments and questions during the hearing on this case in December, most observers expect the Court to uphold Mississippi’s law. The question is how they will do it: Will the conservative majority leave the framework of Roe and Casey in place, but find a loophole that lets Mississippi’s law stand? Or will it fulfill the decades-old dream of the Religious Right and reverse Roe and Casey outright, essentially declaring that those decisions were mistakes?
If you’ve been following Chief Justice John Roberts over the years, you know that big reversals are not his style, particularly in cases where a majority of the public disagrees, as it does here. Roberts has a partisan Republican agenda, but he likes to keep it just below the public’s radar, and he is wary of sparking a left-wing backlash that could benefit Democrats. The last thing he wants is to make the Court itself a central issue in the 2022 midterms, or to reawaken talk of packing the Court with enough new justices to overcome the conservative majority installed by presidents and Senate majorities that didn’t represent a majority of voters.
So it’s clear which approach Roberts will favor: Don’t make headlines by reversing Roe, but chew away at it by creating a loophole for Mississippi, maybe by changing the definition of “viability”. The language of such a decision could subtly invite states to push the boundary further, until a woman’s right to control her own pregnancy would have little practical meaning. Roe would continue to stand, but like a bombed-out building without walls or a roof, would protect no one.
That probably won’t happen, though, for a simple reason: When Barrett replaced Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Roberts lost control of the Court. He is no longer the swing vote, so he loses 5-4 decisions when he sides with the Court’s three surviving liberals. That’s what happened in September when the Court refused to grant an injunction stopping Texas’ six-week abortion ban from taking effect. The Court did not rule on the validity of the law, so Roe was not overturned. But it refused to enforce Roe, so abortion is effectively banned in Texas for the time being. (And other states are passing similar laws.) Like many observers, I read that refusal to act as a tacit acknowledgement that Roe is doomed: Why should the Court bother to enforce a precedent they’re going to reverse soon anyway?
Justices Alito and Thomas have made no secret of their desire to reverse Roe. The three Trump appointees (Barrett, Kavanaugh, and Gorsuch) all refused to commit themselves during their confirmation hearings. But the conservative movement that backed them intended for them to reverse Roe, and it will feel betrayed if they don’t.
Getting through Senate confirmation tends to encourage boldness that wasn’t apparent during the hearings. In 2018, for example, Brett Kavanaugh convinced swing-vote Senator Susan Collins of his reverence for precedent, which Collins interpreted to mean Roe. But by the time Dobbs was argued last December, Kavanaugh was singing the praises of reversals.
If you think about some of the most important cases, the most consequential cases in this Court’s history, there’s a string of them where the cases overruled precedent. Brown v. Board outlawed separate but equal. Baker versus Carr, which set the stage for one person/one vote. West Coast Hotel, which recognized the states’ authority to regulate business. Miranda versus Arizona, which required police to give warnings when the right to — about the right to remain silent and to have an attorney present to suspects in criminal custody. Lawrence v. Texas, which said that the state may not prohibit same-sex conduct. Mapp versus Ohio, which held that the exclusionary rule applies to state criminal prosecutions to exclude evidence obtained in violation of the Fourth Amendment. Giddeon versus Wainwright, which guaranteed the right to counsel in criminal cases. Obergefell, which recognized a constitutional right to same-sex marriage.
In each of those cases — and that’s a list, and I could go on, and those are some of the most consequential and important in the Court’s history — the Court overruled precedent. And it turns out, if the Court in those cases had — had listened, and they were presented in — with arguments in those cases, adhere to precedent in Brown v. Board, adhere to Plessy, on West Coast Hotel, adhere to Atkins and adhere to Lochner, and if the Court had done that in those cases, you know, this — the country would be a much different place.
Given that Kavanaugh was the new justice considered most likely to follow Roberts’ lead, sometime in June we can expect a 5-4 decision reversing Roe, as part of a 6-3 decision upholding Mississippi’s law. The Religious Right will erupt in celebration, as a half-century quest reaches a successful conclusion. Like the Ring of Sauron melting into the flames of Mount Doom, Roe will be gone forever.
But what then? Is that the end of the saga, or will there be sequels? Maybe the Religious Right will be like the dog that final catches the car and doesn’t know what to do next. Maybe they’ll hold a victory party and then break up, like a caravan that has crossed the desert and finally reached its destination.
Or maybe not. Maybe the Religious Right and the Court’s conservative radicals still have places to go.
The legal roots and branches of Roe. Conservative rhetoric makes Roe a prime example of “legislating from the bench”. In this way of telling the story, seven justices in 1973 thought a right to abortion was a good idea, even though the Constitution doesn’t mention it. So like a small, un-elected, lifetime-tenured legislature, they voted to establish that right. Of course they had to construct some hocus-pocus argument to hide their usurpation of legislative power, but really they conjured abortion rights out of thin air.
That’s not how it happened. Roe was part of a long process that included several decisions before it and several after, most of which had nothing to do with abortion. And just as Roe wasn’t conjured out of thin air, it can’t vanish in a puff of smoke either. Whatever logic reverses it will have far-reaching consequences that may take decades to play out.
Roe, along with several other important decisions, arises out of an interpretation of the 14th amendment, one of the three post-Civil-War amendments that freed the slaves and defined their place in American society. (A series of terrible 19th-century Supreme Court decisions undercut those amendments, opening the way for the former Confederate states to disenfranchise Black voters and replace slavery with Jim Crow. But that’s a topic for another day.) In particular, the 14th amendment says:
No state shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any state deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.
It’s not hard to figure out what it means to deprive someone of life or property, but lawyers have been arguing ever since about the definitions of liberty and due process. A narrow definition of liberty might just mean staying out of jail; a broad definition might extend to living the way you want to live.
And if some state is telling you that you can’t live the way you want to live, how much process are you due? Maybe due process just means that a state has to dot all its i’s and cross all its t’s before it starts dictating your major life decisions. Or maybe some decisions are so central to a life of liberty that states need really good reasons to interfere in them. And maybe some are so important that a state can’t limit them at all.
The idea that the 14th Amendment’s due process promises more than just a procedural standard is known as substantive due process. Fundamentally, this notion is neither liberal nor conservative. Roe is rooted in substantive due process, but so are arguments against vaccine mandates. (Contra Senator Cornyn, though, Dred Scott was not a substantive due process case.) Conservative courts from the Progressive Era to the early New Deal used substantive due process to throw out liberal reforms like limited work-weeks or a minimum wage: Telling workers they couldn’t work long hours for low wages was seen as such an egregious violation of their liberty that no process was deemed sufficient. (The Court at the time did not appreciate the irony of using an anti-slavery amendment to justify working long hours for low wages. Obviously, those decisions are not in force today.)
The path from the 14th Amendment to Roe goes like this: Substantive due process implies that each person lives inside a sphere of personal liberty, which cannot be violated by governments for any but the most serious reasons, if at all. (Vaccine mandate cases, for example, revolve around whether a pandemic killing almost a million Americans sufficiently justifies invading the personal sphere of anti-vaxxers.)
Prior to Roe, that personal sphere was found (in Skinner) to contain a right to procreate even if the state would like to sterilize you, (in Loving) to include a right to marry someone of any race, and (in Griswold) to encompass a married couple’s right to use birth control. (Justice Douglas wrote: “Would we allow the police to search the sacred precincts of marital bedrooms for telltale signs of the use of contraceptives? The very idea is repulsive to the notions of privacy surrounding the marriage relationship.”)
After Roe, the personal sphere grew (in Lawrence) to include the right of consenting adults to choose their own sexual acts, and (in Obergefell) to allow same-sex couples to marry.
In short, Roe doesn’t stand alone. It is part of a web of substantive due process decisions on a variety of issues. Reversing Roe will send ripples through the whole web, putting all those rights up for grabs.
Conservative understand this, and welcome it. This week, at Ketanji Brown Jackson’s confirmation hearing, Senator Cornyn of Texas pushed Jackson to disavow substantive due process entirely.
Justice Jackson, … you’ve suggested that policy making isn’t in your lane and you strive to be apolitical, something I applaud. But why isn’t substantive due process just another way for judges to hide their policy making under the guise of interpreting the Constitution?
He went on to rail against the Obergefell decision on same-sex marriage. And Senator Braun of Indiana had this exchange with the Indianapolis Star:
Question: Would you apply that same basis to something like Loving v. Virginia, the Supreme Court case that legalized interracial marriage?
Answer: When it comes to the issues, you can’t have it both ways. When you want that diversity to shine within our federal system, there are going to be rules and proceedings, they’re going to be out of sync with maybe what other states would do. It’s a beauty of the system, and that’s where the differences among points of view in our 50 states ought to express themselves. And I’m not saying that rule would apply in general depending on the topic, but it should mostly be in general, because it’s hard to have it on issues that you just are interested in when you deny it for others with a different point of view.
Question: So you would be OK with the Supreme Court leaving the question of interracial marriage to the states?
Answer: Yes, I think that that’s something that if you’re not wanting the Supreme Court to weigh in on issues like that, you’re not going to be able to have your cake and eat it too. I think that’s hypocritical.
And Senator Braun is correct: Unless the argument used to reverse Roe is very precise and subtle — and I’ve seen no sign that any of the conservative justices combines the skill and will needed to write such an opinion — it will also be an argument for reversing a long list of rights Americans have come to rely on.
Those rights will not go away immediately when Dobbs is settled in June, but red-state legislatures will recognize the Court’s invitation to pass laws violating them. And once those cases reach the Supreme Court (which may take several years), the conservative bloc will see no option other than to make a decision compatible with their reversal of Roe.
After all, as Brett Kavanaugh explained to Susan Collins, the Court has to respect precedent.