With the likely turnaround on Roe v. Wade, the right to abortion is not the only one that could be in danger in the United States.
Last spring, law professor at the University of Florida Law Mary Ziegler warned, while certain conservative states were already multiplying legislation restricting the right to abortion: “Anti-abortion activists are already thinking about after-Roe v. Wade”. The legal scholar referred to fears of a legal battle for “the recognition of a right to life, for the Constitution to consider a fetus or an unborn child as a person, who has rights that would make abortion unconstitutional but the risk goes far beyond this single issue, after years of local legislation and challenges in courts where many conservative judges have been appointed.
To read : The right to abortion more than ever in danger in the United States
In Louisiana, elected Republicans presented on Wednesday, 48 hours after the leak of the text in Politico, a text of law classifying abortion as a homicide (excluding rape and threat to the health of the mother), recognizing the rights of a fetus “from the moment of fertilization” and assuming that “the Supreme Court is about to ignore Roe v. Wade”. “We have been waiting for this for 50 years,” welcomed Danny McCormick, the elected Republican who presented the text. In the document written by Samuel Alito, the judge refers abortion legislation to local legislation, but in the case of Louisiana, the fact that the governor is a Democrat will probably not prevent him from going back on this right: John Bel Edwards is known for its anti-abortion positions and has enacted, in recent years, several measures restricting this right.
Emergency contraception, the next step?
If Samuel Alito specifies in his text that he “insists on the fact that [leur] decision concerns only the constitutional right to abortion and no other”, he nevertheless writes that any right not explicitly stated in the Constitution would have to be “deeply rooted” in American history for the Supreme Court to create a precedent (as was until then Roe v. Wade): “Until the latter part of the twentieth century, there was no support in American law for a constitutional right to access abortion. Zero. None”, insists the one who also refers to treatises by the English jurist of the 13th century Henry de Bracton to justify the prohibition of this right at the federal level.
The argument was made by Conservative Justice John Roberts in the dissonant 2015 opinion when the Supreme Court ruled in favor of marriage for all: “The importance of insisting that fundamental rights under -heard have historical roots and a tradition among our people that when unelected judges undo democratically passed laws, they do so based on more than their own beliefs, “wrote the president of the Court which, according to the “Washington Post”, voted against the decision to be rendered this summer.
Thus, the concerns of activists go beyond the right to abortion since, in his text, Samuel Alito considers that it is “scandalously wrong” to legislate on a subject that is not mentioned in the Constitution made effective in 1789… thus opening the way to appeals on other subjects, such as the right to contraception. “We have already seen people falsely equate emergency contraceptives and IUDs with abortion. This is something that worries me,” Mara Gandal-Powers, director of the contraceptive access service at the National Women’s Law Center, told the New York Times. Questioned Sunday on CNN, the republican governor of Mississippi Tate Reeves did not exclude the possibility of returning to certain forms of contraception, such as intrauterine devices, even the morning after pill, in the future: “I am sure that there will be discussions in America about it but it’s not something we’ve spent a lot of time on,” he said, refusing to commit to not legislating on the issue. It is from this conservative state that the file Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health, which could lead to the reversal of Roe v. Wade.
‘It’s about so much more than abortion,’ warns Biden
The subject of marriage, like the 1967 decision Loving v. Virginia, which ended the ban on marriages between blacks and whites or same-sex unions, is also at risk according to some specialists, who see Samuel Alito’s text as the end of the protection of certain rights under privacy: “None of us is immune to the anti-women and anti-LGBTQ ideology that dominates this court,” feared Sarah Kate Ellis, president of GLAAD (Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation ), in a statement. “It is more important than ever that Congress act quickly and […] make Roe law and pass the Equality Act to protect marriage and other rights for LGBTQ people.”
The fear was even voiced from the White House. “It’s about so much more than abortion. What other things are they going to tackle? Because this MAGA mob is truly the most extremist political organization that has existed in recent American history,” Joe Biden thundered, referring to Donald Trump voters (and his “Make America great again” campaign slogan, “ MAGA”), whose election led to the appointment of three conservative judges to the Supreme Court. A way for the American president to mobilize his electorate a few months before the midterm elections next November, after which the Democrats could lose their majority in the House of Representatives and the Senate (50 elected from each side currently, with the 101st vote of Kamala Harris, Vice President and President of the Senate, to decide in the event of a tie).