Now Roe. What's Next?

Contributing sentiments towards policy:

56% : Second, same-sex marriage involves strong "reliance interests," in terms of people organizing their lives and affairs "in reliance" on, or depending on, a given right.
52% : In 1997, in a case called Printz v. United States, Justice Thomas wrote a solo concurrence suggesting that the Second Amendment protected an individual right to keep and bear arms.
51% : The justices upheld a Mississippi law banning most abortions after fifteen weeks of pregnancy and overruled two longstanding precedents, Roe v. Wade and Planned Parenthood v. Casey, which together protected the right to get an abortion before fetal viability, which takes place around twenty-three weeks.
49% : Compare support for same-sex marriage, which increased dramatically from 27 percent in 1996 to 70 percent today, with public opinion on abortion, which has remained much more stable over the same time period.
48% : Again, abortion is different.
48% : Imagine that same-sex marriage returned to the Court.
45% : I'm unaware of presidential candidates campaigning on reversing Obergefell v. Hodges, the 2015 decision that recognized the right to same-sex marriage, or of organizations trying to revisit Griswold v. Connecticut, the 1965 decision that recognized the right of married persons to buy and use contraception.
43% : They basically said as much in Dobbs: "to ensure that our decision is not misunderstood or mischaracterized, we emphasize that our decision concerns the constitutional right to abortion and no other right.
43% : Rather, he was calling reconsidering the legal doctrine called "substantive due process," which claims that the Constitution's protection of "due process" doesn't just guarantee proper "process" (like a fair trial), but also certain "substantive" rights not mentioned in the Constitution (like abortion).
43% : On the contrary, the Court's decision properly leaves the question of abortion for the people and their elected representatives in the democratic process."
42% : If the conservative justices plan to roll back other rights in the near future, they easily could have left this language out -- but its presence suggests the conservatives have little appetite for fights beyond abortion.
42% : Or as pro-life advocate Karen Swallow Prior wrote in the New York Times on Friday, she and her fellow pro-lifers believe "that abortion unjustly ends the life of a being that is fully human" -- which can't be said of almost any other right.
41% : On Friday, as you may have heard, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization that the Constitution does not confer a right to abortion.
39% : Second, contrary to the claims of many commentators, Justice Thomas wasn't actually arguing for getting rid of all legal protection for contraception, same-sex marriage, and similar rights.
38% : Abortion is an issue where there's no national consensus -- and no sign of consensus emerging anytime soon.
37% : Nothing in this opinion should be understood to cast doubt on precedents that do not concern abortion."
36% : Writing for five justices -- all the conservatives except Chief Justice John Roberts, who wrote in a separate opinion that he would have upheld the Mississippi law but preserved Roeand Casey -- Justice Alito argued that "[t]he Constitution makes no reference to abortion," nor is abortion otherwise protected under the Fourteenth Amendment as an unmentioned right that is "deeply rooted in this Nation's history and tradition."
36% : As noted by Professor Kerr, the American public has reached a consensus on other issues that it has never reached on abortion.
33% : In the eyes of social conservatives, abortion is uniquely evil -- and Roe, by enshrining that perceived evil in constitutional law, is a uniquely bad decision.
33% : While the general logic of Dobbs might support rejecting this right and overruling Obergefell, it's a different issue than abortion.
32% : But the arguments in Justice Samuel Alito's opinion for the Court, plus a separate concurrence by Justice Clarence Thomas, have many observers worried that other rights could soon be in jeopardy, including rights to contraception, interracial marriage, and same-sex marriage.
31% : First, as noted by Justice Alito in Dobbs, same-sex marriage doesn't involve any destruction of "potential life."
29% : As Justice Brett Kavanaugh wrote in his own Dobbs concurrence, "the Court's decision today does not outlaw abortion throughout the United States.
28% : Why isn't there the same hunger on the right to ban, say, interracial or same-sex marriage that there is for banning abortion?
11% : As Justice Alito wrote in Dobbs, the critical difference between abortion and most other rights is that abortion destroys "potential life" or "the life of an 'unborn human being.'"

*Our bias meter rating uses data science including sentiment analysis, machine learning and our proprietary algorithm for determining biases in news articles. Bias scores are on a scale of -100% to 100% with higher negative scores being more liberal and higher positive scores being more conservative, and 0% being neutral. The rating is an independent analysis and is not affiliated nor sponsored by the news source or any other organization.