This Supreme Court Is Out of Step With Most Americans

No one expected that the news of Roe v. Wade’s imminent demise would come as it did — in an extraordinary late-night leak of a draft opinion two months before the end of the Supreme Court’s session. But everyone should have expected that it would, eventually, come.

For decades, the court has been chipping away at a woman’s right to choose what happens to her own body, but the core holding of Roe always managed to survive. Then came 2020, when Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg died and was replaced by Justice Amy Coney Barrett only days before the presidential election. Suddenly, the court had a solid majority of justices prepared to overturn Roe outright.

This didn’t happen by accident: Republicans have spent the past several years twisting the court into an aggressive right-wing supermajority for precisely this purpose. Remember that one of Donald Trump’s major selling points in the 2016 campaign was his vow that if elected, he would ensure Roe was overturned “automatically.” It hasn’t been automatic, but if the holding in the draft opinion stands, it will mark an astonishing moment in our history: the elimination of an existing constitutional right, one that millions of American women (not to mention the men who impregnated them) have relied on for nearly half a century.