A red state sent a strong message to U.S. Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito and his conservative colleagues in a recent ruling.
The Wyoming Supreme Court struck down the state’s abortion ban 4-1 last week, finding that legislators had perhaps inadvertently enshrined abortion access as part of their 2012 backlash to Obamacare, and Slate’s Dahlia Lithwick and Mark Joseph Stern argued that red state’s court had rebuked the U.S. Supreme Court on the issue.
“How did a ruby-red state wind up enshrining that fundamental right?” Stern asked. “Well, when Congress enacted the Affordable Care Act back in 2010, GOP politicians and activists decided they were going to fight back by banning socialized medicine in state constitutions. They claimed they were worried that the government would force everyone into a state-run health care system in which bureaucrats dictated exactly what would be provided. So they pushed for these constitutional amendments that would preserve private insurance and give everyone the right to access and pay for medical treatment.”
Wyoming and four other states ultimately enacted those amendments, but the court found the language used in that amendment was overly broad while the state’s ban lacked meaningful and coherent exceptions
“In legal terms, the law was tailored in a very arbitrary way, seemingly to prolong the suffering of women, as well as fetuses who were not going to survive if they were born,” Stern wrote.
The majority ruled that the ban was irrational and unworkable, and not even remotely crafted to serve the state’s alleged interest, and Lithwick argued that their decision stood in sharp contrast to Alito’s reasoning in the Dobbs case striking down Roe v. Wade.
“This is a rebuke to Justice Samuel Alito and his completely inane analysis about the complexity of pregnancy,” Lithwick wrote. “But it’s also a rebuke to state lawmakers who think they understand how medicine works, and to the entire pro-life industrial complex, which keeps treating pregnancy as though it’s a simple, check-the-box enterprise. This is an opinion that deeply honors the fact that pregnancies are complicated. They are fraught. They are a big deal. It sweeps in questions of rape and abuse and power differentials and reporting and how the criminal justice system works. It sweeps in granular questions about when life begins and whose life matters.”
“This is not the kind of thing that Alito can just imagine away, because he likes the idea of fetuses above all,” Lithwick added. “What you’re describing is a court that is really sensitive to the principle that Alito missed completely in Dobbs, which is that when the government tries to regulate pregnancy and abortion in simpleminded cartoonish ways, women are oppressed and tortured. But then there’s the other piece of this that I want you to just amplify, which is that this is a court doing actual, principled, Scalian textual analysis. I’ve almost forgotten what that looks like, because you sure as hell don’t see it at the Supreme Court.”
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