With the demise of Roe v Wade in a decision announced Friday morning by the US Supreme Court, Republicans like former Vice President Mike Pence have their sights set on another target: a national abortion ban.
On Twitter, Mr Pence celebrated that the court had returned “the question of abortion to the states and to the people” and called on anti-abortion activists to continue working across the country to ban abortion in every state.
“Now that Roe v. Wade has been consigned to the ash heap of history, a new arena in the cause of life has emerged and it is incumbent on all who cherish the sanctity of life to resolve that we will take the defense of the unborn... and support for women in crisis pregnancies to every state Capitol in America,” he wrote, before adding: “Having been given this second chance for Life, we must not rest and must not relent until the sanctity of life is restored to the center of American law in every state in the land.”
The Supreme Court’s decision overturning Roe v Wade eliminates a national right to abortion care, but does nothing to ban abortions. Instead, those decisions will be a left to individual states — and while a number of states have trigger laws banning abortion that were prepared to go into effect with the reversal of Roe, abortion still remains legal in numerous other states across the country.
A national abortion ban would change that, taking decisions about the legality of abortions out of individual states’ hands and making abortion care illegal across the country.
For anti-abortion activists, a national ban has long been considered the ultimate goal — and in the aftermath of Friday morning’s decision, it’s what the likes of Mr Pence appeared to advocating for.
Currently, abortion is legal and expected to remain legal in the West Coast states of Washington, Oregon, and California, the southwest states of Colorado, Nevada, and New Mexico, the midwest states of Minnesota and Illinois, Alaska, Hawai’i, Washington, DC, and throughout the northeast. A New York Times analysis holds that the future of abortion remains uncertain in nine more states, while 20 states are expected to enact total or near-total bans on abortion.
Mr Pence, who has been traveling to early primary states as he weighs a 2024 White House, was joined by numerous other Republicans in calling for aggressive next steps in the total criminalization of abortion — including in states where overwhelming majorities of citizens support abortion care and have laws on the books protecting it.
Sen. Ted Cruz, whose home state of Texas enacted a near total ban on abortion last fall in anticipation of the court’s willingness to strike down Roe.
“This is a momentous day, and yet the fight for life doesn’t end with the Dobbs decision,” Mr Cruz tweeted. “It simply begins a new chapter.”
“Thank God for the SCOTUS’s courage,” Rep. Bob Good of Virginia tweeted after the Court released its decision. “May Republicans in Congress match that courage by demanding a vote on the Life at Conception Act, and finally bring an end to the atrocity of abortion in America.”
The Life at Conception Act, sponsored by Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky, would declare that the right to life guaranteed by the Constitution begins at the moment of conception — effectively classifying all abortion as murder. The bill currently has 18 Republican co-sponsors and has no chance of passage so long as the Democrats control Congress and the White House.
But Democratic control of Congress could be coming to an end as soon as next January following the midterm elections, and the Supreme Court’s conservatives may have their sights set on much more than just ending the nearly half-century old right to abortion care in the US.
In his concurring opinion on the Dobbs case, Justice Clarence Thomas suggested that the coourt now had reason to “reconsider all the court’s substantive due process precedents,” including Griswold, which protects the right to contraception, Lawrence, which protects the right same-sex sex, and Obergefell, which protects the right to same-sex marraige.
