North Jersey Democrats vowed to fight for a woman’s right to choose if the U.S. Supreme Court overturns abortion rights in a case where a decision is expected this Spring.
The issue moved to the front of the political world after an initial draft majority opinion written by New Jersey native Justice Samuel Alito was first published by Politico May 2 that would strike down what was considered settled law and return the issue back to the states to decide.
Gov. Phil Murphy reminded New Jerseyans that the Freedom of Reproductive Choice Act that he signed earlier this year in Teaneck codified a woman’s right to choose into state law. The law ensures women the right to access contraception, the right to terminate a pregnancy and the right to carry a pregnancy to term in New Jersey.
Right to Choose Unchanged in New Jersey
“This decision will have no impact on New Jersey state law or the full right to reproductive freedom under our state law. This remains fully intact, because here in New Jersey, instead of hoping for the best, we prepared ourselves for the worst.,” Murphy said at a press briefing May 3.
Murphy urged federal action by Washington lawmakers to counteract the actions of a Supreme Court “stacked with Trump appointees that could not be trusted to protect women’s reproductive rights,” including reform of the filibuster in the U.S. Senate if needed to assure a vote is held.
Congressional Action Needed
“Our elected officials in Washington must take matters into their own hands,” said the governor. “Congress must immediately pass federal legislation protecting the reproductive rights of all Americans, everywhere across this nation. If that means reforming the filibuster, then we need to reform the filibuster. And if this Congress won’t protect reproductive freedom, America needs to elect a Congress in November that will.”
Rep. Tom Malinowski advised that if Republicans retake Congress, New Jersey’s law could be at risk.
“I want to issue a warning that our law in not necessarily safe…as the same people who have been pressing the Supreme Court to do this are also at the same time pushing are trying to elect a majority in the United State Congress to enact a nationwide abortion ban,” said Malinowski. “If we allow them to do that, our law becomes mute.”
Biden Promises Fight
President Joe Biden said his administration will be ready to fight the court’s ruling if it overturns the access to abortions anywhere in the U.S.
“If the court does overturn Roe, it will fall on our nation’s elected officials at all levels of government to protect a woman’s right to choose. And it will fall on voters to elect pro-choice officials this November,” Biden said in a written statement. “At the federal level, we will need more pro-choice Senators and a pro-choice majority in the House to adopt legislation that codifies Roe, which I will work to pass and sign into law.”
On the federal level, Rep. Donald Payne Jr. warned that women across the country are in jeopardy of falling backwards to a dark past when access to a safe abortion procedure was difficult or impossible.
Republican Radicalism
“This absolute travesty is the direct result of the continued radicalism of the Republican Party and its turn to the far right,” said Payne in a press statement. “I know that we must trust women to make their own healthcare decisions rather than dictating to them.”
Rep. Mikie Sherrill offered that while the founders were worried about the tyranny of the majority, the United States currently “faces a tyranny of the minority: the extreme right has attacked our voting rights, women’s rights, and continues work to undermine our system of democratic elections. The forthcoming partisan opinion—which includes the votes of three Trump appointed justices—carries out a decades-long attack on this constitutional right and a rollback of law that has been settled for half a century.”
Picking up on that thread, Sen. Cory Booker stated the overturning of Roe v. Wade is part of a campaign by Republican officeholders that has accelerated “their longstanding effort to control, criminalize, and dehumanize people’s most personal reproductive health decisions. Already, 13 states have laws on the books that would automatically ban abortion if Roe v. Wade is overturned. And it’s clear that Republicans in Congress are preparing to outlaw and criminalize all abortions nationwide.”
Payne urged the U.S. Senate to the Women’s Health Protection Act, legislation that would guarantee the legal right to an abortion nationwide.
“The U.S. Senate must act now to pass this bill, and if necessary Senate leaders must abolish the filibuster to allow an up or down vote to be held,” he said. “There is no other action that would rise to the urgency of this moment than doing whatever it takes to pass this bill. The American people are watching, and they are counting on us to act. We must not let them down.”
Mississippi Case in Question
The written draft revolves around Mississippi’s attempt to ban most abortions after 15 weeks of pregnancy. Alito’s draft ruling would overturn a decision by the New Orleans-based 5th Circuit Court of Appeals that found the Mississippi law ran afoul of Supreme Court precedent by seeking to effectively ban abortions before viability.
The opinion is considered a complete reversal of the 1973 Roe v Wade Supreme Court 7-2 decision that found the Constitution protects a pregnant woman’s liberty to choose to have an abortion without excessive government restriction as well as the subsequent 1992 Planned Parenthood v. Casey decision that largely maintained the right.
“Roe was egregiously wrong from the start,” Alito writes. “We hold that Roe and Casey must be overruled. It is time to heed the Constitution and return the issue of abortion to the people’s elected representatives.”
Thomas, Gorsuch, Kavanaugh, Coney Barrett
Later, the decision adds “The Constitution does not prohibit the citizens of each State from regulating or prohibiting abortion. Roe and Casey arrogated that authority. We now overrule those decisions and return that authority to the people and their elected representatives.”
Siding with Altio are four Republican-appointed justices—Clarence Thomas, Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett—who voted with Alito in the conference held among the justices after hearing oral arguments in December 2021.
The three Democratic-appointed justices—Stephen Breyer, Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan—are reportedly working on one or more dissents. Unknown is the vote of Chief Justice John Roberts, with speculation surrounding whether he will join an already written opinion, draft his own or attempt to persuade one of the conservative justices to side with him, Breyer, Sotomayor and Kagan to uphold what was considered law.
Disregarding 50 Years of Precedent
The Supreme Court released a statement on May 3 that the draft was authentic but not final and Roberts directed the Marshal of the Court to launch an investigation into the source of the leak.
But Garden State lawmakers said the issues was not the leak but of a “radical Supreme Court ripping to shreds 50 years of settled law in this country that the overwhelming majority of American support,” said Malinowski.
Booker noted “this opinion would strip people of the constitutional right to make their own medical decisions with their doctor, even in the most extreme and unthinkable circumstances, such as in the case of rape, incest, or if someone’s life is endangered by continuing a pregnancy. Abortion is health care, and it’s the federal government’s mandate to protect people’s most fundamental rights.”
This is a step towards the hopefully peaceful breakup of the US into two or more red and blue states, as it should rightly do, based on the increasing degree of division. I guarantee, however, that red states won’t survive on their own, because the Federal government has been forced to keep them afloat for many decades.
CItizens, including doctors and hospital administrators, should, in the meantime, refuse to abide by this imminent Court decision, and should, instead, fight back, using whatever means are necessary. It’s time to eject the red states from the union, if they won’t leave willingly, so that we can reclaim the kind of America we’ve enjoyed for at least the past fifty years since Roe v Wade was decided. If we don’t do this, we risk more erosion of our basic rights, all in the name of originalism, since the Constitution also does not speak of such rights as interracial marriage, same sex marriage, contraception, and many other rights we’ve taken for granted for decades if not centuries.
It’s such BS. Just puts the states in charge. Where it should be. Does not ban anything.
That’s ridiculous, David.
More than 1/2 of the states have indicated that they will ban abortion altogether. Many others will restrict it dramatically. This has to be stopped by any and all means necessary.
Bryan, there are so many flaws in your thinking, that it beggars belief Many women cannot carry a fetus to term because of health issues, such as diabetes that put them at risk, and there are also many instances where it’s clear that the fetus will be born severely deformed or that they have little or no chance of being able to survive past birth. As for your reference to newborns being able to survive, the difference is that they can survive with alternative carers.
Whereas clumps of cells or other fetuses pre-viability, cannot survive no matter what. Women should not be forced to go through that trauma. And then the victim blaming you’ve done is unconscionable. Women and girls who are raped did not make the decision to have sex.
This is going to start a civil war, mark my words. And you will be my mortal enemy in that battle, so remember that.
NJ has become such a vast wasteland of Libtards, how could re-elect this radical governor? You let an obscure leaked document cause an uproar when you are a sanctuary state in bed the free immigration policies of the current morons in change at the federal level. Murphy I saw what you did with the lockdown mandates, how many business you destroyed under the guise of Covid. Just poor decisions based on no real facts. The true “Democrat Party Way.”
Assuming that this decision goes through, the people of each state will have the opportunity to vote for their state’s abortion laws. Blue states will undoubtedly enshrine the “right” for their citizens to kill as many innocent, unborn children as they like. Red states will likely outlaw abortions to one degree or another. That’s called federalism, which is (or was) one of the foundational principles of our form of government. Forcing all of the states to adopt a one-size-fits-all policy on abortion (or other matters not granted to the Federal government) has led to the irreconcilable divide between Left and Right. Peaceful separation would be a welcome solution.
I would support forcing the Red states to depart the union, if they won’t go willingly.
And no, abortion is not killing unborn children — it’s ending the existence of a clump of cells that can’t survive outside of the womb. But forcing women to carry pregnancies to term that put their lives at risk, for example from ectopic pregnancies, or eclampsia, or from the consequences of rape or incest, is definitely willful murder. A 12-year old girl whose father rapes her doesn’t deserve to suffer through a pregnancy. And women who don’t want to carry to term will, otherwise, terminate their own pregnancies, or resort to back alley abortions, the kind that literally killed hundreds of thousands of American women prior to Roe v. Wade. So if you want to go to the Red Fascist States of America to live, where you can enslave your evangelically-brainwashed or otherwise enslaved “Handmaid’s Tale” women, whose lives you don’t seem to regard as valuable, go right ahead.
the fed gov of the US has nothing to say about abortion. Abortion or any medical service is not a right. The fed gov has nothing ligit to say about money, banking, healthcare, transportation, education or a a whole host of others things that are best left up to private doctors. All these advocates of “choice” are hypocrites. They just got through persecuting those of us who had natural covid and didnt want to inject ourselves with experimental drugs. Of course all these lib-tards can do is call us names like rascists and misogynists b/c they have no real arguments, only ideology and power lust.
For once Mr. Hfrederics has the right idea, failing abusive relationships should end. The clueless liberals who think political power is the secret to prosperity can leave the union and form their own progressive utopia. It wont be long before they are begging for food and refugees are streaming over the borders into the free states of FL, TX and others
Dirk, as Red states currently receive disproportionately more federal dollars than they send to Washington through their taxes, it is the Fascist States of America (aka Red States) who will be begging for aid and sending refugees to the rest of the country.
Dirk, actually, for the past 50 years, the federal government has had a lot to say about abortions, and has afforded the guaranteed right to abortion, while also refusing to pay for abortions with federal funds since the Hyde amendment passed some 45+ years ago.
As for the difference between COVID vaccines and abortion, the federal government has a compelling interest in protecting public health for the country, which vaccines do achieve. If people get sick with covid and take up hospital beds, become disabled, or die, due to severe infection, they burden everyone else around them. They do not have a compelling interest in controlling a woman’s right to decide what happens exclusively in their own body, and which does not impact others. In fact, however, a woman is 14x more likely to die during childbirth than during an abortion procedure. So there is actually a compelling interest in preventing excess births in the US.
Howard, you seem to pick and choose the points in which you proclaim to be a doctor and which you don’t, which is telling to me. If you are a so called doctor, you seem to neglect the basic tenets of biology which would show you that from the moment of conception an entirely new human person is created that has a completely distinct set of DNA never before created and never to be replicated again. When we see an elephant or a pig in utero, we don’t say it’s a clump of cells, we say that’s an elephant, or a pig. Only with human beings do we twist our logic to say it’s a clump of cells. A newborn can’t survive outside the womb without help from parents or others either, so what’s us to stop us from killing them too? By your logic we’re punishing the child for the potentially poor decisions of the parents. So killing the child because it hasn’t been born yet is ok, because it can’t survive outside the womb, but the only thing separating the unborn child from the born child is time and the right conditions to thrive. The fact that it’s been legal to kill over 60 million human people in abortion procedures since the 70s is the greatest human tragedy of our time. To think that we can discard the most vulnerable lives because it is an inconvenience to the parents is just absurd. And no one on the pro-life side is saying that a woman doesn’t have a choice in having a child. She and the father absolutely have a choice, but the pro-life argument is that the choice should be made prior to engaging in the one act that can produce a new life. You know what you’re getting into when you engage in sexual activity, so why do we act shocked when 9 months later a baby is born? Your ignorance shows your true political leanings, and I hope one day you’ll see the flaw in your logic.
Howard,
You have either misunderstood or mischaracterized my position. I wanted to respond sooner but wanted to take the time to try and formulate my arguments more clearly. There is probably too much for me to unpack in a comment box, but allow me to start by offering some places where I believe we share some common ground. I’d also appreciate it if you left the fear mongering and the keyboard threats out of the conversation. First, I have never said that women should be strapped down and forced to become pregnant or that any woman should be forced to become pregnant against their will. I don’t know anybody that would argue that. Women should absolutely have a say in their reproductive choices. Second, I acknowledge the pain and suffering that can and does occur when someone is raped (and especially if the woman becomes pregnant). Rape is one of the ultimate denials of human dignity and a complete betrayal of trust between two people (whether they know each other or not). I also believe that every woman has inherent dignity and shouldn’t be punished or held back by society, workplaces, etc. if and when she does become pregnant (and even if she doesn’t, for that matter).
I believe that when a child is conceived in rape the father should have to pay for all the medical expenses (including counseling for the mother and the baby). Yes, this causes trauma for a woman! I can acknowledge that and at the same time ask why should the child be killed because of the horrible acts of the father? That would be like saying a man beats his wife and we’re going to put that man in jail because it’s what he deserves, but we’re also going to kill their child because the mother is always reminded of the father’s beatings whenever she sees her child. Why doesn’t the child get to make the choice to live?
I wanted to discuss some of your other examples but there are other things I want to point out. The thing is, while there are certainly these hard cases, there are just as many stories of doctors who gave a wrong prognosis and the mother decided not to have an abortion and gave birth to a perfectly healthy baby. We could come up with a myriad of these individual instances and debate each one, but it’s really a distraction from the larger issue at hand.
According to a study done by the Guttmacher Institute (the research arm of Planned Parenthood) in 1998, 93% of abortions are due to either social or economic reasons. In other words, these women know that they don’t want to get pregnant before having sex and they are having an abortion because a pregnancy is inconvenient and abortion is a backup contraception. So while the exception cases you pointed out are important and need to be debated, the vast majority of abortions occur simply because the child isn’t wanted at that particular time. And I would argue that in many cases it is because society wrongly tells women that they can’t have both a career and a family or because we have fathers that are unwilling to step up and be responsible for caring for the baby that they helped to create. Abortion is not the solution to either of those problems!
Your viability argument doesn’t hold weight because it’s a moving target and arbitrary. At the time of Roe a baby was maybe only viable at 27 weeks. Now it’s closer to 20. What happens if and when medical advances are able to make viability closer to 15 weeks, or even 10? We now know due to medical advances that a baby is fully formed around 12 weeks and simply needs time to continue to grow in utero in preparation for life outside the womb. Science tells us that the “clump of cells” (as you called it) is a human person. It won’t become a monkey, or a duck, or an alligator. Every single person in the history of the world, including you and me, started off as a zygote. This zygote has all the DNA that you and I have, and given the opportunity and the right conditions will be born and grow into an adult like you and me.
The crux of my argument is that either all human people have value and are worthy of protection or only some human people have value and are worthy of protection. If only some are valuable, then who gets to decide which ones have value and get to live? I would argue that every single person, no matter what stage of development, is deserving of that protection.
Abortion only treats the symptoms, not the root causes of why women make the difficult choice to kill their babies. My wife and I experienced an unplanned pregnancy and it certainly wasn’t going to be easy to bring a child into the world at that time in our lives. Ultimately we chose life because we knew that our child deserved to live and we have made sacrifices accordingly. We also needed other mental and physical help after our baby was born that many people either don’t know about or have access to. I want every mother (and family) to have access to that same level of care regardless of their state in life.
The pro-life argument isn’t an either/or argument, meaning we can only care for the baby and not the mother. Rather, the argument is that we should care for both the mother and the child, before AND after birth. We should be (and many pro-lifers already are) working to expand and make adoption more affordable, to offer programs to financially support mothers and their children, and enshrine protections for working moms to continue to provide for their families.
I fully acknowledge that deciding to have an abortion is an extremely personal and difficult decision and more work needs to be done to support and protect mothers. At the same time I believe what our Declaration of Independence describes that ALL people (born and unborn) are created equal and the deserve the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. That means we need to also protect and defend those of us who are the weakest and can’t speak for themselves.
Bryan, I have only one reply, and that is that one of the most prestigious medical journals, The Lancet, has determined that women will die if Roe v Wade is overturned, but abortion will not be stopped — it will only be made less safe. This is merely an effort to subjugate women, in a manner fitting the Taliban, not the United States. Margaret Atwood’s warning to us all in her seminal book, “A Handmaid’s Tale” is about to become a reality if we don’t put a stop to it.
https://twitter.com/RVAwonk/status/1525131383919755266/photo/1
https://www.thelancet.com/pdfs/journals/lancet/PIIS0140-6736(22)00870-4.pdf