- Abortion ban. - Illegitimate!
- Pro-life is pro-women!
- Six conservative justices on the Supreme Court
handed down a decision that eliminates 50 years
of abortion protections in America.
They essentially said that the Constitution
makes no express reference to the right to abortion,
and therefore, it's the Supreme Court
overstepping of state's rights
to allow abortion to be protected.
- Today, the Supreme Court of the United States
expressly took away a Constitutional
right from the American people that it had already recognized.
They didn't limit it, they simply took it away.
- Up until this, for the past 50 years,
the decision Roe vs Wade has protected abortion in America
up until about 24 weeks into a pregnancy.
That's about halfway through a pregnancy.
States could regulate it after that.
Now it's completely flipped.
The Supreme Court says states can regulate abortion
however they want,
and in the absence of any federal law
about abortion regulation,
it means that abortion could be illegal
or sharply curtailed in as many as half of states in America.
That includes 13 immediately with this decision.
They have what's called "trigger laws" on the books,
which means if Roe vs Wade were to ever be overturned,
and it just was, abortion would be banned
or severely restricted immediately.
- Today, the Republican-controlled
Supreme Court has achieved their dark,
extreme goal of ripping away a woman's right
to make their own reproductive health decisions.
Because of Donald Trump, Mitch McConnell,
and the Republican party,
their supermajority in the Supreme Court,
American women today have less freedoms than their mothers.
- This decision is monumental,
but it wasn't necessarily a surprise.
This because in May, Politico got something
that we hardly ever get from the Supreme Court,
and that's a leaked draft opinion.
In that opinion, and very much the same
as the opinion the Supreme Court ended up releasing,
Justice Samuel Alito argues again
that the Constitution doesn't explicitly say
there's a right to an abortion,
and so the Supreme Court should not affirm that right.
- My body! - My choice!
- The public outrage after that opinion was leaked did nothing
to dissuade Samuel Alito
or the other five conservative justices,
three of whom are Trump appointees,
from standing by this opinion.
- The Supreme Court was not bullied by the far left mob.
Threats of violence against the justices did not win.
- This Supreme Court is one of the most conservative
in modern court history.
There are only three liberal justices on the court.
All of them dissented with this opinion.
That wasn't going to change anything.
As conservative justices pointed out in this opinion,
it doesn't mean abortion is banned in America.
Women would still be able to get abortions.
There will still be women in the states
who will want or need abortions.
They have several different options.
There are mail pills, and it's currently a debate right now
whether you can get prescribed that over the phone.
They can travel out of state.
Another reason this decision is so controversial
is because of the reasoning Justice Alito and conservatives
used to end Roe vs Wade.
What he said was that abortion isn't mentioned
in the Constitution,
but he specifically said, that doesn't mean that states
could make illegal same-sex marriage,
not mentioned in the Constitution.
Contraception, mentioned in the Constitution.
IVF, not mentioned in the Constitution.
What Justice Alito said was,
I'm applying this logic up to abortion and that's it.
- And what I think many of our colleagues
perhaps haven't quite,
or perhaps they have fully understood
is that this also undermines the right to privacy
in the United States of America.
- On the left, there's a concern,
and when I talk to legal experts,
they say it's a valid concern,
that there could be a lot of other rights
on the chopping block that recently,
the left specifically has taken for granted.