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This piece first appeared in our weekly publication, The Fallout. Please contemplate donating as we speak to assist us inform the story of reproductive freedom into 2024. We want you now!
Virtually as quickly because the ink was dry on the choice to overturn Roe v. Wade final 12 months, conservative attorneys common had been cooking up methods to try to additional limit the rights of individuals searching for an abortion of their state.
Considered one of their first targets? Attempting to dam pregnant of us’ potential to depart a state for abortion care. To Alabama Legal professional Normal Steve Marshall, it meant thumbing his nostril on the constitutional proper to journey and threatening to criminally prosecute anybody who helped Alabamians get care in one other state.
Not solely is that this a brazen abuse of the prison course of, nevertheless it has additionally teed up one other constitutional disaster following the Dobbs v. Jackson Girls’s Well being Group choice that’s sufficiently big to get the Biden administration’s consideration.
Per week in the past, the Division of Justice took an vital step and filed a press release of curiosity in a set of lawsuits filed by abortion care advocates in Alabama making an attempt to stop Marshall’s threatened prison prosecutions. The submitting raises the stakes in litigation that was already taking form as a few of the most vital exams for the reason that Dobbs choice.
The submitting can be an aggressive protection of what’s left of the constitutional rights of pregnant individuals after the Supreme Court docket tossed them apart in 2022 as a result of a majority of the justices on the Court docket may. And it’s a welcome little bit of offense from an administration that has too typically taken a path of minimal interference within the post-Dobbs fallout.
It’s additionally simply straight-up good advocacy from the DOJ, together with realizing when and the best way to quote the Dobbs choice in its favor right here.
“As Justice Kavanaugh has defined, the query of whether or not a State could ‘bar a resident of that State from touring to a different State to acquire an abortion’ is ‘not particularly tough’—‘the reply is not any primarily based on the constitutional proper to interstate journey,’” the temporary states.
Justice Brett Kavanaugh, you may bear in mind, was a part of the conservative majority that voted to overturn Roe within the Dobbs choice and who pinky swore that doing so wouldn’t contact every other elementary rights—like the correct to journey. It’s improbable to see the Division of Justice name conservatives’ bluff right here.
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