This week the U.S. Supreme Court will consider Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization, a challenge to the abortion standards that the Court created in the final quarter of the twentieth century in Roe v. Wade and Planned Parenthood v. Casey. The Mississippi statutory prohibition on abortion after 15 weeks of pregnancy with exceptions only for severe abnormalities and medical necessity is up for review. Newspaper opinion pages have filled with prognostications about the current Court’s predilection for providing wholesale reconsideration of the late-20th-century Blackmun-Kennedy-O’Connor-Souter due process renderings. But any member of the legal or philosophic intelligentsia who is uncertain about whether the current Court will remain faithful to application of law in this case has not been paying attention.
Over the past two years the Court has received numerous urgent high-stakes constitutional questions involving matters like COVID restrictions and religious liberty, the reinvigorated federal death penalty, and aggressive exercises of raw regulatory power. In the vast majority of instances, the Court has settled on a constitutionally sound answer.
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