If SCOTUS reverses Roe, state courts could overturn abortion bans in red states | NC Policy Watch

Contributing sentiments towards policy:

56% :Paul Linton, an Illinois attorney who has represented anti-abortion clients in state courts and the U.S. Supreme Court for more than 30 years, said he's skeptical about abortion rights advocates' chances of succeeding in most state cases.
44% : States have a long history of providing greater protections than the federal government, including many examples in free speech, marriage rights, education equality and criminal justice, he said.
43% : The Tennessee Constitution, for example, says: "Nothing in this Constitution secures or protects a right to abortion or requires the funding of an abortion."
40% : If the federal right to abortion is erased by the U.S. Supreme Court in a few weeks as expected, the legal spotlight will shift immediately to state courts, where experts say judges in some conservative states could surprise everyone and uphold the right to abortion.
40% : On the other side of the issue, 16 states and the District of Columbia have statutes guaranteeing the right to abortion: California, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Hawaii, Illinois, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Nevada, New Jersey, New York, Oregon, Rhode Island, Vermont and Washington.
39% : In the nearly 50 years since the U.S. Supreme Court established the right to abortion, conservative state lawmakers have been passing restrictions, and advocates have been suing them in federal courts.
39% : There's nothing to stop an abortion rights attorney from asking an Oklahoma Supreme Court judge to establish a right to abortion similar to Roe v. Wade based on the Oklahoma Constitution, he explained.
37% :Such challenges can't happen in Alabama, Louisiana, Tennessee and West Virginia, where lawmakers opposed to abortion rights already have amended the state constitution to clearly say that it does not protect the right to abortion.
37% : And in Michigan, a lower state court granted a preliminary injunction barring enforcement of the state's dormant 1931 law making it a felony to provide an abortion.
27% : "Hundreds of attorneys for abortion advocates across the country are no doubt poised to go into state courts to block enforcement of multiple state abortion laws the minute the decision comes down," said Clarke Forsythe, senior counsel at Americans United for Life, which opposes abortion.

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