Predictions for a Post-Roe America

Contributing sentiments towards policy:

54% : I don't think we had a huge amount of personal experience with abortion or with pregnancy in general.
52% : Obergefell is the Supreme Court case that recognized the right of same-sex marriage in the Constitution.
50% : So the more the Court kind of leans into this, you know, "abortion is different because it's the taking of a human life" kind of reasoning, the more I think anti-abortion groups are going to push the Court to go even further on that.
49% : And anti-abortion groups take the position that the word person applies before as well as after birth, and that therefore abortion is unconstitutional.
49% : The sharp distinction is that abortion ends what Roe and Casey call "a potential life" and what the state of Mississippi calls a, you know, "unborn child," and that these other cases don't have that same impact on other people.
48% : One of those attorneys is Mary Ziegler, a visiting professor at Harvard and the author of Abortion and the Law in America: Roe v. Wade to the Present.
48% : But twice he says that there is a sharp distinction between the abortion cases and these other cases, like interracial marriage or sodomy or same-sex marriage.
48% : So, for example, same-sex marriage is consenting adults.
45% : I mean, of course, there was no recognition of a right to same-sex marriage.
45% : Ziegler: The other way the draft tries to get around this is essentially by saying, look, you know, what makes abortion different is because it's the taking of a human life: that fetal life, or the life of an unborn child.
44% : French: The argument for yes is by placing this in the opinion, he's creating precedent signed on to by a majority of the Supreme Court that says abortion's just different.
44% : It's saying abortion is different."
41% : By which I mean: I think the Court is going to be focusing on what the justices frame as the original public meaning of the 14th Amendment and arguing that that is not consistent with the idea of a right to abortion.
39% : Obviously we know the Supreme Court is conservative and doesn't think there's a right to abortion.
39% : And so for a lot of people, life isn't going to change as much as you might think it would change, because, again, Roe ending doesn't ban abortion.
38% : [John] McCain was not a huge fan of Obamacare, but he did that thumbs down.
38% : And that means it looks like 26 states will have bans on abortion.
35% : It it does not outlaw abortion on the federal level, but what it does is give the states total legislative control over abortion.
34% : And that leaves you much worse off when you're thinking about abortion.
34% : I've had just as many people go straight to the same-sex-marriage question, to the gay-marriage question, and the implications there.
33% : There's sort of footnotes suggesting that people who wanted abortion to be legal were racist.
33% : And then you're going to have, say, a Virginia or even a Florida or some others that are much more purple states, which might restrict abortion more than Roe permitted, but still permit abortion, say, up to 15 weeks or maybe up to 20 weeks.
31% : I think if you look at Obamacare, what saved Obamacare were those people lying in the doorways of their legislators' offices.
31% : And abortion was being criminalized.
27% : But it was because there was this time in the '90s where it felt like they might take away abortion, between Reagan and Bush -- Bush one -- where it felt like maybe they would take abortion, that abortion was under attack.
17% : And the argument is that that's true -- because at the time the 14th Amendment was passed, no one thought there was a constitutional right to abortion and, in fact, many states were criminalizing abortion, which would be inconsistent with the idea that there's a right to abortion.

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