It was something that literally no one expected, and from the portals of the Supreme Court of the United States — a leaked draft of the court’s decision on abortion law indicating that a majority of the Justices might have just about agreed to overturn the 1973 landmark Roe vs Wade that legalised abortion in America. When Politico got its hands on the 98-page draft, and other media organisations jumped on the bandwagon, all hell broke loose, and expectedly so. In an already divisive country, nothing rankles the partisans more than the sensitive subject of abortion.
Some have likened the leaked document as being the equivalent of the Pentagon Papers that surfaced during the Nixon era. In a country where leaks are not out of the ordinary, these have been mostly confined to the White House and the vast bureaucracies, but not from the sacred hallways of the Supreme Court. In fact, one argument has been that even in the heightened political environment of 2000, when the election of a President (George W. Bush/Al Gore) was being decided , there was not even a whisper about which way the Justices were leaning.
