A recap
- President Joe Biden condemned the ruling, calling it “a sad day for the court and for the country”.
- Donald Trump, who as president installed three of the justices that voted to strike down Roe v Wade, reportedly doesn’t think the ruling is a good idea.
- States nationwide are scrambling to react to the decision, with many Republican-led governments moving to ban abortion immediately.
- West coast governors pledged their states would be havens for abortion access.
- A Republican senator said she was duped by two of the supreme court justices who she supported while insisting they would respect Roe v Wade.
- Protesters gathered at the supreme court building in Washington DC, in cities and towns around the country – and even at the American embassy in London.
- Abortion clinic staff in states like Texas has to abruptly stop providing care this morning.
- Among the conservative justices, there was a slight difference of opinion in how far the abortion ruling should go.
- Congress approved the bipartisan gun control compromise, sending the bill to Biden for his signature.
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House speaker Nancy Pelosi said “the path forward will depend on the outcome of the upcoming midterm elections”.
– Chris Stein, Maanvi Singh
Updated
Contraception, gay marriage: Clarence Thomas signals new targets for supreme court
Many Americans reacted to the supreme court’s decision to reverse Roe v Wade and remove federal abortion rights in the US with shock, but many also asked a terrified question: what might be next?
The conservative justice Clarence Thomas appeared to offer a preview of the court’s potential future rulings, suggesting the rightwing-controlled court may return to the issues of contraception access and marriage equality, threatening LGBTQ+ rights.
“In future cases, we should reconsider all of this court’s substantive due process precedents, including Griswold, Lawrence, and Obergefell,” Thomas wrote in his concurring opinion to the ruling on Roe.
Griswold v Connecticut established a married couple’s right to use contraception without government interference in 1965. The court ruled in the 2003 case of Lawrence v Texas that states could not criminalize sodomy, and Obergefell v Hodges established the right for same-sex couples to marry in 2015.
In the decision written by Justice Samuel Alito, the conservative majority makes it clear that the decision in Dobbs v Jackson Women’s Health Organization should not be interpreted as a threat to other major precedent cases. But the court’s three liberal justices – Stephen Breyer, Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan – dismissed that logic as a farce in their fiery dissenting opinion.
“Either the mass of the majority’s opinion is hypocrisy or additional constitutional rights are under threat,” the liberal justices wrote. “It is one or the other.”
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