Mary Ziegler

The chaos unleashed by the U.S. Supreme Court’s reversal of Roe v. Wade was underscored on Friday when federal judges released dueling opinions on mifepristone, a pill used in more than half of abortions in the United States. In a suit by 17 progressive states and the District of Columbia, Judge Thomas O. Rice of the Eastern District of Washington State ordered the FDA to preserve access to mifepristone. In a competing ruling from Texas, Judge Matthew J.

Tomorrow will mark 50 years since Roe v. Wade was decided, but the landmark ruling did not make it to its semicentennial, having been overturned by Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization last summer. Many people viewed this as the end of abortion rights in America. But that’s not what it was. Both practically and theoretically, Roe was never the guarantor of those rights that people believed it to be.

For months and even years I have seen this coming, and yet the reality of the Supreme Court’s decision is still a shock. How can it be that people had a constitutional right for nearly half a century, and now no more? How can it not matter that Americans consistently signaled that they did not want this to happen, and even so this has happened?The Court’s answer is that Roe is different.

After weeks of waiting, the Supreme Court this morning finally allowed abortion providers’ challenge against Texas’s functional ban on abortion, S.B. 8, to go forward. But the win for abortion providers is not the sweeping victory that seemed likely when the Court heard oral argument on S.B. 8 in November—and even if legal abortions resume in Texas, any reprieve probably won’t last for long, because of another major abortion case, Dobbs v.

Anyone listening to today’s oral argument on abortion could not miss that something historic was happening. The case, Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, involves a Mississippi law that bans abortion at 15 weeks. Such a ban is clearly unconstitutional under current law—Roe v. Wade and its successor case, Planned Parenthood of Southeastern Pennsylvania v. Casey, recognize a right to choose abortion until fetal viability, which is at roughly 24 weeks.

Last night, the Supreme Court faced an unprecedented emergency application. Unless the Court acted, abortion would be functionally illegal in Texas.In May, the state had adopted a version of a “heartbeat bill” that went into effect today. So-called heartbeat bills prohibit abortions once a physician can detect fetal cardiac activity, usually around the sixth week of pregnancy, before most people know that they are pregnant.