Read
an excerpt from Lady Justice
“I remember thinking it was exceptional. In retrospect, it’s heartbreaking.
Sometimes I think of March 2, 2016, the day of the Supreme Court oral argument in Whole Woman’s Health v. Hellerstedt, as the last truly great day for women and the legal system in America. There are, to be sure, many such glorious moments to choose from, both before and after the election of President Donald Trump, but as a professional Court watcher, I had a front-row seat to this story, one that offered a sense that women in the United States had achieved some milestone that would never be reversed. Whole Woman’s Health represented the first time in American history that a historic abortion case was being heard by a Supreme Court with three female justices. Twenty-four years earlier, when the last momentous abortion case—Planned Parenthood v. Casey—had come before the Supreme Court, only one woman, Sandra Day O’Connor, sat on the bench. Go back a bit further and Roe v. Wade, the path-breaking 1973 case that created a constitutional right to terminate a pregnancy, was argued before and decided by nine men and zero women. And when Griswold v. Connecticut, the lawsuit protecting the rights of married couples to buy and use birth control, was argued at the high court back in 1965, that bench comprised nine males so uneasy with the topic of contraception that at oral argument nobody was brave enough even to name the birth-control device being litigated.
It is this uncertainty and this chaos and this pain that pushes everything underground, out of the light, and into the darkness in which women’s health and safety foundered in the decades before Roe.
That powerlessness—the need to rely on whisper networks and health providers and the restraint of prosecutors was the very opposite of liberty. So much so that it was ultimately deemed unacceptable in Roe. Now, we are back there, trying to figure out whose rights still exist, in which states, and who will be investigated and who will be charged. This, too, is a return to being un-free.”
—“The Last Truly Great Day for Women in American Law” By Dahlia Lithwick, excerpted from Lady Justice
Other Publications
Dahlia Lithwick is a regular contributing analyst at MSNBC and senior editor at Slate Magazine - and, in that capacity, has been writing their "Supreme Court Dispatches" and "Jurisprudence" columns since 1999. Her work has appeared in the New York Times, Harper’s, The New Yorker, The Washington Post, The New Republic, and Commentary, among other places. She is host of Amicus, Slate’s award-winning biweekly podcast about the law and the Supreme Court.
