An Update on SCOTUS’s Senate Bill 8 Decision
Today, you may have heard about the Supreme Court's decision regarding Texas' Senate Bill 8. The Court's conservative majority once again allowed SB8's harm to continue, keeping Texans from accessing abortion care in their own state in opposition to federal law.
The Court has decided to continue to not protect Texans from diabolical schemes by anti-choice lawmakers that remove their right to bodily autonomy while signaling to other states that it intends to allow them to do the same. This is more incredibly bad news for reproductive autonomy as well as the legitimacy of this country's federal courts and their ability to protect us from state based legislated bigotry. Trump's hand picked Court does not believe in the right to abortion. Period.
We are grateful for and want to highlight Justice Sonia Sotomayor's dissent, which connects our current fight against racist abortion laws to our past:
This is a brazen challenge to our federal structure. It echoes the philosophy of John C. Calhoun, a virulent defender of the slaveholding South who insisted that States had the right to 'veto' or 'nullify' any federal law with which they disagreed.
The Court's delay in allowing this case to proceed has had catastrophic consequences for women seeking to exercise their constitutional right to an abortion in Texas.
My disagreement with the Court runs far deeper than a quibble over how many defendants these petitioners may sue. The dispute is over whether States may nullify federal constitutional rights by employing schemes like the one at hand.
Read her full dissent here, share what today's decision means with everyone you know, and if you haven't already, step up your support for practical support organizations and abortion funds doing the work to prepare for a monumental shift in abortion access. Some of our partners in states poised to ban abortion that we haven't mentioned recently are the Kentucky Health Justice Network, Yellowhammer Fund, Women Have Options, and Hoosier Abortion Fund.
Until abortion is accessible for people in their own states by providers in their own communities, MAC will continue to work with our partners and provide whatever is needed to get people to providers in states where the right to an abortion is protected.
In Solidarity,
The Team at Midwest Access Coalition
