Not if, but when.
“By this time next year, we will be talking about which way the Supreme Court chose to functionally end abortion rights in which states. That’s going to be the conversation a year from now,” Elie Mystal, The Nation’s justice correspondent, tells Molly Jong-Fast on the latest edition of The New Abnormal. “That is just what’s going to happen.”
Subscribe to The New Abnormal on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Podcasts, Stitcher, Amazon Music, or Overcast. To listen to our weekly members-only bonus episodes, join Beast Inside here. Already a member? You can listen here and sign up for new episode email alerts here.
ADVERTISEMENT
But here’s the thing. The court’s conservative majority won’t come out and say that’s what they’re doing. They’ll be sneaky about it.
“I don’t think that they will take the political heat of writing down ‘and thus we overturn Roe v. Wade.’ That’s not how it’s going to legally play out. And I think that unfortunately, a lot of the mainstream media will miss the headline because of it,” he continues. “What they will fundamentally do is overturn the logic of Roe… that the state has a legitimate interest in the health and safety of an unborn child after that child is viable.”
“The way they’re going to overturn Roe is by obliterating that fetal viability standard,” he continues. “They’re going to say that states can place a burden on abortion rights whenever they want—one week, two weeks, three weeks, whatever, whenever they want, they can place a burden on abortion rights before fetal viability. So they won’t directly overturn Planned Parenthood v. Casey [which allows abortion restrictions, as long as they don’t put an undue burden on the mother’s access to her constitutional rights]. They won’t directly overturn Roe. They’ll still say that people have a right to abortion. It’s just that the state can place a burden on that right before fetal viability if they want.”
“Right. So they’ll pen the door to whatever the fuck the conservatives want, which will then completely screw women—as always,” Jong-Fast says.
Then, Anne Nelson joins the show to talk about her book Shadow Network: Media, Money, and the Secret Hub of the Radical Right. And Andrew Zimmern talks about how he and his fellow star chefs helped convince Washington to rescue the restaurant business when the pandemic threatened to end it. He says, “The fact is that opening the doors on all of them now doesn’t make up for the year plus of lost revenue, the incredible debt restaurants took on. So even though your neighborhood restaurant may look crowded tonight, when you walk by it, everyone is desperate for dollars.”
Listen to The New Abnormal on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon and Stitcher.
