The year was 1972, and the Supreme Court decided 7-2 with a bipartisan majority that abortion was legal. Since this point in time, the majority of Americans have continued to support abortion rights up to the present day. when asked whether we are pro-life or pro-choice, Americans are split, but when asked whether people believe abortion should be banned in all circumstances, almost no one actually believes that. The percentage of Americans who oppose abortions in all circumstances remains extremely low to this day.
While abortion has strong support as long as you don’t ask the question in politically charged language, there is a loud vocal minority of around 30% of Americans who have used the Republican Party to accomplish their goals of making abortion illegal. Over the last 50 years the Supreme Court has had a consistent Conservative majority, but there have been times where it almost got a Liberal majority, particularly in 2016 where if President Obama had been able to appoint the successor to Antonin Scalia, it would have been the first time we had a liberal majority on the Supreme Court since the Civil Rights era.
That future of course didn’t occur, and Trump got 3 appointees to the Supreme Court. with 3 justices appointed by Trump, 2 justices appointed by George W Bush and 1 appointee by George H W Bush there are 6 Republican appointees. If our current Supreme Court Justices vote in the same way they voted in Whole Woman’s Health v. Heller, here is what we will likely see:
Voted In Favor of abortion rights: Breyer, Sotomayor, Kagan
Voted against abortion rights: Thomas, Alito, Roberts
There are then 3 justices who were appointed by Donald Trump, 2 of them need to vote to uphold the new law in Texas and Roe v Wade will be repealed. There are no signs that any of Trump’s appointees are going vote in favor of abortion rights, based on previous cases. (NPR)
If Clinton had been elected, we would have either had a 3-3 split at the Supreme Court, or if we had managed to take the Senate in 2018 in that timeline, we would now have a 6-3 Democratic majority in the Supreme Court.
However, this is not the case. We got here because people saw the wife of the man who appointed Stephen Breyer and Ruth Bader Ginsburg as too moderate, and because of this, and only this, we are likely going to see abortion be made illegal again in the next few weeks.
This is really simple stuff.
References:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abortion_in_the_United_States#Public_opinion
https://www.npr.org/2021/10/22/1047619075/the-supreme-court-keeps-texas-abortion-law-in-place-but-agrees-to-review-it
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