This is something the Supreme Court leaker maybe didn’t count on. Having revealed that the court is about to overturn Roe, people are behaving as if the court is about to overturn Roe.
Although Roe v. Wade remains the law of the land, women can no longer get a legal abortion in two states, Oklahoma and South Dakota. In at least one other, Missouri, the only clinic is booked and not accepting new appointments…
Before May 2, when a draft Supreme Court opinion that would overturn Roe was leaked, there had been at least one abortion clinic in every state. But in some states, health care providers aren’t waiting for the actual decision to be issued to start operating as if Roe were overturned.
“It’s already happening,” said Caitlin Myers, a professor of economics at Middlebury College who studies abortion accessibility. She is leading a national survey of abortion clinics and supplied data on her recent findings, which was verified by The New York Times…
A banner at the top of the website for Planned Parenthood of Wisconsin says: “Our doors are open. Planned Parenthood of Wisconsin will continue to help patients get the care they need — including safe and legal abortion. No matter what.” But the organization there decided to stop offering any new appointments for abortion after June 25, anticipating that the court might release its opinion two days later, on its last scheduled decision day.
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We still don’t know who leaked the draft decision showing a majority of the court planned to overturn Roe. We’ve looked at the case for both sides here at Hot Air. On the one hand, this might have been a clerk on the right trying to firm up a wavering Justice and preserve the majority to overturn Roe. On the other hand, it might be an attempt by someone on the left to initiate a nationwide backlash that would change the outcome.
Personally, I’ve always been in the 2nd camp. I could be wrong of course but it makes more sense to me to assume that whoever did this could foresee the outrage that would follow and hoped that would be enough to shake things up. Did they envision the assassination attempt of a sitting Justice? They certainly probably envisioned a lot of pressure on the six conservatives to change their minds.
But what they apparently couldn’t see is that in some parts of the country this was a greenlight to assume Roe was done. And while I think there will still be a significant amount of outrage if Roe is overturned as expected, there’s also a sense that having been given a warning of several weeks, the actual news won’t come as a shock. In fact, assuming there are no big surprises in the final decision, it will certainly be less of a news story than it would have been without the leak giving us all a heads up.
By pulling some of that pro-Roe energy into the public square sooner and spreading it out over time, the leaker may have hurt their own cause a bit. In at least some parts of the country, by the time this actually happens the end of Roe will feel like old news.
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