The Supreme Court’s may open the door for other rulings to be reconsidered, including those that protect access to contraception and allow for same-sex relationships and marriage.
In Friday’s 6-3 ruling, the court ruled in favor of the state of Mississippi in the case of Dobbs v Jackson Women’s Health Organization, allowing the state to ban most abortions after 15 weeks of pregnancy, overruling Roe v Wade.
Justice Clarence Thomas wrote that the same reasoning behind why there is no right to abortion could be used in other cases.
Justice Samuel Alito wrote in the majority opinion that this decision ‘should be understood to cast doubts on precedents that do not concern abortion.’ In his concurring opinion, Thomas agreed.
He added that the court should revisit other cases that fall under the Court’s previous due process precedents.
‘For that reason, in future cases we should reconsider all of this Court’s substantive due process precedents, including Griswold, Lawrence and Obergefell,’ Thomas wrote.
Those three landmark cases mentioned by Thomas, which protected access to contraception and allowed same-sex relationships and marriage, rely on the same legal reasoning as Roe.
In Roe, the right to personal privacy protected by the Due Process Clause included the right for a person to determine whether or not they would bear a child.
Thomas wrote that ‘any substantive due process decision is “demonstrably erroneous.”‘
He added: ‘After overruling these demonstrably erroneous decisions, the question would remain whether other constitutional provisions guarantee the myriad rights that our substantive due process cases have generated.’
In their dissent to the opinion, the high court’s three liberal justices fought against this very idea, saying ‘no one should be confident that this majority is done with its work.’
‘The right Roe and Casey recognized does not stand alone,’ wrote Justices Stephen Breyer, Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan.
‘To the contrary, the Court has linked it for decades to other settled freedoms involving bodily integrity, familial relationships and procreation. Most obviously, the right to terminate a pregnancy arose straight out of the right to purchase and use contraception.’
They added: In turn, those rights led, more recently, to rights of same-sex intimacy and marriage.
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