Supreme Court Justices Wrestle With Past in Fiery Hearing on Abortion’s Future
- Doctrine of honoring precedent becomes an especially hot issue
- Justices wrestle with past in fiery hearing on abortion
This article is for subscribers only.
Two words kept coming up in arguments over the fate of abortion rights at the U.S. Supreme Court on Wednesday, and while they may sound dry, they’re at the heart of a dramatic struggle between the court’s six-member conservative majority and its three liberal stalwarts.
Stare decisis, the legal principle that the court should stand by its own decisions, was a central issue at the hearing on a Mississippi law that bans almost all abortions after 15 weeks of pregnancy. The court established a legal right to an abortion in the 1973 case Roe v. Wade and has reaffirmed that decision many times, most notably in Planned Parenthood v. Casey in 1992. Mississippi is asking the justices to overturn Roe and Casey.