 Well, unfortunately, it doesn't look good for Roe v. Wade, because the Supreme Court is hearing oral arguments for and against the Mississippi's 15-week abortion ban, which makes no exceptions for rape and incest, and really, what I think it's ultimately going to come down to is whether or not they uphold Roe v. Wade. Now, there's a chance Roe v. Wade could be just tweaked partially to where they allow for more restrictions on abortion, but Mississippi, the state, that is arguing here before the Supreme Court is asking them to just overturn Roe v. Wade full stop, and based on the line of questioning that at least five of the Supreme Court justices who are conservative are asking, they only need five, you don't need all six, there's a lot of red flags that indicate that they are actually ready to straight up strike down Roe v. Wade and outlaw abortion in the United States, and in the event they actually do this, you can expect at least nearly two dozen states to immediately ban abortion. So as Ian Milheiser of Vox explains, midway through arguments in a case that could end with the Supreme Court abolishing the constitutional right to an abortion, Justice Sonia Sotomayor asked a pointed question about the court's future. Will this institution survive the stench that this creates in the public perception that the Constitution and its reading are just political acts? There are early signs Sotomayor is correct that the public is turning against the court as the court turns against Roe v. Wade, but during Wednesday's oral arguments in Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization, all six of the court's Republican appointees appeared eager to push ahead anyway and overrule at least some key parts of the court's prior decisions protecting abortion. The justices were asked to consider a Mississippi law that prohibits nearly all abortions after 15 weeks of pregnancy, a law that violates the court's decision in Planned Parenthood v. Casey that pregnant people have a right to terminate their pregnancy up until the point when the fetus is viable, meaning it can live outside the womb. A majority of the court appeared very likely to overrule this part of Casey. At least four justices seemed inclined to go even further, eliminating the right to an abortion altogether, and though Justice Amy Coney Barrett played her courts a little closer to her chest than her colleagues, it seems more likely than not that she will join them. In other words, there could be a majority for overturning Roe, and even if the court does not explicitly overrule Roe, it could easily announce a new legal standard that renders Roe an empty husk. A decision like that might leave Roe nominally alive, but that would also leave states free to restrict access to abortions to the point they're not existing in the state or come up with other creative ways to effectively ban them. Now, I'll just say first of all that it's impossible to make a prediction based on the questions that they're asking, but there's a lot of questions that are suspicious. There's a lot of red flags in the way that they're wording their questions and the questions that they're asking, and the biggest thing that stood out to me was Sonia Sotomayor kind of pointing out what we're all pointing out. She sees it too. She acknowledges that based on their line of questioning, they're actually ready to do this. They're gonna do it. It's it's insane. People who want to ban abortion, they don't realize that this isn't actually a pro-life position. This is actually a pro-death position because by banning abortion, you're not actually getting rid of abortions. You're just making abortions unsafe and illegal, which means that if more women have to seek out unsafe illegal abortions, that is going to pose a greater risk to their health. People are going to die. So if you are anti-abortion, you're not pro-life. You're pro-death because that's what this is going to lead to and it seems like the Supreme Court is poised to do what was unthinkable maybe a decade ago. It seemed like after Casey, this was super precedent. But I mean, you can't you can't be naive about the Supreme Court. The conservatives in America have been trying to do this for decades and now that they got their majority, they're gonna strike while the iron's hot and all these states are enacting bans trying to tempt the Supreme Court into overturning bro, that's basically what Mississippi did here. And that's what it looks like the conservatives are going to do. We should be expanding the right to abortion in America because I mean, we're supposed to be any egalitarian, advanced country. I mean, newly democratized countries in Honduras. They're electing presidents that want to legalize abortion and we're going backwards. We're going back to coat hanger abortions in 2021 in America, possibly or 2022, which is when this would take effect. And there are some states that already have passed what's known as trigger laws, which means that in the event row were to ever be overturned, abortion would immediately be banned in that state. So it looks really bad. Now, another reason to kind of be fearful here is to look at what they're deciding, how they're reexamining Casey here. So Casey laid out a two part framework governing the right to an abortion. The first part is that a state may not prohibit any woman from making the ultimate decision to terminate her pregnancy before viability, which occurs around the 24th week of pregnancy. Casey also held that states may under certain circumstances regulate abortion, but such regulations may not impose an undue burden on that right to terminate a pregnancy, meaning states cannot enact a law if its purpose or effect is to place substantial obstacles in the path of a woman seeking an abortion before the fetus attains viability. The court initially asked the parties and dobs to write briefs on only the first of these two holdings, whether all pre-viability prohibitions on elective abortions are unconstitutional, a clear signal that at least some members of the court want to overrule Casey's viability holding. Indeed, all six of the court's Republican appointees appeared eager to overrule that holding. That includes Chief Justice John Roberts, the most cautious member of the court's conservative majority. Roberts asked Julie Reichelman, one of the lawyers struggling to defend Roe from a hostile court, why is 15 weeks not enough time for someone to decide whether to terminate their pregnancy? It's really, really a sad time in America. This is a moment where we'll look back on this moment with shame, because this is this is not right. We should always, if we're a healthy, functioning society for a robust democracy, we should always be expanding rights. But here, for the first time in a while on the Supreme Court, they're going to go backwards. I mean, in 2015, they struck down bans on same-sex marriage. And here, just a few years later, they might be going in an opposite way. And don't be surprised if same-sex marriage is on the chopping block after Roe gets overturned, if that is indeed the case. But again, just going back to what Sonia Sotomayor said, she knows that they're asking the questions that they're asking because she knows the way that they're going to vote. And she makes a very important point about will this institution survive the stench that this creates in the public perception? Because here's the thing about the Supreme Court, their legitimacy is already in crisis. The last time people were talking about packing the Supreme Court was during the Lochner era. That's when they had another crisis of legitimacy. And we're talking broadly about packing the Supreme Court again. Now, that's not to say that Biden and Democrats are actually going to do it, but they are experiencing a legitimacy crisis. And the Supreme Court, they're playing with fire here if they actually do overturn Roe v. Wade, because if it is the case that they lose more and more legitimacy, they do what the overwhelming majority of the American people don't want. And they overturn Roe v. Wade. And they're just not even pretending to care about the constitutionality of laws. And they're just partisan actors. That's going to hurt them and they need legitimacy to function as a branch. Because without legitimacy, their holdings have no value. So we don't know what's going to happen. That's the one thing that I'll leave you with. That's the caveat here in this story. We don't know if they are, in fact, going to override Roe's precedent, but it doesn't look good. And at this point, it looks like the best case scenario for Roe is that they just nominally got it. But it looks like they're going to do what they've been wanting to do. And that's absolutely horrifying. But this is the state of politics in America. We are in an era where we are going backwards, not forward. Progress isn't always something that, you know, progresses in a linear fashion. Sometimes you take a lot of steps backwards. And we are apparently in that moment. But I mean, we'll have to wait and see either way, brace for impact, because if they choose to override Roe's precedent, it's going to get ugly in this country.