Battle for the Constitution: Week of November 1st, 2021 Roundup

Below is a round-up of the latest from the Battle for the Constitution: a special project on the constitutional debates in American life, in partnership with The Atlantic.

The Anti-abortion Movement Will Win Even If It Loses

By Mary Ziegler, professor at the Florida State University College of Law

Legal scholar Mary Ziegler argues that a Supreme Court ruling against Texas’s recent abortion law, Senate Bill 8, would not indicate that the Court will continue to preserve its decision in Roe v. Wade (1973). Rather, Ziegler says, the Court will likely reverse or roll back Roe in the upcoming Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization case, in which it will consider the constitutionality of a Mississippi law banning most abortions after the first fifteen weeks of pregnancy.

No, Really, the Right to an Abortion Is Supported by the Text and History of the Constitution

By David H. Gans, director of the Human Rights, Civil Rights, & Citizenship program at the Constitutional Accountability Center

Constitutional scholar David H. Gans argues that, contrary to claims by conservative originalists, an originalist reading of the Fourteenth Amendment provides a strong basis for women’s abortion rights. The Fourteenth Amendment as originally understood, he says, safeguarded the rights to bodily integrity, establishing a family, and reproductive liberty, which is demonstrated by the legislative debates surrounding the amendment’s framing.