In 2009 I interview Gimberg of the magazine stated that her main concern about abortion was the lack of access to poor women (a court banned Congress in 1980 from using Medicade for medically necessary abortions. Because it was decided that it could be done). I asked if relocating Roe based on women’s equality is on the feminist wish list. “Oh, that’s right,” she said. Once again, timing was everything. Gimberg’s death during President Donald Trump’s term far alienated her from her goals.
In the current Supreme Court proceedings regarding abortion, a lawyer at the Jackson Women’s Health Organization, a clinic. bring the action He challenged Mississippi’s restrictions, stuck to court precedents, and did not claim that the right to abortion was protected by the Equal Protection Clause.This time, a friend of the court simply To Leva Siegel Then two other law professors, Melissa Murray and Serena Maeri, had an equal discussion. They needed more cooperation than Stearns did in 1971. In particular, the two Supreme Court decisions that have been issued since then show how the Constitution’s commitment to equality protection protects against gender discrimination.
The first is the 1996 case. United States vs Virginia, Ginsburg wrote the majority opinion that broke all men’s admission policies in military schools on the basis of equal protection. In the 2003 case, using the same legal basis, Nevada Human Resources Development Bureau v. HibbsJudge William H. Rehnquist, a solid conservative, wrote to the majority that the state cannot distinguish between maternity leave and parental leave policies, based on the assumption that “family care is a woman’s job.” .. Siegel, Murray, and Mayeri put together these cases in the Amikas Briefs, and the law governing pregnancy “violates the Equal Protection Clause if it is rooted in an injury or a stereotype of a subordinate’s gender role.” Insisted.
Judge Samuel A. Arito Jr. dismissed the equality debate on abortion rights in the leaked majority draft. Release By this month’s Politico, it will overturn Rho. He wrote that “regulation of medical procedures that only one sex can receive” is a constitution, unless it is “just an excuse designed to affect severe discrimination.”
Alito came up with this phrase, citing the 1974 decision. Geduldig vs AielloThis was the lowest point for a Supreme Court feminist. In that case, six judges ruled that California could exclude women with pregnancy complications from receiving benefits from the State Disability Fund, which covers other conditions. The state did not discriminate against women — it merely distinguished between “pregnant women and non-pregnant women,” the court said. Parliament dealt unfairly by passing the Pregnancy Discrimination Act in 1978, and before Arito’s opinion, the Supreme Court did not rely on Geduldig’s decision for 30 years.
When I called Sterns and asked about Arito’s opinion, she still didn’t have herself to read it. But she was already with her friend protesting over Roe’s imminent end. “We were an old lady in tennis shoes,” she said.
Stearns was thinking about decades of backlash against Roe. Did something prevent it? “We had a discussion,” she said. “It was lost for some people.” Feminists in the 1970s, as they saw, sought to give freedom and equality to future generations. Now that the era may be over, Arito’s draft opinion suggests. Another generation has its own story to tell, in and out of court.
Emily Bazeron is a staff writer for The New York Times Magazine and a Truman Capote Fellow of Creative Writing and Law at Yale Law School.
