On Monday, Democrat Senator Jeanne Shaheen (D-NH) threatened a “revolution” if the Supreme Court overturned the infamous Roe V. Wade decision of 1973 that mandated states to allow abortion.
The threat comes as the United States Supreme Court is set to hear Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health this week which could result in Roe being overturned.
“This infringement on women’s rights, on our privacy, on the attempt to have state control of our personal health, really is what we would see in an authoritarian state,” Shaheen said. “It’s not what we would expect in New Hampshire. I think if you want to see a revolution, go ahead, outlaw Roe v. Wade and see what the response is of the public, particularly young people. Because I think that will not be acceptable to young women or young men.”
.@SenatorShaheen on new abortion restrictions going into effect in N.H. & the upcoming Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization case: "I think if you want to see a revolution, go ahead, outlaw Roe v. Wade and see what the response is…" #NHPolitics #WMUR pic.twitter.com/O7weoVuOSk
— Adam Sexton (@AdamSextonWMUR) November 29, 2021
“In Dobbs, the court considers the constitutionality of a Mississippi law that limits abortions after 15 weeks of gestation with exceptions for health emergencies and fetal abnormalities,” Carrie Severino, president of the Judicial Crisis Network, explained. “The statute conflicts with the court’s controlling abortion cases, Roe and Planned Parenthood v. Casey, which held that laws may not pose an undue burden on abortion prior to viability.”
When Roe V. Wade was originally decided, it was considered extremely controversial and nationally destabilizing. Even the pro-choice late Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg believed the decision was too large in scope and caused decades of controversy.
In a 1992 law review article, Ginsburg explains that the Texas law at the center of the case was one of the strictest in the nation and could have been struck down with a much more limited ruling.
“Suppose the Court had stopped there, rightly declaring unconstitutional the most extreme brand of law in the nation, and had not gone on, as the Court did in Roe, to fashion a regime blanketing the subject, a set of rules that displaced virtually every state law then in force,” Ginsburg wrote. “Would there have been the twenty-year controversy we have witnessed, reflected most recently in the Supreme Court’s splintered decision in Planned Parenthood v. Casey? A less encompassing Roe, one that merely struck down the extreme Texas law and went no further on that day, I believe and will summarize why, might have served to reduce rather than to fuel controversy.”
