Here’s the introduction…..
This case is just about whether Roe should be overturned, and so it was very, very different.”
This week, the Supreme Court heard oral arguments in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health, the case out of Mississippi that directly challenges Roe v. Wade. Julie Rikelman, litigation director for the Center for Reproductive Rights, argued the Jackson side on Wednesday, and then came on Amicus to talk to Dahlia Lithwick about the experience. A portion of their conversation, edited and condensed for clarity, is below. Listen to the whole episode here.
Dahlia Lithwick: I want to start by asking: you had only just argued June Medical. Suddenly you’re back in the Court and you’re arguing another abortion case. We used to get one every 10 years, I guess now we get one every year. Can you just give me a sense of what was different, what was the same, being in that chamber?
Julie Rikelman: I had the last live argument that the Supreme Court did March 4th, before COVID hit. So I left the Supreme Court and a week later the world shut down. So there were obviously a few things that were different. June Medical was a case about a regulation that would’ve made a tremendous difference in Louisiana by cutting off access to abortion, but it was about abortion regulation, a question the court had just considered a few years ago. It was very focused on the facts and convincing the court that this case from Louisiana was no different than the case from Texas that had decided four years ago about an identical law. So it was in some ways a relatively straightforward case.
This case is just about whether Roe should be overturned, and so it was very, very different. The stakes were higher, but it was just much more about first principles and whether people think that women should have liberty and equality under the Constitution. And then of course the Court itself was different, so there were different justices on the bench.
One of the things that I found really striking, both in your presentation and that of the Solicitor General, is how desperately you were both trying to center women. But it got dragged into these orthogonal conversations about the legitimacy of the court, or I don’t know, at some point adoption. And I wondered—what did it feel like? I thought it was so deeply weird that you were both women trying to talk about women, and time and again the response was like, “But enough about women, let’s talk about the legitimacy of the court
That was absolutely one of my biggest goals—to make sure that the voices of women were heard at the court and were present there in the courtroom, because the courtroom was largely empty. And so that’s what we really needed to do was to make sure that the impact of taking this right away, something the court hast never done, taken away a constitutional right after 50 years, the impact would be felt. And I tried both legally, but also I’m a mom, so I also know what I am talking about. And so I tried to emphasize every time that a justice would say, “Well, if we change the law this way, is it really going to harm women?” To say, “Absolutely, it will harm women.” Pregnancy has unique physical demands and risks for women, even just being pregnant changes your life, having a child changes your life tremendously. All of these things change everything about your life, your family, your ability to have a job, to just live in this world. And so I tried every way I could to bring that into the courtroom.
It’s so interesting, because it reminded me of Justice Ginsburg when she would describe her early advocacy when she was trying so hard to make a woman’s life visible to a court, except at the time she was talking to courts full of men, right? And she was just trying to say, “Stop for a minute, walk in my shoes, see what a woman’s life was.” And I really felt like that was bizarrely, in 2021, the thing you were trying to do again.
It was very strange. And I think one of the things that was obviously very concerning is that Mississippi had suggested in its brief that women don’t need this right anymore, it’s OK to force them to be pregnant and give birth and have a child against their will because things are better now than they were 50 years ago. And so that was another major point that I wanted to communicate; maybe some things have changed, but how could it be any less important for women to be able to make this decision? How could it be any less critical that states don’t force somebody to be pregnant and to have a child? Nothing about that has changed. And that was another major goal I had in the argument.
Read full article https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2021/12/dobbs-lawyer-explains-what-arguments-were-like.html
