![]() When, in 1981, Ronald Reagan nominated Sandra Day O’Connor to the Supreme Court, her views on abortion became a source of intense speculation. Various G.O.P.-controlled state legislatures began passing laws seeking to outright overturn Roe, or to test how much they could limit women’s choice. By 1980, Falwell’s organization, the Moral Majority, would try to make abortion a litmus test for millions of voters all over the country, particularly those voting in Republican primaries. He instantly knew in his heart, he said, that evangelicals needed to organize into a vast pro-life movement to undo the Supreme Court’s decision. The Reverend Jerry Falwell claimed that he had an epiphany when he read news of the Roe v. Almost immediately, a backlash erupted from the new Christian right. ![]() In an epic miscalculation of the mood of American politics, the majority of Justices seemed to believe that they were merely putting the court’s imprimatur on a social liberalization whose time had come. ![]() The decision, written by Justice Harry Blackmun, gave women an unfettered right to abortion in the first trimester of pregnancy, limited thereafter by the state’s interest in the mother’s health and in protecting a “viable” fetus that could live outside the womb. Wade, that women have a constitutional right to abortion. Supreme Court ruled, 7–2, in the landmark case of Roe v. The story of how the first female Justice, Sandra Day O’Connor, dealt with abortion law reveals much about why this issue is so difficult, and why we may be headed back to the age of proverbial back alleys. Judge Barrett would become the fifth woman appointed to the Supreme Court in its two-hundred-and-thirty-year history. If, as is widely speculated, Trump nominates Judge Amy Coney Barrett, of the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals, to take Ginsburg’s place, women would be at serious risk of losing their constitutionally protected right to abortion. It may be again, if Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who just finished her third fight with cancer, leaves the Supreme Court during the Trump Presidency.
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