News
June 23, 2022 – 2:45 pm to 6:45 pm (ET)
PBS NewsHour – June 24, 2022 (04:43)
The Supreme Court on Friday stripped away women’s constitutional protections for abortion, a fundamental and deeply personal change for Americans’ lives after nearly a half-century under Roe v. Wade. The court’s overturning of the landmark court ruling is likely to lead to abortion bans in roughly half the states.
The ruling, unthinkable just a few years ago, was the culmination of decades of efforts by abortion opponents, made possible by an emboldened right side of the court fortified by three appointees of former President Donald Trump.
Both sides predicted the fight over abortion would continue, in state capitals, in Washington and at the ballot box. Justice Clarence Thomas, part of Friday’s majority, urged colleagues to overturn other high court rulings protecting same-sex marriage, gay sex and the use of contraceptives.
Pregnant women considering abortions already had been dealing with a near-complete ban in Oklahoma and a prohibition after roughly six weeks in Texas. Clinics in at least eight other states — Alabama, Arizona, Arkansas, Kentucky, Missouri, South Dakota, Wisconsin and West Virginia — stopped performing abortions after Friday’s decision.
The Telegraph – June 24, 2022 (01:33)
CNN, – June 24, 2022
Ukrainian forces are withdrawing from Severodonetsk, effectively ceding the city to Russia and putting the eastern Ukrainian region of Luhansk almost fully under Russian control following months of grueling and bloody fighting.
Severodonetsk was one of the last major Ukrainian strongholds in the area. Serhiy Hayday, a top military commander in east Ukraine, said the military made the decision to evacuate “because the number of dead in unfortified territories may grow every day.”
“It makes no sense to stay,” Hayday said.
It’s unclear if Ukrainian forces are currently leaving the city, or if they have already evacuated.
Though the capture is a symbolic breakthrough for Russia, it comes after a lengthy and costly battle in which Moscow’s forces were met with a stubborn Ukrainian resistance.
After nearly 50 years, the US Supreme Court has overturned Roe v. Wade, Planned Parenthood v. Casey and their related precedents, returning to the American people once again the authority to govern ourselves on the vexed matter of abortion through the deliberative processes of the political branches of government — as is the case in the majority of nations around the world.
By my lights, Roe and its progeny have been very bad for America. By virtue of those precedents, the Supreme Court imposed on the nation an extreme, one-size fits all regulatory regime for abortion of its own invention, without any justification in the text, history or tradition of the Constitution.
Indeed, the reasoning in both Roe and Casey is famously weak and even the most sophisticated proponents of abortion rights have put forward their own justification rooted in the 13th amendment’s ban on involuntary servitude or the 14th amendment’s guarantee of equal protection, rather than mining that latter amendment’s due process clause for an implicit right to privacy, which was the basis for the Roe decision, or an unwritten liberty interest, which was the grounding of the Casey decision. In my view, the Court’s jurisprudence has, from the beginning, been a conclusion in search of a justification — a tortured narrative of constantly shifting arguments, standards and rules.
June 24, 2022 – 6:00 pm to 7:00 pm (ET)
