The unsettled future of Supreme Court abortion cases

June 30, 2020

Good morning, Broadsheet readers! Brynn Putnam sells her fitness startup Mirror for $500 million, Ava DuVernay will chronicle Colin Kaepernick’s teen years in a new series, and a nuanced Supreme Court ruling on abortion leaves the issue largely unsettled. Have a lovely Tuesday.

– An unsettled future. Relief, not outright celebration, was the reaction of pro-choice advocates after yesterday’s Supreme Court ruling that invalidated a Louisiana law requiring doctors at clinics that perform abortions to have hospital admitting privileges.

The case had been the first opportunity for the Trump-era Supreme Court, with its newly conservative majority, to start rolling back abortion precedents.

But that didn’t happen.

Instead, Chief Justice John Roberts sided with the court’s four liberal judges in striking down the law that would have made abortions all but inaccessible in the state of Louisiana. Had the law been upheld, a single doctor in a single clinic in the state would have been able to perform the procedure.

Though he aligned with the court’s liberal cohort, Roberts wrote a solo explanation for his decision, which differed from his peers’. His rationale was a fierce adherence to prior Supreme Court precedent. Because the court had decided an almost identical case involving Texas in 2016, Roberts said the Louisiana case deserved the same outcome, even though Roberts had personally dissented in the previous ruling.

That nuance leaves the future of abortion cases unsettled. On one hand, the ruling was narrow, directly snuffing out just one legal avenue anti-abortion advocates have pursued. On the other hand, Roberts indicates he’s unwilling at this point to overturn the court’s jurisprudence backing a woman’s right to choose.

What’s more certain is that women’s reproductive rights and the makeup of the Supreme Court will remain top agenda items in the 2020 election cycle—in the presidential race and Senate contests—since any future Supreme Court nominee will play an outsize role in shaping forthcoming decisions on the matter.

Claire Zillman
claire.zillman@fortune.com
@clairezillman

Today’s Broadsheet was curated by Emma Hinchliffe.

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IN CASE YOU MISSED IT

- Pressing pause. Entrepreneur Nicole Shanahan and her husband, Google cofounder Sergey Brin, created and funded the Buck Institute’s Center for Female Reproductive Longevity and Equality in 2018 after the couple had trouble conceiving. Now, the center has ambitious goals: end menopause—and the shelf life on women's fertility. Marie Claire

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- Band-ing together. The stationery startup Ban.do was one of several companies to have its founder accused of racism and creating a toxic work environment as protests over racial injustice engulfed the U.S. Now, BuzzFeed reports more details about what the culture was like inside Ban.do, founded by Jen Gotch. Beyond concerns about Gotch's own behavior, there was a core tension between the company's feminist branding, expectations created by that branding, and its actual owners: a Kentucky-based company run by mostly white men, Lifeguard Press. (The owners of both Ban.do and Lifeguard Press told BuzzFeed they are “incredibly sorry that knowingly or unknowingly people have been hurt by their time at ban.do.”) BuzzFeed

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The unruly genius of Joyce Carol Oates The New Yorker

PARTING WORDS

"One thing we cannot accept is being left behind this time.”

-Miss Major Griffin-Gracy, one of the last surviving leaders of the Stonewall uprising, on the movement for Black trans lives