Turning Roe v. Wade Into Permanent Law To Protect Abortions Proposed By Klobuchar

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During an appearance on NBC’s Meet the Press this Sunday, Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.) spoke on the continuing fight to secure abortion rights in the United States, with a U.S. Supreme Court decision in a case involving a sharply restrictive, anti-abortion law in Mississippi now looming over the struggle. The court seems poised to potentially deliver a destructive ruling considering its current conservative majority, which is in place thanks to the political machinations of self-justifying Republican Senators, who refused to hold a hearing for an Obama pick for the court in the final year of his term but rushed through the confirmation process for a Trump nominee much closer to last year’s election.

In response, Klobuchar raised the prospect on NBC of making the abortion rights that were originally outlined by the Supreme Court in Roe v. Wade a part of federal law. Doing so, rather than relying on legal precedents that intrepid right-wingers may be inclined to throw out, would help eliminate the possibilities for sudden reversals in access to abortion around the United States. As Klobuchar put it, referring to the establishment of abortion rights:

‘The answer may well be doing it through the political process now. I don’t think that’s the right thing to do, but it may be the way to do it, and I think the best way to do it is not a patchwork of state laws, but to codify Roe v. Wade, put it into law, and we even have some pro-choice Republicans that have signaled interest in doing that… I think the federal baseline is the bill that we’ve put together, the Women’s Health Protection Act, which would basically put Roe v. Wade into law… Of course, the ultimate answer would be to uphold 50 years of precedent, and the [Supreme] Court doing the right thing.’

Check out Klobuchar’s comments below:

Observers at The New York Times and elsewhere said after a recent hearing in the case involving that Mississippi law that the Supreme Court sounded poised to uphold it, but the fate of the Roe precedent was not immediately clear. Still, leaving the Mississippi law — which bans most abortions after 15 weeks — would be destructive enough. Republicans in positions of state-level power have yet again kickstarted anti-abortion advocacy around the country recently, including with a Texas law (which remains on the books) that bans almost all abortions in the state, with few exceptions.