Inside the Arguments in Dobbs v Jackson Women’s Health
Slate News
Slate Podcasts
4.5 • 6K Ratings
🗓️ 4 December 2021
⏱️ 84 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Dahlia Lithwick is joined by Julie Rikelman, senior director of litigation at the Center for Reproductive Rights, who argued for reproductive rights and liberty on behalf of Jackson Women’s Health in Dobbs v Jackson Women’s Health at the Supreme Court this week. Together, they unpack the arguments and discuss the women missing from the narratives in the courtroom that day.
Then, Dahlia’s joined by Professor Katherine Franke, director of the Center for Gender and Sexuality Law at Columbia University and the founder and faculty director of the Law, Rights, and Religion Project at Columbia Law School. Professor Franke helps us examine how the Supreme Court’s conservative majority’s views on religious liberty undergirded Wednesday’s arguments, are set to influence the court’s jurisprudence, and will likely alter your constitutional rights.
In our Slate Plus segment, Slate’s own Mark Joseph Stern joins Dahlia for a frank discussion of the liberal justices’ performances in this week’s monumental abortion case, the gaslighting that maybe got us here, and then they look ahead to a big religious-liberty case coming up next week.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | I know your interest here is in abortion. |
| 0:06.8 | It's really about whether women have equal status under our Constitution. |
| 0:12.0 | What constitutional right protects the right to abortion? |
| 0:17.5 | The people can protect an unborn girl's life when she just barely can survive outside the womb, but not any earlier when she needs a little more help. |
| 0:25.3 | Is it privacy? Is it autonomy? What would it be? |
| 0:29.6 | It's liberty, Your Honor. |
| 0:31.2 | How is your interest anything but a religious view? |
| 0:35.3 | This is a radical new way to think about what it means to be a people governed by limits on |
| 0:42.3 | government, that some people enjoy greater freedom and equality than others do. |
| 0:51.8 | Hi, and welcome to Amicus. |
| 0:54.0 | This is Slate's podcast about the law and the courts and the Supreme Court. |
| 0:58.1 | I'm Dahlia Lithwick. |
| 0:59.1 | That's my beat at Slate. |
| 1:01.1 | This past Wednesday, the highest court in the land heard oral arguments in Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health. |
| 1:07.6 | That's the third abortion case it's heard in five years. |
| 1:12.7 | This time, the court wasn't fiddling with state clinic regulations. This time, the state of Mississippi has chosen to |
| 1:18.2 | prohibit virtually all abortions after 15 weeks of pregnancy. This is a pre-viability ban. It is |
| 1:24.4 | absolutely in violation of Roe v. Wade and Planned Parenthood versus Casey. |
| 1:29.8 | And that's kind of the point. |
| 1:32.0 | Mississippi waited until after Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg had died, Justice Amy Coney-Barritt had |
| 1:37.1 | replaced her, to ask the court for what it was really seeking all along, the end of Roe v. Wade. |
| 1:43.1 | The arguments, some of which you will hear on the show |
... |
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