A Critical Race Perspective of the Overruling of Roe and Wade

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Gender Law Newsletter FRI 2024#3, 01.09.2024 - Newsletter abonnieren

USA: CONSTITUTIONAL LAW

June 2024

Sophie BRILL, Re-Righting History: A Critical Race Perspective of Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization, Berkeley Journal of Gender, Law and Justice, 1/2024, pp. 41-55.

The right to abortion had been recognized by the Supreme Court as part of the Fourteenth Amendment of the U.S Constitution in its judgement of 22 June 1973 Roe v. Wade. However, with its judgement of 24 June 2022 Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, the Supreme Court overruled its former position. This article «re-writes the Dobbs majority decision as if it were written by a Supreme Court that acknowledges its flawed history and addresses it head-on. The opinion re-frames the issue presented and uses historical context to show that reproductive autonomy is an issue of race as well as gender, and that the inability to control one’s body is precisely the kind of harm the Reconstruction Amendments were meant to guard against. It then finds that Mississippi’s 15-week abortion ban and the fetal personhood theory supporting it are nothing less than a continuation of the relentless state regulation and control that Black women have experienced since they first arrived on this continent. In holding that such policies violate the Reconstruction Amendments as they were meant to be interpreted, the opinion acknowledges the fact that the United States’ practices have long conflicted with its founding promises, and demonstrates that only when that acknowledgement is incorporated into our legal framework can the two be brought into alignment».

Direct to the article (https://lawcat.berkeley.edu)