From CBS News: Supreme Court declines to take up fetal personhood dispute

As discussed in class: 

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The Supreme Court on Tuesday turned away a dispute over whether the unborn are entitled to constitutional protections, sidestepping an issue that could be at the center of the next big battle over abortion after high court's conservative majority reversed the nearly 50-year-old Roe v. Wade decision.

The court declined to hear an appeal from two pregnant women, filed on behalf of their then-unborn fetuses, and a Catholic organization of a Rhode Island Supreme Court decision. The state court left intact a Rhode Island abortion rights law and found the unborn babies, Baby Mary Doe and Baby Roe, did not have legal standing to challenge the law because they were not "persons" under the 14th Amendment.

The legal battle involved the Reproductive Privacy Act, which was signed into law by then-Gov. Gina Raimondo in 2019 and sought to enshrine into law the right to an abortion established in the Supreme Court's 1973 decision in Roe.

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INTRODUCTION

 This Court, in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, 572 U.S. ___ (2022), avoided the question of “when prenatal life is entitled to any rights enjoyed after birth.” See Dobbs, slip op. at 38. Petitioners’ case presents the opportunity for this Court to meet that inevitable question head on. This Court’s Dobbs holding, that “Roe was egregiously wrong from the start,” id. at 6, and its further overruling of Roe v. Wade, 410 U.S. 113 (1973), and Planned Parenthood of Southeastern Pa. v. Casey, 505 U.S. 833 (1992), surely signal rejection of this Court’s statement in Roe that, “[t]he word ‘person,’ as used in the Fourteenth Amendment, does not include the unborn.” See Roe v. Wade, 410 U.S. 113, 158 (1973), overruled, Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, 572 U.S. ___ (2022). The Fourteenth Amendment has no textual definition of the term “any person” therein.

And it neither includes nor excludes unborn human beings specifically. Petitioners seek a writ of certiorari for questions presented that do not require this Court to adopt any particular “theory of life.” Dobbs at 38-39. They ask only that this Court identify the guarantees upon which Petitioners – and any unborn plaintiff regardless of gestational age – can rely for constitutional protection under the Fourteenth Amendment, and whether unborn human beings will categorically be denied access to the courts to challenge an abortion law.