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Dear Friend,

In 2018, Mississippi passed a law restricting abortion procedures after the first 15 weeks of pregnancy. This law, which the Mississippi Center for Public Policy played a key role in preparing, has never been applied.

A number of courts have ruled that the law violates women’s rights as established in Roe v. Wade in 1973.

This week, however, the case – Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization – finally reached the Supreme Court, which must now decide if the 15-week restriction is indeed constitutional.

It could be that the Supreme Court upholds the decisions by the lower courts, and nothing changes. But it might just be that we see a really quite subtle and important change in America’s political process that goes far beyond the issue of abortion.

If the Supreme Court were to rule in favor of Mississippi’s law, women across America would continue to have less restricted access to abortion than women have in most European states. Claims that the Supreme Court ruling would ban abortion strike me as far-fetched.

What Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization might just do is not just overturn Roe v. Wade as much as upend the assumption that it is for authorities at the federal level to decide what the law ought to be uniformly on this issue.

If Mississippi was free to do things a little differently, might not Massachusetts or Maryland, or Michigan follow suit? And in what direction might they choose to diverge? And if states, not federal institutions, could do some things differently, why not others?

The effect of taking power away from judges in DC to decide, and giving it to those elected in each state would be profound.

Judicial activism has reduced a lot of America’s national politics to a process of trying to pack Courts and skew judicial nominations. If the Supreme Court rules that it should really be up to elected officials at the state level to decide more of the policy, politics might once again become an exercise in persuasion.

I suspect America would end up with better public policy overall. Watch this case with interest.

It would be a remarkable achievement for a state-based organization such as ours if the law we helped author in 2018 also ended up helping shift the balance of power away from the federal machine and back to the states.

Have a wonderful weekend!

Warm Regards,

Douglas Carswell
President & CEO

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