Today the Supreme Court began hearing the oral arguments in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization. This case is a direct challenge to the idea that a woman’s right to an abortion is protected up until the point of viability, when the fetus can live outside the womb. Mississippi seeks to lower the threshold of viability from about 23 weeks to 15, and the Court took this case in order to rule on the constitutionality of all pre-viability prohibitions. Dobbs has the potential to open the door to abortion bans at 15 or 12 weeks—or, as we’ve seen in Texas, an insane six weeks, because sometimes dystopian science fiction isn’t fiction.
