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Women’s Rights Today and Tomorrow
Will Oregon Continue to Protect Those Rights?
The overturning of Roe vs Wade on June 14, 2022, sent a seismic shock wave across the country, wiping away fifty years of progress for women’s rights. With the stroke of a pen, the Supreme Court threw established freedoms enjoyed by all American women into disarray, declaring that such rights as these Americans enjoyed in the past were now subject to the whims of State Law. The message to women was clear — your freedom is not our business, and it is now subject to a zipcode lottery, wholly dependent on where you live. The good news for Oregonians is that women’s rights are currently protected in Oregon.
Justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel A. Alito Jr., Brett M. Kavanaugh, Amy Coney Barrett, and Neil M. Gorsuch, all professed Catholics, formed the majority opinion. Three of these justices (Gorsuch, Kavanaugh, and Barrett) were newly appointed by then-President Trump, causing him to brag in 2023 that “I was able to kill Roe v. Wade.”
But more bad news lay below the surface in Judge Thomas’ concurring opinion when he wrote that the Supreme Court “should reconsider all of this Court’s substantive due process precedents, including Griswold, Lawrence, and Obergefell.” These precedents include women’s access to contraception and same-sex marriage rules.
