House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) shredded the Supreme Court’s decision to leave the Texas ban on abortion in place, calling it a “catastrophe.”
In a Thursday statement, Pelosi said, “The Supreme Court’s cowardly, dark-of-night decision to uphold a flagrantly unconstitutional assault on women’s rights and health is staggering. That this radically partisan Court chose to do so without a full briefing, oral arguments or providing a full, signed opinion is shameful.”
She added, “SB8 delivers catastrophe to women in Texas, particularly women of color and women from low-income communities. Every woman, everywhere has the constitutional right to basic health care. SB8 is the most extreme, dangerous abortion ban in half a century, and its purpose is to destroy Roe v. Wade, and even refuses to make exceptions for cases of rape and incest. This ban necessitates codifying Roe v. Wade.”
Pelosi vowed to bring up Rep. Judy Chu’s (D-Calif) Women’s Health Protection Act “to enshrine into law reproductive health care for all women across America.”
The House speaker argued the legislation “is a cynical, backdoor attempt by partisan lawmakers to evade the Constitution and the law to destroy not only a woman’s right to health care but potentially any right or protection that partisan lawmakers target.”
She urged the court to “uphold, as Justice Sotomayor wrote in her dissent, ‘its constitutional obligations to protect not only the rights of women, but also the sanctity of its precedents and of the rule of law.'”
Read My Full Statement on Supreme Court Shadow Ruling on Texas Reproductive Rights Case here: https://t.co/Qon4WtB9ax
— Nancy Pelosi (@SpeakerPelosi) September 2, 2021
President Joe Biden similarly called the decision “an unprecedented assault on a woman’s constitutional rights,” as IJR reported.
He continued, “For the majority to do this without a hearing, without the benefit of an opinion from a court below, and without due consideration of the issues, insults the rule of law and the rights of all Americans to seek redress from our courts.”
The president then claimed the court “will allow millions of women in Texas in need of critical reproductive care to suffer while courts sift through procedural complexities.”
The Supreme Court upheld the law in a 5-4 vote late Wednesday night, as IJR reported. The ban prohibits abortion after six weeks.