The Supreme Court’s recent controversial decision on abortion has opened the way for a confusing future in American jurisprudence, predicted a report by The Marshall Project, a leading criminal justice reporting organization.
There is not a single “criminal justice system” in the United States, but instead there is an amalgamation of municipal, county, state and federal legal systems that often overlap and conflict with one another, according to Jamiles Lartey, a New Orleans-based staff writer for The Marshall Project.
Ohio attorney general candidate Jeff Crossman told Lartey, “The Dobbs decision did not settle anything. It opened a Pandora’s Box of other legal problems that are going to take years to resolve.”
The writer said few cases in recent history illustrate the conflicting jurisdictions issue as clearly as the Dobbs v. Jackson women’s health case. This ruling repealed Roe v. Wade, the 49-year-old Supreme Court case that gave women a constitutionally protected right to abortion care.
The battle over reproductive rights will impact not just the Democratic Party’s control of Congress in the upcoming 2022 midterms, but will influence policies at both the federal and state levels as well, the July report said.
The report noted that Texas has three anti-abortion laws. One of these was an outdate law from 1925 that was activated in June.
A second law, a “bounty” or “vigilante” law, provides criminal penalties for performing an abortion after detection of a fetal heartbeat. The “bounty” law also allows private citizens to sue those who assist in providing abortions for damages of at least $10,000.
The third Texas anti-abortion law, a so-called trigger law that was passed in 2021, criminalizes abortion even in cases of rape or incest.
Texas abortion clinics were relocating to New Mexico, Southern Illinois, and New York, the report said.
The report also explained that doctors were postponing medical procedures for dangerous pregnancies in hope that the procedures could continue once a fetal heartbeat was no longer detected. One doctor in Ohio described these actions as “the horrible downstream effects of criminalizing abortion care,” according to the report.