In the aftermath of the Supreme Court’s historic decision to overturn Roe v. Wade, dozens of left-wing district attorneys in heavily Democratic cities across the country are publicly vowing to defy their states’ laws against abortion.
As reported by Politico, a public statement distributed by the far-left group Fair and Just Prosecution has seen 84 district attorneys and other prosecutors from 29 different states sign on. In the statement, the prosecutors all pledge to not prosecute abortion providers in red states where “trigger legislation” has been activated by the court’s ruling, effectively outlawing almost all abortions in such states.
“Criminalizing abortion will not end abortion,” the statement declares. “It will simply end safe abortions, forcing the most vulnerable among us — as well as medical providers — to make impossible decisions.”
“Our legislatures may decide to criminalize personal healthcare decisions,” the statement falsely continues, “but we remain obligated to prosecute only those cases that serve the interests of justice and the people.”
Notably, some of the signatories are from deep-red states such as Louisiana, Missouri, Texas, Tennessee, and Mississippi. However, it has been pointed out that such a gesture may ultimately be meaningless, as the court’s decision has already led to many abortion providers in these and other Republican-led states shutting down their operations; some of the states seeing a near-total shutdown of Planned Parenthood and other pro-abortion clinics include Arkansas, Alabama, and West Virginia, among others.
Even then, state authorities have the power to step in and enforce the law if local prosecutors refuse to do so. Carissa Hessick, a professor of law at the University of North Carolina, pointed out that “if a local prosecutor says they won’t bring these cases and the attorney general disagrees with that, depending on the state, they may have the power to take the cases away and pursue them.”
“And in states where they don’t already have the power, they can simply pass a law that allows them to do that,” Hessick added.
On Friday, the Supreme Court determined in a 6-3 ruling that both Roe and the 1992 ruling in Planned Parenthood v. Casey were “egregiously wrong” in determining that there is a Constitutional right to have an abortion. The ruling overturned both of those previous decisions and declared that the matter of abortion would be sent back to the states to be decided on a state-by-state basis.