SOURCE:
http://www.vox.com/identities/2017/1/31/14461468/neil-gorsuch-supreme-court-trump-nominee-abortionTrump nominated Neil Gorsuch as his Supreme Court nominee on Tuesday night. Gorsuch is, without a doubt, a respected conservative jurist.
But when it comes to abortion rights, specifically, Gorsuch’s record is minimal. He’s never ruled on a case hinging on the constitutionality of abortion restriction. So the best way to look at his views is to look at how he’s thought about birth control and about assisted suicide. Together,
it appears he is more likely pro-life than pro-choice.
Gorsuch wrote that the birth control coverage mandate under the Affordable Care Act forces employers to “underwrite payments for drugs or devices that can have the effect of destroying a fertilized human egg.” That argument, which is unsupported by medical research, is often made by anti-abortion rights advocates to explain why they oppose birth control methods like IUDs and emergency contraception.
Separately, Gorsuch wrote a book, The Future of Assisted Suicide and Euthanasia, which
argued against the legalization of assisted suicide because human life is “intrinsically valuable.” Arguing against assisted suicide is not the same as arguing against abortion access, but
the language he uses is similar to that used by anti-abortion activists.
Together, these writings suggest he’ll be the conservative justice Trump promises. But as perennial swing justice Anthony Kennedy has taught us, opposing abortion personally doesn’t necessarily mean you’ll vote to curtail legal abortion rights. Plus, he replaces Antonin Scalia, a fellow conservative, so Gorsuch doesn’t change the balance of the court.
Pro-choice groups are already suspicious“
Gorsuch represents an existential threat to legal abortion in the United States and must never wear the robes of a Supreme Court justice,” NARAL Pro-Choice America president Ilyse Hogue said in a statement Tuesday.
Hogue added that Trump’s decision to “speed up” the announcement should not “distract from the hundreds of thousands of Americans demonstrating” against his anti-immigration executive order.
Vicki Saporta, president and CEO of the National Network of Abortion Funds, called Judge Gorsuch “a far-right jurist who would overturn basic and well-established principles of American law.”
Clarke Forsythe, acting president of Americans United for Life (which describes itself as “the legal arm of the pro-life movement”) said Gorsuch’s nomination shows that Trump “values the legacy of the late Justice Antonin Scalia, and is dedicated to ensuring that the Supreme Court is staffed by jurists who respect the Constitution, not by politicians who vote with their policy preferences.”
Gorsuch has said things that would raise pro-choice alarm bells about the Affordable Care Act’s birth control benefit, and how broad the religious exemptions to that benefit should be in infamous cases like Hobby Lobby.