On Friday's episode of MSNBC's "Rachel Maddow Show," Maddow warned against the ramifications of a "fetal personhood" case reaching the Supreme Court, legally defining a fetus as a human being, and an abortion as murder.
Speaking on the topic shortly after the Supreme Court's 6-3 vote in the case of Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization, which upheld a Mississippi law banning abortions after 15 weeks of pregnancy; a ruling in which five of the six conservative justices concluded that decision required overturning Roe, although Chief Justice John Roberts wrote a concurring opinion in which he disagreed, Maddow put into perspective just what that could lead to.
"There's nothing in the reasoning of Friday's opinion from these six justices that would stop them from accepting something like a fetal personhood case," Maddow said on-air. "A fetal personhood case would give this court a path to not just let individual states ban abortion, which is what they did today ... A fetal personhood case could be their vehicle to impose a nationwide ban on abortion, on the order of the United States Supreme Court."
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Former Vice President Mike Pence has already called for such a national ban, giving a statement to Breitbart News on Friday saying "Having been given this second chance for life, we must not rest and must not relent until the sanctity of life is restored to the center of American law in every state in the land."
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"The anti-abortion political project of the Republican Party and the political right has been the central organizing principle for the right's entire effort around the judiciary, one for which there is still no match or mirror on the left. It's a big deal," Maddow said on her show Friday. "The conservatives have the power on this court, and they will now wield it however they want, to achieve whatever outcomes they want, to change the country however they want without restriction — and you must do what they say . . . For them, the dam has burst."
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