Read: Health and Human Services and the religious-liberty war

The Supreme Court’s decision to take up this case also vindicates another strategy of the anti-abortion movement. “June Medical Services, at heart, is about whether a state can regulate abortion out of existence,” Sepper said. Especially over the past decade, anti-abortion groups have used a barrage of state legislation to limit the number of abortions that actually take place, which has proved an effective alternative to outright bans on the procedure. The Supreme Court pushed back against this strategy in Whole Woman’s Health, calling out the Texas legislature for intentionally placing “substantial obstacles” in the path of women who wanted to terminate their pregnancies. By agreeing to hear a similar case about what appears to be a similar law, the current Court has signaled that it may not continue this approach. Over time, Alvaré said, the Court might gradually shift more power to regulate abortion back to the states, including via purported health-and-safety laws like the ones in Texas and Louisiana. “Some of the justices who don’t like Roe may use this case not to overturn Roe but to say, ‘Would you look at this mess?’” she said. “There may be some who want to just say, ‘We’d really like, as a Supreme Court, to do something other than sort out state abortion laws.’”

Speculation about Supreme Court cases on abortion often gets reduced to one overly simplistic question: Will Roe v. Wade be overturned? It’s unlikely that the justices will use June Medical Services, or any other single case, to summarily strike down Roe in some dramatic one-line declaration. What’s more likely is a gradual unwinding of abortion rights: a decision in June Medical Services that walks back the outcome in Whole Woman’s Health, a willingness to entertain cases that might have previously been refused a hearing. The Court will surely have many opportunities to do that: A recent spate of state bans on abortion after six or eight weeks of gestation is currently winding its way through the lower courts. “It’s going to be interesting to see what happens with the flashier, scorch-the-earth cases that are currently being litigated across the country,” Sepper said. “If the Court took up one of them, it would be much, much harder to think that they hadn’t, in fact, reversed Roe and Casey.”

Abortion-rights advocates fear this kind of outcome, painting the current Court as irresponsibly cavalier toward women’s rights. Even the liberal justices have said as much: This spring, Stephen Breyer warned his colleagues against casually overturning precedents, clearly alluding to abortion, and Ruth Bader Ginsburg described Clarence Thomas’s criticism of abortion jurisprudence as “more heat than light.” But the conservative wing of the Court may see an opportunity at hand: not for a radical act of revision, but for a chance to end the endless legal disputes over abortion.

“The hype in the newspapers is usually, ‘To overturn Roe and Casey would be to demonstrate partisanship,’” Alvaré said. But John Roberts, the conservative chief justice who is now considered the Court’s primary swing vote, may view the Court’s next moves as “the faithful application of constitutional analysis,” and a way to ensure “the future legitimacy of the Court.”

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