The near certainty of the appointment of a 5th Supreme Court justice that is widely feared to be a "conservative" vote has many friends and acquaintances concerned for the fate of the Roe decision. For reasons we can go into later, I'm somewhat skeptical that there will be any meaningful (much less successful) attempts to overturn Roe any time in the near future, but I strongly suspect there will be further attempts to constrain women's bodily autonomy by undermining the "undue burden" standard established in Planned Parenthood v. Casey. (And I believe those attempts stand a reasonable chance of success). To get an idea of how those attacks might be argued, I've sat down to read carefully the opinion in Casey. (With the intent of following on with Hellerstedt and Russo, both of which more or less affirm the standard laid down in Casey)
A couple of pages into the opinion, there is an introductory paragraph that outlines the challenges, implications, and consequences of jurisprudence around abortion, and it ends with an eloquent vindication of the agency of women. While the Casey opinion was ostensibly jointly written by Justices O'Conner, Kennedy, and Souter, the style of writing in this paragraph makes me believe it was written by Justice O'Conner. I'm sharing it here because I think it's a beautifully written acknowledgement of the full humanity and agency of women, all the more remarkable because it was written three decades ago.
"These considerations begin our analysis of the woman's interest in terminating her pregnancy but cannot end it, for this reason: though the abortion decision may originate within the zone of conscience and belief, it is more than a philosophic exercise. Abortion is a unique act. It is an act fraught with consequences for others: for the woman who must live with the implications of her decision; for the persons who perform and assist in the procedure; for the spouse, family, and society which must confront the knowledge that these procedures exist, procedures some deem nothing short of an act of violence against innocent human life; and, depending on one's beliefs, for the life or potential life that is aborted. Though abortion is conduct, it does not follow that the State is entitled to proscribe it in all instances. That is because the liberty of the woman is at stake in a sense unique to the human condition and so unique to the law. The mother who carries a child to full term is subject to anxieties, to physical constraints, to pain that only she must bear. That these sacrifices have from the beginning of the human race been endured by woman with a pride that ennobles her in the eyes of others and gives to the infant a bond of love cannot alone be grounds for the State to insist she make the sacrifice. Her suffering is too intimate and personal for the State to insist, without more, upon its own vision of the woman's role, however dominant that vision has been in the course of our history and our culture. The destiny of the woman must be shaped to a large extent on her own conception of her spiritual imperatives and her place in society."
It's not every day that we find such a compelling and aspirational defense of women's full autonomy in a court opinion.