On Thursday, immediately after House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, finished her speech reacting to the historic Supreme Court decision overturning Roe v. Wade, CNN’s At This Hour gathered their panel together to react to what Roe’s demise means for the country.
Fill-in anchor Erica Hill turned to legal analyst Laura Coates for her reaction. Right out of the gate, she wailed that “It's going to be legal chaos.” “You're going to have interstate battles about how you're going to enforce these laws let alone the very obvious notion that as the majority opinion stated that apparently stare decisis is not a straight jacket,” she added.
Coates huffed that “there have been wrongly decided decisions, and the court should be able to be nimble to do so. But the basis foundationally for why they did so here is not as clear at all. And why? There are 50 years worth where people, that means me, my mother, my grandmother, my great grandmother’s generation all able to have a right that we woke up this morning having and no longer have because the Supreme Court has decided there's no real right for women to have those choices at the moment of conception.”
According to Coates, “as a prosecutor” she couldn’t “help but wonder, how do you intend for these laws to be enforced.” Referring to the laws in conservative states banning or limiting abortions.
Coates did her best to whip the audience up into a frenzy by asking: “Is there no doctor-patient confidentially provision any longer? Are you intending for in those courts we're trying to enforce the laws? Are you going to give them access to the medical records or interrogate people in the office of the receptionist or the doctor about someone's menstruation? The womb is actually the site of the so-called crime.”
Continuing on her rant she huffed that “more than 18 states by the end of the summer likely to have abortion wholly illegal but how does one enforce this with also taking into consideration one's other privacy interests in the law. It's going to be legal chaos. Forget the legal civil war. It will be impossible to truly carry out.”
Coates and the rest of the leftist media have spent much of the past fifty years since Roe trying to scare Americans into believing that if Roe was overturned, life will be hell for women. They are about to find out the truth that this isn’t the case.
Each state will be able to make its own laws regarding abortion. “Legal chaos” and a “legal civil war” are what we had prior to Roe being overturned.
This fearmongering segment was made possible by ADT. Their information is linked.
To read the relevant transcript click “expand”:
CNN’s At This Hour
6/24/2022
11:06:18 a.m. EasternLAURA COATES: Well, when this draft legal opinion came down, people thought the writing was on the wall and here it is clear as day. It's going to be legal chaos. You're going to have interstate battles about how you're going to enforce these laws let alone the very obvious notion that as the majority opinion stated that apparently stare decisis is not a straight jacket. That’s a quote from the majority opinion. The notion here instead that you're not held to these notions because you had the opportunity to diverge from them. Now it’s true over the course of history there have been opinions that have been overturned Plessy v. Ferguson for example.
There have been wrongly decided decisions, and the court should be able to be nimble to do so. But the basis foundationally for why they did so here is not as clear at all. And why? There are 50 years worth where people, that means me, my mother, my grandmother, my great grandmother’s generation all able to have a right that we woke up this morning having and no longer have because the Supreme Court has decided there's no real right for women to have those choices at the moment of conception. You know, as a prosecutor, Erica, I can't help but wonder, how do you intend for these laws to be enforced. Is there no doctor-patient confidentially provision any longer?. Are you intending for in those courts we're trying to enforce the laws? Are you going to give them access to the medical records or interrogate people in the office of the receptionist or the doctor about someone's menstruation? The womb is actually the site of the so-called crime.
So whatever law would be enforced would have to be intrusive and invasive in trying to figure out what's happened there. There are a number of prosecutors who are saying they will not go forward with prosecutions on these cases. But you have to wonder, it's one thing to have the law, the trigger laws that will be there. More than 18 states by the end of the summer likely to have abortion wholly illegal but how does one enforce this with also taking into consideration one's other privacy interests in the law. It's going to be legal chaos. Forget the legal civil war. It will be impossible to truly carry out.
