Supreme Court's message on Texas abortion law was 'stunning indifference,' legal historian says

Supreme Court Building.
(Image credit: MANDEL NGAN/AFP via Getty Images)

"When the clock struck midnight" on Wednesday, the Supreme Court "had done precisely nothing" about a restrictive abortion law that has now taken effect in Texas despite emergency requests to block it, Mary Ziegler, a legal historian at the Florida State University College of Law, writes in The Atlantic.

The high court has spent decades writing that "abortion is so divisive because it touches people's most deeply held beliefs about life in the womb, the rights of women, equality between the sexes, and the role of doctors" and, regardless if you agreed with the justices' rulings on the issue in the past, Ziegler argues it it was clear they took "these clashing beliefs seriously."

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Tim O'Donnell

Tim is a staff writer at The Week and has contributed to Bedford and Bowery and The New York Transatlantic. He is a graduate of Occidental College and NYU's journalism school. Tim enjoys writing about baseball, Europe, and extinct megafauna. He lives in New York City.