New York City Mayor Eric Adams (D) on Monday night concluded that overturning Roe v. Wade would be nothing more than an “assault” on the freedom of women at the hands of “right wing extremists.”
“New York City knows that a woman’s right to make her own health care decisions is hers and hers alone. This potential assault on their freedom by right wing extremists cannot stand,” the Democrat mayor said, announcing that they are “ready to fight like hell”:
His reaction followed Politico’s publication of a possible draft Supreme Court opinion overruling Roe v. Wade. The 67-page opinion, reportedly penned by Justice Samuel Alito, concludes that the 1973 decision “must be overruled.”
It reads in part:
The Constitution makes no reference to abortion, and no such right is implicitly protected by any constitutional provision, including the one on which the defenders of Roe and Casey now chiefly rely—the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. That provision has been held to guarantee some rights that are not mentioned in the Constitution, but any such right must be “deeply rooted in this Nation’s history and tradition,” and “implicit in the concept of ordered liberty.”
The right to abortion does not fall into this category. Until the latter part of the 20th century, such a right was entirely unknown to American law. Indeed, when the Fourteenth Amendment was adopted, three quarters of the States made abortion a crime at all stages of pregnancy. The abortion right is also critically different from any other right that this Court has held to fall within the Fourteenth Amendment’s protection of “liberty.” Roe’s defenders characterize the abortion right as similar to the rights recognized in past decisions involving matters such as intimate sexual relations, contraception, and marriage, but abortion is fundamentally different, as both Roe and Casey acknowledged, because it destroys what those decisions called “fetal life” and what the law now before us describes as an “unborn human being.”
Ultimately, the opinion concludes that the Constitution, as originally understood, does not include a right to abortion, kicking the decision back to the states.
As Breitbart News extensively reported, this leak appears to be part of an intimidation tactic to bully one or more of the justices to change their initial position on the case. As a result, members of the far left are calling for the abolishment of the filibuster and expansion of the Supreme Court.
Mayor Adams’ response comes as no surprise, given the history of New York Democrats publicly celebrating abortion. In January 2019, for example, former Gov. Andrew Cuomo (D) ordered the pink illumination of the One World Trade Center to celebrate the state’s extreme abortion law, the Reproductive Health Act, which allowed abortion up until the day of birth “with certain limitations.”