In Jackson, Lynn Fitch, now the Republican attorney general of Mississippi, had unpacked all her boxes, hired new staff, and dragged an old, heavy desk into her new office. It was the desk of her mentor, Evelyn Gandy, the first woman elected to a statewide constitutional office in Mississippi. Like Gandy, Fitch was making history: the single mother of three was the first female attorney general in the state.
That turbulent summer of 2020, thousands of protesters from Black Lives Matter Mississippi marched below her office on the twelfth floor of the Walter Sillers State Office Building, a Brutalist tower named for a famed segregationist politician. They knelt in silence for eight minutes and forty-six seconds, as long as the white officer in Minneapolis had pressed his knee into George Floyd’s neck. Days after Floyd’s murder, Fitch had decided to drop the prosecution of a white police officer who had shot and killed a Black man during a traffic stop in 2015. She said that the officer’s actions were “necessary self-defense.” Her decision had helped fuel the largest demonstration in Jackson since the Freedom Summer of 1964, the height of the civil rights movement. Half a century later, families and activists were demanding change in a state that remained one of the most segregated in America.
“When Mississippi changes, America changes,” an organizer declared at the podium. And in the midst of the coronavirus pandemic and a racial reckoning, Mississippi was changing. Just not the way the protesters might have thought. History was turning in far quieter corners.
Up above the protests, the legal fate of the fifteen-week abortion ban was sitting on Gandy’s old desk. Like Judge Carlton W. Reeves in the district court, the Fifth Circuit Appeals Court had also rejected the law, with all three judges on the panel agreeing that it should be struck down. The lower court’s decision would stand unless the state of Mississippi appealed. For the Supreme Court to take the case, Fitch would have to ask. That was the role of the state attorney general. She could file for cert—formally known as a petition for writ of certiorari—the legal request for the high court to review the lower-court decision.
Within the Fifth Circuit’s rejection was a notable concurring opinion, written by Judge James Ho, a former clerk for Clarence Thomas and leader in the Federalist Society who was appointed by Donald Trump during his first year in office. Republicans in Texas had blocked Barack Obama from filling his seat on the court for three years, running out the clock until the end of Obama’s term. Thomas swore Ho into office at the Harlan Crow Library in Dallas, a private collection of the billionaire donor who was close to both Thomas and Leonard Leo.
Ho agreed with the Fifth Circuit’s ruling to strike down the law, saying the court was required to follow the precedent of Roe. But functionally, his opinion was a dissent wrapped in the packaging of agreement, one that laid the legal groundwork for the new conservative majority on the Supreme Court to take an interest in the case. If Fitch and her team decided to appeal to the court, Ho’s writing offered guidance for the kind of reasoning that might compel the justices to take up the case.
In his opinion, Ho offered an extensive originalist explanation for why the precedent of Roe was not supported by the text of the Constitution or its original meaning. He cited issues like Reeves’s decision to decline testimony from an SBA scholar who argued that a fetus could feel pain as early as ten weeks, suggesting that the Supreme Court should consider the fetal pain argument. Ho drew a line from this case to when lower courts allowed controversial testimony in Brown v. Board of Education, which overturned Supreme Court precedents and ended racial segregation in public schools.
He also slammed Reeves for suggesting the fifteen-week law was sexist and racist. “I find it deeply disquieting that a federal court would disparage the millions of Americans who believe in the sanctity of life as nothing more than ‘bent on controlling women and minorities,’” he said. Instead, he pointed to a rising “pro-life feminism,” citing a group of female scholars who had spent years arguing that legalized abortion doesn’t liberate women—but oppresses them.
As a politician, Fitch had rarely focused on abortion. Few in the antiabortion movement even knew her. But she subscribed to Ho’s broader concept of conservative feminism, a philosophy that purported to empower women but was not rooted in the liberal movement of the 1970s.
Fitch’s personal story and ambitions represented a strain of femininity that ran deep in Republican states like hers, one that tried to square women’s professional achievements with more traditional ideals of womanhood. Their vision was grounded in traditional Christian femininity. And it was closely tied to the cultural mission of antiabortion activists like Marjorie Dannenfelser and Kellyanne Conway and the rising class of conservative women—elected officials and judges like Amy Coney Barrett in the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals—who were becoming the new faces of their cause.
The thinking amounted to an attempt to reappropriate the feminist movement that had transformed the country since Roe. In some ways, Fitch’s rise mirrored that of Ann Richards, another divorced mother who had started her career as state treasurer. But the two women symbolized very different ideals of American womanhood. Richards was an icon of the liberal feminism of the boomer generation, a movement intertwined with the battle for abortion rights and Roe. Fitch symbolized the conservative backlash to that movement.
Fitch entered government in 1984, after becoming one of just fourteen women to take the bar in Mississippi that year—so few that they could all sit at one table. Gandy, her mentor, hosted Fitch and the other female lawyers for regular meetings to plot ways to expand their role in state politics. When Gandy suggested the idea of a women’s professional committee at the state bar, she asked Fitch, then a lawyer for the state legislature, to present the proposal to the all-male commissioners. “Can you get all those woman things done in a year?” they asked. Fitch bit her tongue and said she’d “certainly try.” Eventually, she got a seat as a commissioner herself, serving as she developed her private practice as a bond lawyer.
Along the way, Fitch had three children, and then divorced. Wanda Lynn Fitch Mitchell, wife and mother, became Lynn Fitch, single mom. School tuition and medical expenses, gas and phone bills, a fraternity pledge trainer for her son and sorority dues for a daughter: Fitch and her husband battled over it all for years in court filings, down to the $196.88 to replace the windshield on her son’s car. A second marriage to a former Secret Service agent for Ronald Reagan ended in divorce after two years, just as her campaign for state treasurer heated up. But with her tight-knit group of girlfriends and color-coded calendars and babysitters, she made it all work, ignoring when her male colleagues disparaged her for sneaking out for school plays or to help her father.
As state treasurer, her passion was women’s economic advancement, a focus that fit neatly into the purview of her role. “As women, we’re doing better, we’re earning more, but we still have old-school concepts about budgeting, about not looking at the big picture,” she told female business leaders at the Tupelo Country Club. She threw her support behind an equal-pay law, named after Gandy. It failed to move out of the legislature for years—a loss Fitch attributed in part to the fact that the state had fewer female legislators than most of America—something Becky Currie knew well too.
When Trump was nominated, Fitch was a committee member for the Republican Party platform and successfully added a clause mandating that fathers were responsible for their babies from birth through adulthood. “It was an opportunity to put some language in there for states to pass legislation in regard to women’s inequality,” she told The Daily Mississippian.
Fitch was rarely asked to prove her antiabortion bona fides. In Mississippi, opposition to abortion was a given in politics, even among Democrats. Nationally, just 12 percent of Americans thought abortion should be illegal in all cases. In Mississippi, 59 percent of adults thought abortion should be illegal in all or most cases. In the rare instances that the fifteen-week law came up during her race for attorney general, Fitch promised to do “everything she could” to move the case along if she won.
And as soon as she got into office, Fitch made good on that promise. She began preparing to ask the Supreme Court to review the Fifth Circuit’s decision to strike down the law. The chances that this abortion case would be accepted by the court seemed low, especially given the Fifth Circuit’s reputation for a conservative bent. The two other abortion laws challenged by Center for Reproductive Rights at the Supreme Court since 2016—the Texas law that Wendy Davis had filibustered and a Louisiana restriction—were both upheld by that lower court.
By this point, the lawsuit bore the name of Dr. Thomas E. Dobbs III, the leader of the state’s health department, who notably had no role in the litigation. When the Pink House and the center initially sued to stop the law, it listed the state’s top health official as a defendant because the health department oversaw abortion regulation in the state. That official was his predecessor and when she retired, the name of the suit changed to his. Dobbs, an epidemiologist and expert on infectious disease, was focused on combating the pandemic and wanted nothing to do with the litigation. “We want to just keep on doing our good work and stay out of the crosshairs,” he later said.
For Fitch, too, the abortion law was something that just landed in her lap. If the court took up the case, it could be the biggest abortion ruling since Casey in 1992. And she would be the face of it. If Mississippi wanted to be able to handle a case as big as Dobbs, Fitch needed a top-notch litigator. For the first time in the history of the state, Fitch hired a solicitor general to handle appellate strategy. Kristi Johnson, the US assistant attorney general who got the job, started the cert petition in March 2020 as hospitals filled with COVID patients.
As promised, the Alliance Defending Freedom had helped defend the law in the lower courts. John Bursch, an ADF lawyer who represented the governor to support the law at the Fifth Circuit, said he reviewed a draft of Johnson’s cert petition. He boasted of a high rate of acceptance for cert petitions at the court and aimed to hone Mississippi’s argument. His goal was to buttress Ho’s argument from the Fifth Circuit and again highlight all the legislative findings in the law that were originally included for exactly this moment.
ADF lawyers also knew John Roberts was likely the swing justice, so Mississippi wrote the cert petition with him in mind. As ADF had long planned, the intent was to chip away at Roe—not foremost to overturn the decision altogether.
“The goal was to get the court to write an opinion that he would join, that would wipe out the illogical, unconstitutionally tethered viability line,” Bursch said.
In June, days after the racial justice protests below her office and after months of preparation, Fitch’s team filed their petition to the Supreme Court. It was two weeks after law enforcement officers fired tear gas and rubber pellets into a crowd of peaceful protesters in Lafayette Square across from the White House, moments before Trump marched through the plaza to St. John’s Episcopal Church—where he held up a Bible in a declaration of Christian power and values.
Fitch’s team took a broad approach in its petition. Mississippi asked three main questions to give the justices room to decide which to answer: 1) Were all pre-viability prohibitions on elective abortions unconstitutional? 2) Which standard should be used to evaluate the validity of a pre-viability law, the one established in Casey, which was evaluating the “undue burden” a law might create for a woman, or the one in the 2016 Texas case, which was about balancing the interests of the state in promoting health of the woman and her fetus and the burdens on the woman? 3) Could abortion providers sue on behalf of a woman against a state’s law against abortions after the first trimester?
The word Roe itself was mentioned in the court filing only in passing, with brief name-checks of the historic case. The idea that Roe could be overturned through this case was only referenced by implication in a footnote. “To be clear, the questions presented in this petition do not require the Court to overturn Roe or Casey,” the petition said. “They merely asks the Court to reconcile a conflict in its own precedents.”
AT THE TIME, few people were paying attention to Fitch’s petition or what was happening with the fate of the state’s fifteen-week abortion law. Or really with any abortion law or pending court case. With the pandemic sweeping the nation, schools shuttered, the economy teetering, and the presidential election underway, there was plenty else to focus on.
The social issue that dominated political discourse in 2020 was race, not abortion or women’s rights. As protests inflamed the country, Democrats seized on the growing awareness of racial injustice, making the issue central to their election campaigns. Republicans tried to ride a conservative backlash, stoking fears about crime and looting. They also attempted to re-create the spark of their 2016 campaign, rallying social conservatives with pleas to reelect the “most pro-life president we have ever had” and continue the work of his administration. Trump even attended the March for Life in late January, at the start of the election year. He showed up on the Mall triumphant, the first president to attend in person. His appearance was a powerful signal of how important conservative Christian voters were to his coalition and his new Republican Party. Still, abortion stayed far under the radar for most independent and liberal voters, a distant second to the moment of racial reckoning.
But even though many voters didn’t see it at the time, the issues of race and abortion were very much intertwined. Black women were disproportionately likely to have abortions: Black women of reproductive age made up 14 percent of women in the United States but received 42 percent of abortions nationally, according to data from the Kaiser Family Foundation, which tracks health statistics.
Almost nowhere were the reproductive health discrepancies more obvious than in Mississippi, a state where Black women of reproductive age were nearly 43 percent of the population and received 80 percent of abortions. Black women in Mississippi were more than three times as likely to die of pregnancy complications as white women. Black babies were twice as likely to die as white babies during their first year of life.
Abortion-rights activists saw those numbers and argued that abortion bans like the fifteen-week one in Mississippi were racist policies that hurt the health, financial standing, and autonomy of Black women. Restricting abortion, they believed, was a way to maintain control over Black women’s bodies and economic futures by prioritizing a fetus over the women’s lives. Already, access to abortion for poor Black women had been limited for generations by Hyde. The new bans—many in Southern states with high percentages of Black women—would limit their access to abortion even further.
Reproductive justice activists saw a deep connection between racism and limits on reproductive rights. For the first 250 years of the American experiment, Black women who were enslaved had no legal control or bodily autonomy over their reproductive lives. The ability of enslaved women to reproduce was central to the income of slave owners and the perpetuation of the institution. Mothers were separated from their future children at the moment of conception, with their wombs considered the prenatal property of slave owners. To many in the reproductive justice movement, state control over women’s reproductive choices furthered this racist legacy.
As the Black Lives Matter movement grew, the abortion-rights movement made common cause with their efforts. “Ever since we were brought here against our will, this country has been a hostile birthing environment for Black women, and a dangerous place to raise Black children,” wrote SisterSong, the reproductive justice organization run by Monica Raye Simpson, in a formal statement of solidarity between the two movements released in 2016. “We offer to the Movement for Black Lives our commitment to hold gender justice as dear as racial justice, with reproductive justice as the core of both these aspirations.”
Antiabortion leaders also saw fresh evidence in the Black Lives Matter movement for their case that ending abortion was a civil rights cause. It was an old argument, reaching back to John C. Willke, but one they believed had new resonance when much of America was suddenly outraged about the continued police shootings of Black people. “This remarkable moment in American history fails to recognize a grave injustice similar to the one that it seeks to remedy,” wrote James L. Sherley, a Black scholar at the Charlotte Lozier Institute, the research arm of SBA. “Among the many shouts demanding freedom and equal protection for Black Americans, silence excludes the millions of targeted preborn Black children who also deserve justice and humility.”
The comparison was enormously controversial, just as the Holocaust comparisons were, equating fetuses with enslaved people and victims of police brutality. The antiabortion movement argued that abortion providers—most centrally Planned Parenthood—were targeting Black women for a campaign of “genocide” against Black babies by locating in areas with large Black populations. Those claims made implicit and racially charged assumptions about the agency of those women, argued abortion-rights advocates. Just because a clinic was located in a Black neighborhood didn’t mean their doctors were forcing patients to abort their pregnancies.
Still, that turbulent summer, the post-Roe generation of millennial and Gen Z antiabortion activists seized the rallying cries of racial justice activists as their own. After the Democratic mayor of Washington, DC, painted “Black Lives Matter” in giant yellow letters on the street across from the White House, antiabortion activists lifted the effort for their own purposes. Students for Life activists painted “Black Preborn Lives Matter” on murals across the country. Kristan Hawkins, their leader, organized a coalition with Black-led organizations that installed six billboards featuring the slogan and a clenched baby fist pumped to the sky. Trump’s reelection campaign spun up limited-edition “Baby Lives Matter” onesies, mimicking the BLM logo.
The campaign looked like a stunt from young conservative activists— yet another effort to “own the libs”—but it reflected an ideology about civil rights that permeated their movement up to the highest ranks. Two days before Trump’s speech at the March for Life, Betsy DeVos, his education secretary, compared the antiabortion cause to abolition and, implicitly, enslaved Black people to helpless fetuses.
This moment in the antiabortion struggle, DeVos said in her speech at Washington’s Museum of the Bible, reminded her of President Abraham Lincoln. “He, too, contended with the ‘pro-choice’ arguments of his day,” she said. “They suggested that a state’s ‘choice’ to be slave or to be free had no moral question in it.” In DeVos’s telling, Lincoln reminded “those pro-choicers” that slavery was a vast moral evil. “Lincoln was right about the slavery ‘choice’ then, and he would be right about the life ‘choice’ today,” she said. “Because as it’s been said: Freedom is not about doing what we want. Freedom is about having the right to do what we ought.” Her comments were another attempt to claim the heritage of civil rights for the antiabortion movement. Democrats quickly cast them as a willful, racist perversion of American history.
The antiabortion movement’s racial arguments were most extensive when it came to Planned Parenthood and its founder, Margaret Sanger. Activists frequently highlighted Sanger’s relationships with racists and eugenicists, proponents of a discredited pseudoscience that promoted the genetic fitness of white people. Historical records showed that Sanger courted members of those types of people. In 1926, she addressed a women’s auxiliary branch of a Ku Klux Klan chapter in New Jersey, an appearance she later described in her memoir as “one of the weirdest experiences.”
Antiabortion activists circulated quotes from Sanger’s extensive body of writing that portrayed her as supporting racist ideology. The most damning quote, one often circulated on antiabortion websites and social media, was from a December 10, 1939, letter. “We do not want word to go out that we want to exterminate the Negro population,” they would quote, often pairing the remark with comments from Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama praising Sanger.
The full context of the letter actually undercut the very point the antiabortion movement was trying to make. Her letter was an attempt to dispel the misinformation of her day. Sanger was writing to a program director, arguing that they needed Black doctors and the support of Black ministers to help counter inaccurate suspicions that Planned Parenthood was running a racial sterilization effort by providing birth control.
“The minister’s work is also important and he should be trained, perhaps by the Federation as to our ideals and the goal that we hope to reach,” wrote Sanger. “We do not want word to go out that we want to exterminate the Negro population and the minister is the man who can straighten out that idea if it ever occurs to any of their more rebellious members.”
While Sanger’s early work focused on immigrant women, later in her career, she founded what she called the “Negro Project” with leaders including W. E. B. Du Bois, Mary McLeod Bethune, and Rev. Adam Clayton Powell, and worked to provide birth control in Southern Black communities. In 1966, the year Sanger died, Martin Luther King Jr. praised her work as having “a striking kinship” with the civil rights struggle.
Still, the criticisms of Sanger promulgated by the antiabortion movement reached to the highest court. In a 2019 case over two Indiana abortion laws, Thomas argued that the court was “dutybound” to address provisions of the law, which prohibited abortion based on race, sex, and disability. In his opinion, Thomas offered his extensive version of the history of eugenics. He noted that Sanger “distinguished between birth control and abortion,” but, he said, “Sanger recognized the eugenic potential of her cause.” He added: “Abortion is an act rife with the potential for eugenic manipulation.” A series of historians described his analysis as “historically incoherent,” saying that top eugenicists largely opposed birth control and abortion. The court declined to address that part of the law, effectively leaving in place the lower-court decision striking it down.
Loretta Ross, a founder of the reproductive justice movement who had spent years researching Sanger, believed that Thomas and the antiabortion movement were intentionally weaponizing Sanger’s legacy. “I don’t believe she was fundamentally a racist when judged against the norms of her day,” she wrote in the Huffington Post in 2018. “She was no more prejudiced than all white people were and are.” But, Ross argued, Planned Parenthood’s refusal to directly confront Sanger’s legacy had provided a “golden opportunity” for opponents of abortion to undercut the cause of abortion rights. The dynamic left Black feminists like Ross in the difficult position of defending the historically white-led organization against an antiabortion movement that they saw as far more racist. “Our allies often fail to validate black women’s leadership, while our opponents paint us as brainwashed traitors to our race,” she wrote.
McGill Johnson, the first Black president of the organization in more than a quarter century, believed that Planned Parenthood could not move forward in this new era of racial justice without confronting Sanger’s legacy. She had her own 2020 analogy for Sanger’s 1920 set of beliefs, one that used a term for a privileged and racially insensitive white woman. “‘First came Margaret, then came Karen,” she told her team. “Margaret is Karen’s godmother, basically.”
To McGill Johnson, Baby Lives Matter felt like an updated version of the old billboard she saw a decade ago, the one that declared, “The Most Dangerous Place for an African American Is in the Womb” and that sparked her interest in joining Planned Parenthood’s board. The higher abortion rate of Black women was not because of a nefarious plot by abortion providers. It was due, McGill Johnson argued, to structural racism and a raft of socioeconomic factors that made Black women disproportionately at risk for unintended pregnancy. Studies showed that Black women were less likely to receive sex education, more likely to live in “contraception deserts,” and uninsured at roughly twice the rate of white women and girls—making it difficult to obtain contraception. Unintended pregnancies that led to unintended births would not only deny Black women their reproductive freedom and risk their health, they could trap them in cycles of economic disadvantage. Some research showed that banning abortion nationwide could lead to a 33 percent increase in deaths among Black women, compared with rates for 2017, because carrying a pregnancy to term was more medically dangerous than having an abortion.
McGill Johnson saw links between the decline of abortion rights and racial inequality. Like Ilyse Hogue, she saw how antiabortion activists were passing abortion restrictions and bans through conservative statehouses with the goal of striking at Roe, though she didn’t know which law would eventually reach the Supreme Court. At Planned Parenthood’s June meeting, she opened her remarks with a provocative question: “Who are we going to be when we’re no longer defending Roe?” Her goal was to prepare her donors, activists, and organization for the emotion of losing Roe, so when it happened they could be in the mindset of reimagination and reconstruction, not just mourning and loss.
Rights had been lost before in America, McGill Johnson reminded the audience. Reconstruction expanded constitutional rights for formerly enslaved Black Americans. Then, the court and Congress, as a way of settling the disputed election of 1876, struck down those laws prohibiting racial discrimination. Rights can get lost in a multitude of ways, she warned.
FITCH’S UPBRINGING TOLD a different story of Mississippi’s racial legacy. Wanda Lynn Fitch came from Holly Springs, a place described on the historic town marker as an antebellum cotton town that was home to thirteen generals of the Confederacy. Fitch’s father, W. O. Fitch—or Bill, as he was known—had moved the family back to his rural hometown near the Tennessee border after making his fortune in finance. He had inherited a prime parcel of an old plantation and enrolled his daughters in Marshall Academy, a private school founded as a segregation academy—one of thousands of such schools started by white parents across the South after the Brown v. Board decision required racial integration in public schools. He opened his own consumer lending company and started buying parcels of land, growing his property to eight thousand acres. Along with Lynn’s mother, Clydean, he restored the antebellum buildings on the Galena Plantation. The couple relocated the original log cabin of Nathan Bedford Forrest, a Confederate general and the first grand wizard of the Ku Klux Klan, onto their property and rebuilt the house as their residence.
On weekends, the Fitch family would saddle up the horses and ride through the open prairie fields and clusters of pine and hardwood thickets. Lynn, a fourth-generation hunter, shot quail like her father and grandfather did. But life in Holly Springs wasn’t enough to hold her. She left for Ole Miss, where she flew through college and law school in five years. By twenty-three, she was a practicing lawyer, working in the attorney general’s office and married to a law school classmate from the Mississippi River Delta.
Twenty-seven years later, when she launched her campaign for state treasurer, her father was the largest donor to her political operation. His fields and historic lodging attracted powerful guests—the state’s governors and professional athletes—who traveled from across the country to hunt the twenty-five thousand quail that roamed the property, with guides and bird dogs. Justice Antonin Scalia, an avid hunter, made annual pilgrimages. Fitch had always felt the strong pull of her roots and admired the conservative justices. Now, with the decision to petition the Supreme Court to hear her case, she was continuing Scalia’s legacy.
Just two weeks after Fitch filed her petition, the Supreme Court ruled on June Medical Services v. Russo, its first major abortion case since Trump shifted the balance of power to the right. The decision was a setback for the antiabortion movement. A five-justice majority struck down the Louisiana abortion restriction, which would have left the state with one abortion clinic, when it returned to the court. The Louisiana law was essentially identical to the one in Texas that Wendy Davis had filibustered and that had been rejected by the Supreme Court in 2016. The antiabortion movement leaders had been worried about Brett Kavanaugh’s commitment to their cause. But he ruled for them, joining the minority in favor of upholding the Louisiana law.
Still, they did not have enough votes to win. For a second time, Roberts, who had also ruled in their favor in the Texas law, flipped to join the court’s four-member liberal wing and strike down the Louisiana restriction. “I joined the dissent in Whole Woman’s Health,” he wrote, “and continue to believe that the case was wrongly decided. The question today, however, is not whether Whole Woman’s Health was right or wrong, but whether to adhere to it in deciding the present case.”
His commitment to precedent put ADF’s strategy into doubt. The fifteen-week plan, and the eighteen-week one after it, asked the court to approve something much more comprehensive that would strike at a far more established precedent: a ban that would remove Roe’s viability standard. Kavanaugh wasn’t enough to secure an antiabortion majority. “This decision demonstrates how difficult it is to drain the DC swamp and how important it is that President Trump gets reelected so that he may be able to appoint more pro-life justices,” said James Bopp Jr., general counsel for National Right to Life. That seemed unlikely: there were no public signs that any of the four liberal justices planned to retire, even Ginsburg, who was the oldest on the bench.
Still, Fitch had done her part in making the ask. Allies of the movement did what they always did, taking the next step, even if it ended in failure. They rallied behind her effort, filing amicus briefs to the court asking the justices to take up the case, some at ADF’s encouragement. The Roman Catholic Dioceses of Jackson and Biloxi were the first to submit one to the court, asking the justices to consider “religious authorities to shed light on issues of morality that come before the Court,” they wrote. They explained what they saw that morality to be, citing a verse from the Bible when God said to the prophet Jeremiah: “Before I formed you in the womb I knew you.”
The case was distributed to the Supreme Court justices for consideration on September 2. And everyone waited.