Abortion rights lawyer vows as decide to observe U.S. Supreme Court docket ruling By Reuters

By Nate Raymond

(Reuters) – The lawyer who represented the Mississippi clinic on the coronary heart of the U.S. Supreme Court docket case that resulted within the overturning of girls’s constitutional proper to abortion pledged throughout Senate testimony on Wednesday to observe that ruling regardless of her previous advocacy if she is confirmed to the federal judiciary.

Julie Rikelman, nominated by Democratic President Joe Biden to serve on the Boston-based 1st U.S. Circuit Court docket of Appeals, advised the Senate Judiciary Committee in her affirmation listening to in Washington that she would observe the June ruling regardless of having fought to protect abortion rights.

“Dobbs is now the regulation of the land, and I’ll observe it, as I’ll observe all Supreme Court docket precedents,” Rikelman mentioned, referring to the Supreme Court docket case by its title, Dobbs v. Jackson Ladies’s Well being Group.

Her position in that and different instances made her a goal for Republican criticism all through the listening to, with a number of the panel’s most conservative members questioning her assist for what Senator Josh Hawley labeled “radical” abortion rights legal guidelines.

“You might have spent the vast majority of your skilled life as an excessive zealot advocating for abortion,” Republican Senator Ted Cruz advised Rikelman. “That’s clearly a heartfelt and private ardour of yours.”

Democrats are searching for to spotlight Republican opposition to abortion rights forward of the Nov. 8 midterm elections through which management of Congress is at stake. The conservative-majority Supreme Court docket overturned its landmark 1973 ruling Roe v. Wade that had legalized abortion nationwide.

Rikelman represented Mississippi’s solely abortion clinic in difficult a Republican-backed regulation that banned abortion after 15 weeks of being pregnant.

A number of Republican-led states have since moved to ban or limit abortions, together with Mississippi.

Republican Senator Mike Lee took concern with Rikelman’s declare in an article by Axios that the Dobbs ruling would end result within the “largest public well being disaster that we’ve got seen in a long time.”

“In a world through which extra infants are being born and being born alive than being aborted, you name {that a} public well being disaster?” Lee requested.

Rikelman didn’t shrink back from having advocated for the power of “girls to have the ability to make their very own private medical selections” and in opposition to the overturning of Roe v. Wade whereas working as a lawyer on the Heart for Reproductive Rights.

However Rikelman mentioned her private views don’t matter as a result of as a decrease court docket decide, she could be sure by U.S. Supreme Court docket precedent, together with its resolution within the Dobbs case, which she promised to “completely” observe.