Danger in the Shadows: Supreme Court Uses Shadow Docket to Threaten Abortion Rights

Reproductive rights—once perceived to be a hallmark of late 20th-century American democracy—may soon give way to conservative states enacting unconstitutional anti-abortion provisions with procedural barriers so thickly and cleverly intertwined that the ability to challenge them may be unattainable, including at the Supreme Court.

The result of the Court’s shadow docket opinion is not just an end, essentially, to the legal right to an abortion in Texas—it sets in motion a workable blueprint for all other conservative state legislatures bent on stripping away abortion rights.