CORPUS CHRISTI, Texas — After the bombshell leak of a U.S. Supreme Court draft opinion, the country awaits a major decision by the court on Roe v. Wade.
Chief Justice John Roberts confirmed the authenticity of the leaked document which states the court will overturn Roe v. Wade, a landmark decision in which the Supreme Court ruled that the Constitution of the United States protects a pregnant woman's right to choose to have an abortion without excessive government restriction.
Nothing is final yet, but the draft includes a majority of justices showing support for overturning the decision made in 1973.
Travis Braidwood, Assistant Professor in the Department of History, Political Science, and Philosophy at Texas A&M University-Kingsville, joined First Edition and said that a majority of Americans want there to be some sort of access to safe abortions.
"We have seen a pretty strong majority say that they want at least some form of abortion access, there is only about between 11 to 15 percent that want a complete ban on access to abortions," Braidwood said.
But the popular decision by the people does not necessarily influence what the Supreme Court rules.
"Often times you can see the Court, especially in the recent era, has tried to stay in relative lockstep with the population because their legitimacy is also dependent upon support by the public and the other branches so they tried not to deviate too far. This would, however, appear to be a pretty wild deviation," Braidwood said.
The draft decision by the Supreme Court being leaked is something that the nation has never seen before, and Braidwood said it will be difficult to pinpoint who leaked the document. There is no indication that person would be legally punished for the leak.
"There have been instances of leaks of decisions or leaks of votes but we have never had a complete leak of a draft, even if it is just an initial draft, we have never had anything, to my knowledge, like this," Braidwood said.
"They (Supreme Court) don't have any investigatory powers and even the officers they have going to engage in the investigation are normally in charge of security, not investigation of leaks, and to my knowledge, there doesn't appear to be any formal federal laws that prohibit this. So, I don't really know what they could possibly do.
"It's also going to be really hard to pin down, there is about 37 or so clerks, you got the nine justices and then there is all the staff that work at the building. Any one of those people could have had access to a draft and quickly scanned it."
The court’s is expected to make their final decision, likely, in the next two months.
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