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Time for sex ed with the House Speaker.
Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) blasted the Supreme Court’s conservative justices Thursday after they indicated they would restore a Mississippi law banning abortions after 15 weeks of pregnancy — with Pelosi saying, “they need a session on the birds and the bees.”
During her regular news conference, Pelosi described listening to Wednesday’s oral arguments before the high court and said it was “a very dark day.”
“The court is threatening to trample over the Constitution, destroy Roe v. Wade, and take away a woman’s freedom to make the most fundamental decision that she can make for herself and her family, with her family members and her doctor and her faith,” the Speaker told reporters.
“Now we don’t know what the decision will be from the court, but from what they have said about not respecting precedents, stare decisis, all of that is troubling, all of that is troubling,” Pelosi later said. “And what they have said about — sometimes I think they need a session on the birds and the bees for some of the kinds of statements that they make.
“I say that as a mother of five [children born in] six years and one week,” the Speaker added, holding up the requisite number of fingers to the camera. “As I say to my colleagues, when you have five children in six years and one week, we can discuss this issue. That was great for me, not necessarily great for other people, and it shouldn’t be up to any of us to decide what a woman and her family, her husband, her partner decides is right for them and their family and their future child-bearing possibilities. So it’s scary, it’s really scary.”
Pelosi has often framed her views on abortion in the context of her Catholic faith and did so again Thursday.
“This shouldn’t even be a political issue,” she said. “Look at Ireland — is there a more Catholic country? Look at Ireland and how they passed legislation respecting, respecting women.”
The Speaker added that she believes Congress’ best course of action would be to codify the right to an abortion in federal law rather than relying on repeated rulings upholding Roe v. Wade.
“The DOJ and providers and those harmed by restrictions made unlawful under the Act could go to court to enforce those rights,” she said. “It would make the law, the Women’s Health Protection Act, protect access to termination of a pregnancy across the country.”
The Mississippi case has been described as the most significant challenge to the Court’s 1973 Roe v. Wade decision in nearly 30 years. Mississippi officials defending the law have asked the high court to overturn Roe and return the issue of abortion to the states.
The case argued Thursday also challenges the Court’s decision in a 1992 case — Planned Parenthood v. Casey — in which the justices ruled that states could regulate abortion before the point when a fetus can survive outside the womb, but not impose an “undue burden” on women seeking the procedure.
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