The Last Truly Great Day for Women in American Law

Sometimes I think of March 2, 2016, the day of the Supreme Court oral argument in Whole Woman’s Health v. Hellerstedt, as the last truly great day for women and the legal system in America.

There are, to be sure, many such glorious moments to choose from, both before and after the election of President Donald Trump, but as a professional Court watcher, I had a front-row seat to this story, one that offered a sense that women in the United States had achieved some milestone that would never be reversed. represented the first time in American history that a historic abortion case was being heard by a Supreme Court with three female justices. Twenty-four years earlier, when the last momentous abortion case——had come before, the pathbreaking 1973 case that created a constitutional right to terminate a pregnancy, was argued before and decided by nine men and zero women. And when , the lawsuit protecting the rights of married couples to buy and use birth control, was argued at the high court back in 1965, that bench comprised nine males so uneasy with the topic of contraception that at oral argument nobody was brave enough even to name the birth-control device being litigated.