The political press is once again giving the embattled court — whose conservative justices are in the tank for Trump — undue credit on abortion cases.

SCOTUS has now weighed in — sort of — on both of the abortion cases before the Court this term. I say “sort of” because the upshot is that the Court has delayed/demurred on addressing the substance of both cases — FDA approval for medication abortion in FDA vs. Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine, and conflicting state and federal laws over emergency abortion care in Moyle v. United States.

Many folks have suggested that these punts are deliberate political moves meant to lull American voters into a false sense of security over abortion access in a high-octane election year, and I’m inclined to agree. As repro reporter Susan Rinkunas put it: “Let’s be extremely clear about the effect of the Supreme Court punting on these cases: Minimal abortion controversy, and maybe even a false sense of security, before the November elections.”

In a 6-3 ruling issued just this morning, SCOTUS “dismissed as improvidently granted” the case over emergency abortion access in Idaho, effectively returning the situation back to a lower court that ruled that Idaho cannot ban emergency providers from providing life-saving abortion care to people with complicated pregnancies.

We had an idea this was coming. Yesterday morning, the ruling was leaked amid other Court issuances. Curious how these abortion cases keep popping up before their appointed time!

But today we got the whole shebang, including a concurrence from Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, who practically lit up a Vegas-sized neon sign and hired a parade of feather-clad dancers to issue a dire warning to the American people. Via HuffPo:

“While this court dawdles and the country waits, pregnant people experiencing emergency medical conditions remain in a precarious position, as their doctors are kept in the dark about what the law requires,” Jackson wrote. “This Court had a chance to bring clarity and certainty to this tragic situation, and we have squandered it. And for as long as we refuse to declare what the law requires, pregnant patients in Idaho, Texas, and elsewhere will be paying the price.”

It’s as predictable as it is depressing — so predictable that two columns I published this week, for DAME and MSNBC, tackled a couple different sides of what’s going on here, but I want to emphasize the extent of the mainstream and legacy political press’ complicity in normalizing and obfuscating the Supreme Court’s gutlessness.

Take for example this morning’s error-ridden coverage of the emergency abortion decision in the Washington Post, which leads thusly:

“Hospitals in Idaho that receive federal funds must allow emergency abortion care to stabilize patients even though the state strictly bans the procedure, the Supreme Court ruled on Thursday, one day after the opinion was prematurely posted on its website.”

The Supreme Court ruled no such thing. The Supreme Court dismissed the case and remanded the situation to a lower court that had previously ruled Idaho must allow doctors to provide emergency abortion care. That’s a distinction that really matters: SCOTUS is not protecting anyone’s rights or access to abortion care here — the SCOTUS majority is merely saying that it’s not going to say either way. (Though Alito, Thomas, and Gorsuch were very clear: they would have allowed Idaho to block doctors from saving pregnant people’s lives, or to prosecute doctors for attempting to save their patients’ lives. Truly. This shit is horrifying.)

For DAME, I wrote about the myriad reasons our embattled, politicized, delegitimized SCOTUS benefits from this kind of courtly cowardice and lazy media coverage:

The fact that mifepristone’s approval has been preserved for now is a side effect, rather than an on-label use, of the FDA vs. AHM ruling.

This credulous coverage works to the embattled Supreme Court’s advantage; we learn more every day about the depths of corruption on the Court, key members of which have been bought outright by ultra-conservative billionaire interests gunning for a second Trump administration. As Madiba Dennie, court-watcher and author of the new book The Originalism Trap recently told DAME: A growing body of evidence—from disturbing secret tapes to insurrectionist flag-waving and posh trips funded by Trump backers—“indicates that they’re already in the bag for Donald Trump.”

Conservatives love to construct elaborate narratives of imagined victimhood, and while the Alliance ruling was a bust for the anti-abortion group, their preposterous claims of harm facilitated a potentially more substantial win for the political right writ large by giving SCOTUS an easy out on abortion at a time when the Court is desperate to reestablish its image as a paragon of objectivity and legitimacy.

And for MSNBC, I wrote about how the press does American voters a disservice by taking Trump’s ever-changing word-vomit on repro issues like abortion and contraception as gospel, divorced as it is from the Republican Party’s actual actions on abortion and birth control:

Again and again, Trump has promised to provide us with concrete positions on reproductive issues and never delivered, only to be cast as a crafty messenger by journalists who seem unable to print the obvious: Donald Trump will say whatever he thinks he needs to say to get elected. 

Trump’s latest feint — that abortion should be left up to individual states — certainly isn’t borne out by his party’s own actions, yet it’s repeated again and again in the media as if it’s incontrovertible truth. Hardly. Across the country, Republicans are using every tool at their disposal to block state ballot initiatives on abortion. GOP politicians have been open about these efforts at every turn, pledging to overrule, overturn or block voters’ will on abortion rights by any means necessary. This media failure is especially galling when these efforts actually tell a very consistent story about the Republican Party’s commitment to outlawing abortion, expanding abortion restrictions, and restricting access to birth control.

It’s exhausting to watch journalists who should know better launder this fuckery for Trump, the Supreme Court, and the GOP over and over again. Why do I have to skeet at a New York Times reporter who claimed she’d finally written a “thorough comparison” of Trump and Biden on the issues to let her know she’d conveniently left out Trump’s most appalling position of all — that abortion should be punished, maybe even prosecuted as homicide????

The Times updated their coverage in response to my skeet, but why is this my responsibility in the first place??? I write a newsletter for two thousand people!!! I am not making six figures as a political hack at the paper of record!! ghghghghgh.

All to say: everything is terrible, and we need to all be reading extremely closely when engaging with mainstream and legacy coverage of abortion rights and access, contraception, IVF, and the whole host of repro health, rights, and justice issues.

As with everything repro all the time, we deserve better, but we’ll have to work with what we have.

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