WASHINGTON — When the Supreme Court heard arguments in December over the fate of the constitutional right to abortion, it was already clear that other rights, notably including same-sex marriage, could be at risk if the court overruled Roe v.
Wade. The logic of that legal earthquake, Justice Sonia Sotomayor predicted, would produce a jurisprudential tsunami that could sweep away other precedents, too.
The justices’ questions on the broader consequences of a decision eliminating the right to abortion were probing but abstract and conditional.
The disclosure last Monday of a draft opinion that would overturn Roe, the 1973 decision that established a constitutional right to abortion, has made those questions urgent and concrete.