Abortion rights lawyer vows as judge to follow U.S. Supreme Court ruling

By Nate Raymond

(Reuters) – The lawyer who represented the Mississippi clinic on the coronary heart of the U.S. Supreme Court docket case that resulted within the overturning of ladies’s constitutional proper to abortion pledged throughout Senate testimony on Wednesday to comply with that ruling regardless of her previous advocacy if she is confirmed to the federal judiciary.

Julie Rikelman, nominated by Democratic President Joe Biden to serve on the Boston-based 1st U.S. Circuit Court docket of Appeals, informed the Senate Judiciary Committee in her affirmation listening to in Washington that she would comply with the June ruling regardless of having fought to protect abortion rights.

“Dobbs is now the legislation of the land, and I’ll comply with it, as I’ll comply with all Supreme Court docket precedents,” Rikelman stated, referring to the Supreme Court docket case by its identify, Dobbs v. Jackson Ladies’s Well being Group.

Her position in that and different circumstances made her a goal for Republican criticism all through the listening to, with a number of the panel’s most conservative members questioning her assist for what Senator Josh Hawley labeled “radical” abortion rights legal guidelines.

“You could have spent the vast majority of your skilled life as an excessive zealot advocating for abortion,” Republican Senator Ted Cruz informed Rikelman. “That’s clearly a heartfelt and private ardour of yours.”

Democrats are searching for to focus on Republican opposition to abortion rights forward of the Nov. 8 midterm elections wherein management of Congress is at stake. The conservative-majority Supreme Court docket overturned its landmark 1973 ruling Roe v. Wade that had legalized abortion nationwide.

Rikelman represented Mississippi’s solely abortion clinic in difficult a Republican-backed legislation that banned abortion after 15 weeks of being pregnant.

A number of Republican-led states have since moved to ban or prohibit abortions, together with Mississippi.

Republican Senator Mike Lee took situation with Rikelman’s declare in an article by Axios that the Dobbs ruling would outcome within the “greatest public well being disaster that we’ve got seen in many years.”

“In a world wherein extra infants are being born and being born alive than being aborted, you name {that a} public well being disaster?” Lee requested.

Rikelman didn’t shrink back from having advocated for the flexibility of “girls to have the ability to make their very own private medical selections” and towards the overturning of Roe v. Wade whereas working as a lawyer on the Middle for Reproductive Rights.

However Rikelman stated her private views don’t matter as a result of as a decrease court docket choose, she could be sure by U.S. Supreme Court docket precedent, together with its choice within the Dobbs case, which she promised to “completely” comply with.

(Reporting by Nate Raymond in Boston; Enhancing by Alexia Garamfalvi and Will Dunham)