Senate Judiciary Committee to Hold Hearing on the Devastating Fallout Since the Supreme Court Overruled Roe V. Wade

WASHINGTON – U.S. Senate Majority Whip Dick Durbin (D-IL), Chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee, today announced that the Senate Judiciary Committee will hold a full committee hearing in the upcoming work period to examine the devastating fallout since the Supreme Court overruled Roe v. Wade in June 2022.  This hearing follows the full committee hearing Durbin held in July 2022 entitled, “A Post-Roe America: The Legal Consequences of the Dobbs Decision.”

“In the nine months since the Court overruled Roe, women across the country have lost the ability to make their own reproductive health care decisions.  Republican-led legislatures have passed abortion bans in more than a dozen states, and now, a single federal judge in Texas has sought to upend our federal drug approval process.  If his ruling is upheld, women nationwide—including in states where abortion remains legal—could lose access to mifepristone, a drug approved more than twenty years ago as safe and effective by the FDA.  In the coming days, the Senate Judiciary Committee will hold a hearing to examine the devastating and life-threatening fallout since the Supreme Court issued its decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization,” said Durbin.  “As Chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee, I will keep fighting to enshrine into law a woman’s right to make her own reproductive choices.  We cannot let our children inherit a nation that is less free and more dangerous than the one their parents grew up in.”

Although Justice Alito claimed in that overruling Roe settles the abortion debate by returning the issue to the states, the past nine months demonstrate that the opposite is true.  The abortion landscape is constantly changing and unsettled, resulting in women across the country—whether or not they live in states where abortion is restricted or banned—facing negative and sometimes life-threatening outcomes.

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