What overturning Roe vs. Wade would actually mean to America

The future of privacy under the U.S. Constitution — and the critical protection of rights such as abortion and same-sex marriage — rests on the continued good health and mental acuity of three lawyers age 78 and older. If you care about these things, and you should, you really should be sending vitamin packets, kale salads and protein smoothies to Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg (83), Anthony Kennedy (80) and Stephen Breyer (78).

All three of those Supreme Court justices are at or approaching the age when many people retire, stop being able to perform their job functions or even pass away. If that happens to any of these three over the course of the next four years, basic constitutional protections could disappear. And the basic rights of American women to control their bodies will be immediately endangered.

Until then, President-elect Donald Trump won’t have much of an opportunity to shift the ideological makeup of the Supreme Court. President Obama attempted to fill the current vacancy created by Justice Antonin Scalia’s death in February, but Senate Republicans successfully obstructed from day one.

Judge Merrick Garland, by all accounts a well-respected moderate, will be remembered in history as the Supreme Court nominee who went nowhere. With Trump winning the election and the Senate remaining in Republican hands, Garland’s nomination will wither on the vine until it is officially pronounced dead on Jan. 3, when the new Congress takes office.

Trump has promised to fill this open seat with a conservative in the mold of Scalia. If he is successful in doing so, the new justice would certainly be a victory for Republicans in staving off an Obama liberal justice, but would not yet change the court’s ideological balance.

It’s the next nomination that could possibly rewrite long-standing law, and is rightly making many people worry about Roe vs. Wade.

Roe, now almost 44 years old, established a constitutional right to choose to have an abortion. The court decided that the right to terminate a pregnancy is part of a woman’s right to privacy and bodily integrity that previous decisions had protected.

This decision has faced intense opposition from the day it was decided but, even though Republican Presidents have vowed to overturn it, its basic principle has survived to this day.

We take the ruling for granted at our peril.

Roe faced a serious attack in 1992 that almost destroyed it. That year, in Planned Parenthood vs. Casey, the Supreme Court considered several abortion restrictions out of Pennsylvania. It seemed that there were enough new justices on the court — five new appointees from Presidents Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush — to reverse Roe. However, a moderate coalition emerged among the justices that saved the ultimate outcome of Roe, reaffirming that states cannot outlaw abortion altogether.

Still, the court gave states more latitude to regulate abortion.

Under this new standard, many states have increased their attacks on abortion. Over the past six years, they have passed hundreds of abortion restrictions that, although not outlawing abortion, make it more difficult for women to access the legal medical procedure.

This past summer, however, the Supreme Court drew a line in the sand. Once again reaffirming Roe, the court told states that they can restrict abortion, but those restrictions must be grounded in evidence-based medicine and not be backdoor attempts to make the procedure illegal.

This was a huge victory for reproductive rights. But with a Trump administration, this new victory — as well as the longstanding precedent of Roe — could be threatened if one of the three over-78 justices leaves the court through whatever means.

Each of those three justices has supported abortion rights