Author: Allison Macbeth and Elizabeth Bernal

Fix the fatal flaw in SCA 10

Overview The reproductive choice rights the United States Supreme Court recognized almost fifty years ago rely on two unwritten fundamental rights: to privacy, and liberty interests in retaining control of one’s body. With the U.S. Supreme Court poised to abrogate those rights in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, Californians will retain their state constitutional rights and statutory protections for reproductive liberty. Yet those California constitutional rights rely on a similar foundation — judicial interpretations of California’s textual constitutional privacy right. That leaves the state constitutional protection for reproductive liberty vulnerable to the same judicial reinterpretation that federal abortion doctrine...