Hello and welcome to the weeds. I'm Ian Millheiser and I'm back to talk about the Supreme

Court as part of our ongoing series, The Most Dangerous Branch.

Here at the end of the most brutal Supreme Court term in recent memory, a rum springer

of conservative excess unlike any in my lifetime. The court threatened huge swaths of American

gun laws. It set fire to the wall separating church and state. It gutted much of the EPA's

power to fight climate change, and it most likely condemned an innocent man to die.

And of course, the biggest decision of the term was Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization.

Roe v. Wade is gone and states are now free to ban abortion outright, and many already

have.

The ruling in Dobbs also sparked a wave of confusion. What if anything can the Biden administration

do to protect abortion rights? While other rights like marriage equality are the right to contraception

be the next to fall, will people still be able to fill prescriptions for drugs that can

be used to induce abortions? What kind of invasive tactics will police use to track patients

who have an abortion? I could think of no one better than Michelle Goodwin to help us make

sense of this uncertain landscape. Professor Goodwin is a lawyer and bioethicist, she's

a professor at UC Irvine School of Law, and she's one of the nation's leading experts

on abortion law and reproductive rights more generally. I highly recommend her book

Policing the Wove for a Guide to How the Surveillance State Targeted Pregnant Patients

Even Before Roe was overruled. So with that, here's my conversation with Professor Goodwin.

Michelle Goodwin, welcome to the podcast. Thank you so much for having me.

So I want to start with something that President Biden said, shortly before he ordered a few,

I would say incremental steps to deal with dobs last Friday. He said that the only way

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