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Supreme Court Overturns Roe v. Wade; States Enact "Trigger Bans" After Court Overturns Roe v. Wade; Demonstrations Erupt At Supreme Court After Roe v. Wade Overturned; Harris Speaks After Supreme Court Overturns Roe v. Wade. Aired 3-3:30p ET

Aired June 24, 2022 - 15:00   ET

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.

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[15:00:57]

ALISYN CAMEROTA, CNN HOST: It's the top of the hour on CNN NEWSROOM. I'm Alisyn Camerota.

And we begin this hour with the fallout from today's historic Supreme Court ruling, the conservative majority overturned Roe vs. Wade and ended the constitutional right to an abortion. In a narrow vote, this decision reverses nearly 50 years of court precedent. The reaction was swift and emotional everything from victory celebrations to outrage outside of the nation's highest court.

Writing for the majority Justice Samuel Alito argued, "Roe was egregiously wrong from the start. Its reasoning was exceptionally weak and the decision has had damaging consequences. And far from bringing about a national settlement of the abortion issue, Roe and Casey have inflamed debate and deepened division."

Abortion rights now lie with the states and the impact on women will be immediate and far-reaching. Nearly half of all states have trigger laws or other plans in place to ban or severely limit abortion starting now. President Biden calls the decision 'a tragic error'.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

JOE BIDEN, PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: State laws banning abortion are automatically taking effect today, jeopardizing the health of millions of women, some without exceptions. So extreme that women could be punished for protecting their health. So extreme that women and girls were forced to bear their rapists child, of a child a consequence. It just stuns me.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

CAMEROTA: Supreme Court Reporter Ariane de Vogue joins us now. So Ariane, tell us about this stunning ruling.

ARIANE DE VOGUE, CNN U.S. SUPREME COURT REPORTER: Right. The court wiping away near 50-year-old precedent doing away with this federal right to abortion. Justice Samuel Alito writing for the majority and he really stuck closely to that draft opinion we saw last month. He said that Roe was egregiously wrong. He said that there's no place for it in the Constitution and he said that this issue belongs back to the States.

He pointedly noted that women have political power, that's where that this issue should move. Interestingly enough, he also tried to wall off this opinion from other cases that have similar legal reasoning. For instance, cases having to do with gay marriage and the right to contraception.

He said in this majority opinion that Roe is different because it had to do with the taking of potential life. It was a huge, huge victory for opponents of abortion and, of course, a big loss for supporters. What's interesting here is we saw that the three liberal justices wrote the dissent together. Usually it's just one author. All three of them wrote it together and they really wanted to pinpoint what this would mean for poor women going forward.

Here's what they said, "They said some women, especially women of means will find ways around the states assertion of power. Others - those without money or childcare or the ability to take the time off from work - will not be so fortunate. Maybe they will try an unsafe method of abortion, and come to physical harm or even die. Maybe they will undergo pregnancy and have a child but at a significant personal or familiar cost."

They were furious in this long dissent and they ended it by saying that they wrote with sorrow. Worth noting one more thing that this opinion today was made possible because of former President Donald Trump. He had a singular focus to change the face of the courts. He put three Supreme Court justices on the bench and it was those justices who voted to date - their votes were critical, Alisyn.

CAMEROTA: Ariane de Vogue, thank you for explaining all of that context.

Now, President Biden says the Supreme Court decision is literally taking America back 150 years.

[15:05:02]

CNN Chief White House correspondent Kaitlan Collins joins me now. Kaitlan, what else did the President say?

KAITLAN COLLINS, CNN CHIEF WHITE HOUSE CORRESPONDENT: He called it a solemn, sad day for the United States, Alisyn, and he had been briefed this morning after the decision came down by his chief of staff. He already had a draft speech ready to go given, of course, after the leak of this opinion, which largely matched what actually came out today.

Earlier last month, the President and his team had been bracing for this decision. So he made a few changes after reviewing the decision. And then you saw President Biden come out and talk about what he thinks this means for women in America saying that their health and their life is at risk now, he believes, because of the decision by the Supreme Court justices. And one thing he hit on in his speech, as he was talking about the grave implications of this was he talked about the idea that for so many decades, Justices from both who had been appointed by Presidents of both parties, Democrat and Republican, had upheld this ruling and had not touched it. And now he talked about the fact that three justices were picked and appointed by the last president, his predecessor, who he doesn't often name had an effect on today's decision.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

BIDEN: It was three justices named by one president, Donald Trump, were the core of today's decision to upend the scales of justice and eliminate a fundamental right for women in this country. Make no mistake, this decision is a combination of a deliberate effort over decades to upset the balance of our law.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

COLLINS: And the President, of course, the big question is what is the White House going to do as a response to this decision, given they've had so much time to prepare for it? The President talked about how the Justice Department is going to be prepared to defend the rights for women to travel out of state should they need to for an abortion if they can't get one in their home state.

He talked about the Health and Human Services Department making sure that they are working to eliminate barriers to abortion medication. Those steps that are within his power. But, of course, Alisyn, as you know, no executive order can restore the constitutional right that was taken away today, only an act of Congress can do that.

And so the President called on voters saying that Roe vs. Wade, he believes is going to be on the ballot this November. They need to elect more pro choice lawmakers, of course, obviously, Democrats there when the President was talking about this and what that needs to look like. But I think that's where some frustration is going to come down is the limits here of what the White House can do, of course, seeing the President give his speech today.

CAMEROTA: Okay. Kaitlan Collins, thank you very much from the White House.

So this ruling will have an immediate impact across the country because dozens of states have trigger laws in place.

CNN's Tom Foreman joins us now. So Tom, how do these trigger laws work?

TOM FOREMAN, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Well, they work fast is the way they work, Alisyn. Yes, this is how this will actually touch you wherever you live. Thirteen states has a so-called trigger laws in place for today, meaning abortion bans are going to go into effect very quickly according to the abortion rights group, the Guttmacher Institute.

In Kentucky, Louisiana and South Dakota, for example, the law has said it would happen immediately. So barring some issue there, that procedure is already illegal there. At the next level, there are abortion bans to be enforced 30 days from now, that's how the law was written in Idaho, Tennessee and Texas. Although there is a push in Texas we know of to bypass even that delay and implement a ban even sooner.

Then we have a half dozen states where officials need to certify that their legislation is legally valid before their bans kick in. Arkansas, Mississippi, Missouri, North Dakota, Oklahoma, Utah and Wyoming, this map is changing very fast since some of them have already certified so much so that they made it almost immediate like the other group we just talked about. Others could be just taking hours or days until all of those are done.

And finally, we can add to this, these are the states where the trigger laws are in place. We can add in those that have old unenforced abortion bans, which now can be enforced and states that pass bans under Roe which were blocked by courts, altogether you get a whopping 26 states certain were likely to ban abortion now.

We say likely because there are places like Montana where the state Supreme Court is still blocking away for the moment. That's compared to just 16 states and DC with laws to protect abortion rights states, which right now like Illinois, are bracing for an influx of people from the neighboring states seeking care.

So how severe are these bands? Missouri has eyes on targeting even non residents who might pass through and conceive a child in their state, that person were to get an abortion elsewhere.

Oklahoma passed a law just this year to ban abortion from the moment of fertilization. Texas and some other states want abortion illegal after just six weeks when many women may not even know that they are pregnant.

[15:09:58]

Conservative lawmakers in several states have embraced the idea that there should be no exception for race or for rape or incest and almost all these laws carry stiff penalties for medical professionals caught providing abortion services. Tens of thousands of dollars in fines, loss of their licenses and potentially years in prison.

Alisyn, there's a lot that happens in Washington, D.C. that never really hits home for many Americans, this will.

CAMEROTA: Tom, I'm just very curious how Missouri and Oklahoma will prove where a baby is conceived, that seems to sometimes be open for debate.

FOREMAN: Oh, there's much that's open for debate in all of this and yet it hasn't stopped this galloping effort. For those who support this who say, finally after all these years, the doors are open, they're staking their tents very deep into the territory of saying we're going to be the law of the entire land even if they say it's just their state. CAMEROTA: Understood. Tom Foreman, thank you for all that reporting.

FOREMAN: You're welcome.

CAMEROTA: Let's bring in Harry Litman. He's a former U.S. attorney and a former Deputy Assistant Attorney General, S.E. Cupp is a CNN political commentator and Nia Malika Henderson is a CNN senior political analyst. Great to see all of you. Harry, give me your legal take on the decision today.

HARRY LITMAN, FORMER U.S. ATTORNEY: What you just read from Alito, Alisyn, that this sort of puts the debate to rest is the most fanciful conceit in the whole opinion. It's threadbare as was the draft because it does - it makes no attempt to distinguish between Roe and many other rights at play.

And there is as the dissents said, we could talk about this for a whole episode, some special antipathy that the five kind of all grew up having toward Roe and abortion rights in particular. But it simply says that because roe isn't mentioned in the Constitution that basically says it is egregiously wrong and has to go by the boards and that means the way things work in this country, whatever state now passes a not - an anti-gay marriage bill, an anti-contraception, an anti-sodomy bill, that will work its way up to the court and they won't be able to duck it.

Second, this is going to be a very polarizing process. This is not 1973 anymore, as you already see, the states are lining up and it's playing out against the sort of nasty Trumpian political atmosphere where this is going to just bring greater and greater social strife. It's a really grim and tragic day for the court and especially for women of childbearing age.

CAMEROTA: S.E., I just want to remind everyone what Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh said during their confirmation hearings about how much they respected the precedent of Roe vs. Wade.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

JUSTICE BRETT KAVANAUGH, SUPREME COURT: It is an important precedent of the Supreme Court. By 'it', I mean Roe v. Wade and Planned Parenthood v. Casey. They have been reaffirmed many times. Casey is precedent on precedent, which itself is an important factor.

JUSTICE NEIL GORSUCH, SUPREME COURT: The Supreme Court of the United States has held that Roe v. Wade, that a fetus is not a person for purposes of the 14th Amendment. And the book explains that.

SEN. DICK DURBIN (D-IL): Do you accept that?

GORSUCH: That's the law of the land. I accept the law of the land, Senator. Yes.

CAMEROTA: So S.E., I don't know how to interpret that today or how to make sense of what they said so definitively then with what they did today. And Sen. Susan Collins, for one basically has put out a statement saying that she feels misled. That's my word, not hers, but that was the gist of her statement.

S.E. CUPP, CNN POLITICAL COMMENTATOR: Yes, because she had defended them. She had said at the time, I believe them. And then apparently they pulled the rug out from underneath her and everyone else. And they aren't alone, I mean, several Supreme Courts before this one also thought it was the law of the land and so do millions of Americans. Put it this way, Alisyn.

Roe is older than I am, that doesn't make me young, that makes me the majority. There are more people alive today who have never known in America without Roe than there are Americans alive, who lived without it. So the idea that you're going to strip away what many people consider a right for 50 years and think that this will just be sort of met with a shrug and not the seismic kind of shift of American life that we are going to see is really naive.

I mean, I can't think of another ruling this sort of regressive and earth shattering for a majority of Americans who have not known anything different and without anything to replace it. There's no idea of how to deal with a completely new America, where in many states, this will be banned, criminalized, police and prosecutors will be unleashed to round up women and doctors and Uber drivers where a woman will have to choose between going to prison or carrying her rapist's baby.

[15:15:08]

I mean, this is draconian medieval stuff and it happened overnight. All I can say is I'm actually glad we got that leaked document because I can't imagine what the reaction would be today, had we not had weeks to really anticipate this. I mean, I think this would be sort of scorched earth and chaos today.

CAMEROTA: Well, on that note, Nia Malika, of no plan being in place, what is the plan in these Republican-led states that Tom Foreman just outlined for what to do with these 10s of thousands of unwanted babies that will be forced to be born, are they going to expand the social safety net? Are they going to add more money for welfare? Are they're going to build more foster care centers? What's the plan?

NIA-MALIKA HENDERSON, CNN SENIOR POLITICAL REPORTER: So far, crickets, in terms of that. There is no plan to make it easier for women to have children because, listen, the main reason that women choose to have an abortion is because they can't endure the financial burden of having a kid and sometimes an additional kid.

Lots of women who have abortions already have children and they are facing a world where child care is incredibly expensive. They often have jobs where they don't have a paid family leave and maybe they don't have partners who have access to kinds of health care or resources, either.

So this is a whole new ballgame in the states in terms of what are they going to say to these women who are now forced to carry these children (inaudible) forced to be in a state of having a medical condition, essentially, for nine months. It's a question for men, too, right?

Men often take their partners to get abortions because they can't endure the financial responsibility, either for having another child. So are they also men, who are the fathers, are they going to have additional financial responsibilities now as well. I mean, I think you're unleashing chaos in many regards in terms of the state to state patchwork of laws that we're going to see in this new reality are for women in the states who are now going to be subjected to all sorts of scrutiny.

I mean, think about like if you're like a 15-year-old child in a high school, who gets pregnant and wants to have an abortion, because the father is 21 years or years old, is the teacher going to like rat you out if you try to go across the state line and get an abortion because you don't want to be a 15 year old raising a child. There are all sorts of complications that I think women and young girls and men as well and families in general are going to face in this new post Roe reality.

CAMEROTA: Yeah, it's such a good point. This is not just a women's problem. This is a human problem in terms of what the solutions are going to be here.

S.E. Cupp, Nia Malika Henderson and Harry Litman, thank you all very much.

All right. Protesters who are on both sides of the issue are gathered outside of the Supreme Court. Next, we'll speak to the president of the March for Life group who applauds the ruling.

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CAMEROTA: Protesters and supporters gathered outside the Supreme Court following today's ruling overturning Roe vs. Wade. CNN's Whitney Wild has been there all day. So Whitney, what's happening at this hour?

WHITNEY WILD, CNN LAW ENFORCEMENT CORRESPONDENT: Well, people are continuing to streaming here, Alisyn, and at this point, all of the protesters who are in supportive this opinion, all if not most of them, at least, have filtered out. And we've seen very, very few protesters who are supporting this opinion remain in the crowd. Right now this is mostly a crowd of people who are protesting that opinion. Let me give you a live look, because again, people have been streaming in here for hours. This crowd has grown significantly over the past several hours since this opinion came down.

Law enforcement response here continues to be watchful, but not aggressive. We have not seen any police jumping into the crowd, moving people around. We have not seen any arrests. I'm not aware of any arrests and this point within the crowd. There are a couple police officers sprinkled throughout these protesters, but for the most part, they're on the perimeter and monitoring very heavily. And the reason for that Alisyn, of course, is because anytime you have a big group like this, even though at this point, we don't see opposing protesters, so the risk of a big clash is dramatically minimized at this moment.

But the big concern here is that a lone wolf style attack could happen that someone would see an opportunity here, a domestic violent extremist would see an opportunity to have a mass casualty attack. And so that's the big concern here for law enforcement as they watch very carefully. The staffing in Washington, D.C. is ramping up law enforcement-wise, though the staffing in neighboring jurisdictions where some of these justices live is also on heightened alert.

So law enforcement again, very concerned that this could turn into an issue. But now, Alisyn, this is calm, this is peaceful. It's noisy, but it's peaceful. And people are continuing to stream in. We expect that this protest will grow as well another one later tonight. Back to you.

CAMEROTA: Okay. Whitney Wild, thank you for showing us what's going on there at this hour in front of Supreme Court.

Let's discuss this now with pro-life advocate Jeanne Mancini, she's the president of March for Life. Jeanne, thanks so much for being here. So tell us your reaction to today's decision?

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JEANNE MANCINI, PRESIDENT, MARCH FOR LIFE: Right. Well, thanks so much for having me. And so I've been blessed to be the head of the March for Life for 10 years. And I'm just really just thinking about the collective millions of Americans, primarily young people who've peacefully protested every January, hundreds of thousands each year, and have finished at that Supreme Court showing that Roe was not settled law.

And so today, we saw that that is the case and that this question has returned to the people in the states whether it's a state like California or a state like Texas. It has returned to the voters.

CAMEROTA: In terms of public opinion, all of the latest polling, all of the polling, really, for years has shown that Americans do support Roe vs. Wade, the latest one that I'm looking at here from CNN was in May, should the supreme court overturn Roe vs. Wade 66 percent of respondents said no. So it - do you accept that it is out of sync with where the majority of the Americans are?

MANCINI: No. So as for polling, it really depends on how the question is asked. So let's be clear that the decision that went before the Supreme Court that was voted on today was can we enact a limit on abortion after 15 weeks, and until today, that wasn't allowed in the United States.

So the large majority of Americans would limit abortion at the very most of the first three months of pregnancy and that until today has not been the law of the land. It hasn't even been allowed in different states. So what today's decision did was it returned to the States the ability to make, common sense decisions like that.

So let's be clear that the United States is one of only seven countries around the world that allows late term abortion. So we're very much out of mainstream when you consider most of Europe, and most countries around the world.

CAMEROTA: And those late term are for the women's the mother's health. But Jeanne, hold that thought for one second, the Vice President ...

MANCINI: No, no, no, Alisyn ...

CAMEROTA: ... hold on, Jeanne, hold that thought, the Vice President Kamala Harris is speaking about this right now, I'll be right back with you.

KAMALA HARRIS, VICE PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: Think about it, as the right for each person to make intimate decisions about heart and home. Decisions about the right to start a family, including contraception, such as IUDs, the morning after pill, decisions about whether to have a child, including as Sen. Durbin mentioned, threw in vitro fertilization. Decisions to marry the person you love, Obergefell v. Hodges, Loving v. Virginia.

This opinion also says, when you read it, that abortion is not deeply rooted in our nation's history. They offer that in the opinion as a foundation for the decision they render today. In holding that it is not deeply rooted in our history, today's decision on that theory, then calls into question other rights that we thought were settled, such as the right to use birth control, the right to same sex marriage, the right to interracial marriage.

The great aspiration of our nation has been to expand freedom. But the expansion of freedom clearly is not inevitable. It is not something that just happens. Not unless we defend our most fundamental principles. Not unless we elect leaders who stand up for those principles. The strength of our nation has always been that we move forward.

Today, I invite all people to stand together in defense of one of the most fundamental ideals and principles, that for generations, for centuries, I believe we had held dear, which is that fundamental principle about the importance of liberty.

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