Supreme Court tosses Roe v. Wade; local leaders react

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Rhinrbeck residents protest Supreme Court decision on Friday (photo: Roger Rosenbaum, Brand News Team, Inc for Mid-Hudson News)

MID-HUDSON – Reaction to the Supreme Court’s reversal of Roe v. Wade is along political party lines.

Ulster County Executive Patrick Ryan, a Democrat, condemned the ruling calling it “a devastating decision that undercuts women’s freedom, puts lives at risk, and rolls back decades of hard-won progress.” He asked how the country can be free “if the government tries to control women’s bodies? That’s not the country I fought to defend.”

State Senator Elijah Reichlin-Melnick, a Democrat, said the ruling is “reckless” and “declares war on American women.”

Republican State Assemblyman Colin Schmitt said the decision returns the right to states and their duly elected leaders to decide abortion policy.” Calling himself a pro-life legislator, “like the vast majority of New Yorkers, I strongly oppose the state’s radical abortion law that allows late-term abortions up to the moment of birth and allows non-doctors to perform abortions.”

Democratic State Senator Pete Harckham said, “The right-wing majority of the U.S. Supreme Court’s unconscionable decision to overturn Roe v. Wade now returns our country to the cruel, dark ages where women were not legally in control of their own reproductive health.”

Democratic Congressman Sean Patrick Maloney said the decision “means women in America will have fewer rights than their mothers had. Republicans ands their activist judges want to take our nation backwards and rip away not only reproductive freedoms, but also gay marriage and other rights we have fought so hard for as a nation.”

Democratic State Senator Shelley Mayer said the SCOTUS ruling “is absolutely devastating to millions of American women, and completely inconsistent with the views of the majority of women and men in this country.”

Assemblyman Kevin Cahill, a Democrat, said six appointed individuals “decided to remove the right to bodily autonomy for millions of Americans, a 50-year precedent that has allowed women to advance their careers, pursue higher education and begin their families on their own terms.”

The Democratic caucus of the Westchester County Board of Legislators issued the following statement: “No matter what the Supreme Court says, no decision is more fundamental to a woman’s liberty than the decision to become a mother, and that includes the agonizing decision whether or not to carry a pregnancy to full term. It impacts every subsequent facet of a women’s life. It is a decision a woman has a fundamental right to make for herself.”

 

 

State Attorney General Letitia James, a Democrat, said the ruling is a “vicious, dangerous, and deliberate attack on our most basic freedom as humans. Every single person in this country should have the right to make their own decisions about their own bodies.”




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