North Carolina judges, the fall election and reproductive freedom • NC Newsline

As we head toward Election Day 2024, with high-profile presidential and congressional elections just around the corner, many of us are talking about how these elections will affect abortion access in North Carolina and across the country. Even if we elect a pro-abortion White House, the specter remains of nine unelected justices appointed for life to the highest court in the land, where they will play an outsized role in abortion access. In fact, getting six anti-abortion justices to form a two-thirds majority on the U.S. Supreme Court was key for anti-abortion groups to push through their unpopular and regressive agenda.

Because presidents appoint U.S. Supreme Court justices and the U.S. Senate confirms them, we have a way to lend our voice, albeit indirectly, to this branch of the federal government. Voters should remember that there are also state judges who make rulings that are just as consequential for the residents of our state and often impact our daily lives. In North Carolina, these judges are not appointed—we elect them directly.

Because judges are part of our political system and serve as the third branch in our system of checks and balances, they are political actors, but not necessarily in the same way as legislators or governors. Judges certainly have their own personal ideologies, and in North Carolina are associated with a political party on the ballot, but their role is to act as a check on any executive and legislative overreach that denies us our rights promised in documents such as the federal and state constitutions, and to interpret our laws. The role of judges is not to promote any kind of personal ideology, but to examine the laws and facts before them to determine whether they unreasonably restrict the rights and freedoms set forth in our founding documents.

This is especially true in state supreme courts. While we would never expect justices to be free of personal political beliefs, we can and should expect them to put politics aside when deciding cases that affect our most basic rights and freedoms. At a time of hyperpolarization in our electoral politics, justices should put themselves above political dispute.

A good example of this is the Kansas Supreme Court. While Kansas voters were the first to vote on a ballot initiative to protect abortion rights after the 2022 ballot, Dobbs Decision that was repealed Roe v. WadeThe Kansas legislature is still a reliably anti-abortion institution. Despite the supposedly “red” nature of state government, Kansas Supreme Court justices ruled in 2019 that the Kansas State Constitution protects the right to abortion for state residents, a ruling they reaffirmed earlier this summer.

In contrast, earlier this year, the highly politicized Florida Supreme Court overturned its own ruling on state protections of abortion access. In a 1980 referendum, Florida voters chose to add the right to privacy and freedom from government interference in personal decisions to their state's constitution. A 1989 Florida Supreme Court ruling affirmed that this means the state constitution protects the right to abortion, and any abortion restrictions passed by the state legislature must be weighed against that right.

This was the norm in Florida for 30 years. That changed in 2019 with the rise to power of an ultra-conservative governor who sought to gain national prominence within a political party that represented an increasingly extreme anti-abortion agenda. That governor appointed five of the seven current state Supreme Court justices while also signing a six-week ban that would have been deemed unconstitutional under the original court ruling. Last spring, the same state Supreme Court overturned the court's 1989 ruling. Abortion access in Florida was decimated not because of a constitutional amendment but because of a change in the judiciary.

Who serves on the court is important not for political reasons, but for reasons of legal philosophy. We need and demand judges who put their political views behind them when they put on their judicial robes to make decisions that have an impact on all Residents of North Carolina.

In North Carolina, we elect the judges for our state's Supreme Court, Court of Appeals, Superior Courts, and District Courts. While the issue of abortion has not often been addressed directly in our state courts in North Carolina, the loss of federal protections makes it more likely that it will happen here. State courts across the country are addressing the full range of reproductive health care access, and there is no reason to believe North Carolina will be an exception.

It is not only our state's Supreme Court that is important when it comes to protecting our rights. The lower courts often have a more direct impact on us and may be the places where more of us interact with judges. These courts hear criminal and civil cases, small claims suits, and family law cases. It is said that in our state courts we can have our best days, such as getting married in front of a judge, and our worst days, such as a difficult child custody hearing.

With the increasing criminalization of abortion, pregnancy outcomes, and reproductive health care by hostile legislators, cases involving self-performed abortions, miscarriages, stillbirths, assisting minors in obtaining abortions, interactions with anti-abortion activists in clinics, and even providing information about abortion care can and will come before our state's courts. These types of cases have occurred across the country in the wake of Dobbsand even before the fall roe.

While elected officials who oppose abortion are becoming more and more bold, there are also more and more attempts by those officials to use their office at every level to push an anti-abortion agenda. Late last year, for example, we saw a North Carolina Court of Appeals ruling in which some judges attempted to insert their belief that life begins at conception into a ruling, even though the case had nothing to do with reproductive rights (the case concerned parental custody). That ruling was later overturned, but we in the reproductive justice movement know that legal recognition of the “personhood” of fertilized eggs at the time of conception is the ultimate goal of anti-abortion extremists, because that recognition would ban all abortion everywhere and many types of contraception. While that specific ruling was overturned, we know that we cannot ignore these seemingly minor attempts to insert personal beliefs into legal precedent.

Again, judges have personal beliefs that don't translate into party political agendas. Your election planning must include your voting decision in judicial elections. Too often, voters check off the most important candidates and leave candidates lower on the ballot – like judges – blank. In less important elections, where the winner may have a few hundred more votes than his opponent(s), every vote counts, and it all depends on who sits on the bench.

Common Cause NC, Emancipate NC, North Carolina for the People, and Pro-Choice North Carolina have created a website to help you better understand the importance of judicial elections and the need for a fair and independent judiciary. The content of the website is constantly evolving and you can add to it! You can find the website here: www.whyjudgesmatternc.com