Biden nominates abortion rights lawyer in U.S. Supreme Court case to federal judgeship
Reuters
July 29 (Reuters) - President Joe Biden on Friday nominated a lawyer who represented the Mississippi clinic at the heart of the U.S. Supreme Court's decision to overturn its landmark 1973 Roe v. Wade abortion rights decision to become a federal appeals court judge.
Biden's latest slate of nine new judicial nominees included Julie Rikelman, an abortion rights lawyer with the Center for Reproductive Rights whom the president picked to serve on the Boston-based 1st U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.
The nomination, which Republicans are likely to oppose in the narrowly Democratic-controlled Senate, came a month after the conservative-majority Supreme Court overturned Roe, which for nearly five decades had guaranteed women nationally a constitutional right to obtain abortions.
Rikelman had argued against such a ruling in representing the Jackson Women's Health Organization - Mississippi's only abortion clinic - in challenging a Republican-backed law that banned abortion after 15 weeks of pregnancy.