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Based on what we knew about Roberts in 2005, it should have been crystal clear he'd vote to overturn Roe. His judicial views on abortion were unknown, but the guy was a pretty solid Rehnquist clerk, devout church-going Roman Catholic (sure, there are some weekly mass attending white Catholics who support abortion, but its pretty rare) and his wife was a card-carrying member of a pro-life organization, for crying out loud! John Roberts 2020 is significantly to the LEFT of John Roberts 2005 (and sadly, seems to be moving increasingly leftward every day), so that's why I say "iffy" at this point. As nickcarraway notes, Roberts tends to go traitor on some BIG "landmark" cases where the liberals have the votes to establish some NEW socialist "precedent" (Roberts wants to be on the "winning" side and assign or write the opinion himself... I think its vanity), but he still votes mostly conservative when the outcome of the case won't change things. He is nowhere near as "liberal" as many FReepers seem to see him as, and he is not on the level of Souter or Stevens. So I could see Roberts staying in the minority for a decision affirming Roe still stands. He did so in a similar case 5-4 where Gorsuch joined the commie side.

Gorsuch's background was the opposite. He is simply NOT a social conservative. Period. His insane SJW feminazi pastor has rotted that guy's brain, much the same way that Obama's race-based social justice politics were influenced by Jermimah "God Damn America" Wright's beliefs, no matter how much Obama argued otherwise. Gorsuch won't vote to overturn Roe because he AGREES with basic gist of it. Again, he is a Sandra Day O'Connor type justice and WILL vote to overturn some bad left-wing precedents, and will probably vote the way we want 70-80% of the time. But you can forget about Gorsuch being on "our side" on issues like abortion or "rights" for homos & transgender freaks.

Kavanaugh... certainly not in the same ballpark as Gorsuch on social issues. He's voted better than Gorsuch OR Roberts on a number of notable cases. But I am confident he is a "no" vote on overturning Roe for an entirely different reason: he is a "Don't rock the boat" type status quo conservative, who said over and over again during his confirmation hearings that is EXTREMELY hesitant to overturn ANY Supreme Court decision that has been entrenched in society for decades, even if he personally dislikes it and wouldn't have established that "right" in the first place. He flat out SAID he wouldn't overturn Roe. The RINO from Maine believed him and voted to confirm him for that exact reason. Kav probably thinks Roe was a bad precedent but overturning it at THIS time would damage the judiciary's credibility and reduce them to flip-flopping for purely partisan reasons and would result in chaos in American culture and law if it were suddenly and abruptly struck down completely, and blah blah blah. He'd probably write some useless "concurrence' saying Roe is bad law but he's not overturning it because it needs to be "corrected" by lawmakers, and blah blah blah... some lofty puff piece that will accomplish jack squat for our side, but it will SOUND like a very scholarly "conservative" argument.

The decision on whether to overturn Casey (which has been the controlling precedent for three decades now) won’t be about the judges’ views about abortion, but about their views about intra-court stare decisis. There are at least six Justices on SCOTUS who believe thst Roe and Casey were wrongly decided (maybe Kagan would be a seventh, but you’d have to get her drunk before she’d admit it); the question is whether they would have the stones to do something about it. The easy thing would be not to tackle Casey head on (and instead nibble around the edges of what constitutes an “undue burden”), and that’s exactly what the Court has done for decades, even after Kavanaugh replaced Kennedy. But I think that we finally have the numbers to get this done.

One good thing about Gorsuch is that he doesn’t give a rip about what a prior court decided—if he thinks that the precedent was incitrect, out it goes. Thomas is the same, but on steroids. Alito generally is more traditionalist and cautious but he would overturn Casey in a heartbeat. And while Barrett is new to the judicial game, everything points to her being an originalist in the Scalia mold, and she won’t give a rat’s behind about what Kennedy, O’Connor and Souter wrote in 1989; she’ll say nicer things than Scalia did when she slices up a precedent, but she won’t hesitate to do so if she believes that the precedent was wrong.

So I think that we have four sure votes to overturn Casey. Those are also the four votes that will grant certiorari to a case about a law that could not be upheld without overturning Casey. I am not quite as certain about Kavanaugh, since he seems to prefer to seek compromises and avoid having to make a big decision when a little one could do, but if he is asked the question point-blank I think that he will rule that laws that burden the ability to get an abortion do not violate the Constitution.

At the justices-only conference at which justices announcechow they will vote on a case, the Chief Justice votes last, after the other eight have said how they will vote. As we know, Roberts cares more about “the Court as an institution” than about the Constitution itself, and nornally he would be loath to overturn a precedent such as Roe-cum-Casey. But once he hears that there are five votes to strike down Casey and its undue burden test, I think that it is precisely his interest in preserving tge Court’s “reputation” (as he sees it) that will lead him to vote to overturn Casey as well. First of all, if a precedent is going to be struck down, he would prefer for it to ve done 6-3 rather than by the dreaded 5-4 that he sees as a sin of conflict within the Court. But even more importantly, Roberts would want to be on the winning side of that vote so that he, not Clarence Thomas, gets to assign the author of the Opinion of the Court. Roberts’s greatest fear is for Thomas to write an Opinion of the Court that the media will depict as unnecssarily “divisive” and that might go further than required to decide the particular case at hand (perhaps by declaring intra-Court stare decisis to be illegitimate abd unconstitutional, which hapoens to be my humble opinion), and were Thomas in the majority and Roberts in the minority ithere would be no way for Roberts to stop that.

So I think that Roberts will be the sixth vote to overturn Casey, despite his preference for the precedent to remain in the books but get watered down some more, largely to keep Thomas from writing a more expansive opinion; this would be ironic because, in Roe v. Wade, Chief Justice Burger provided the seventh vote to strike down the Texas law that prohibited abortion (despite his disagreement with the whole right-to-privacy argument) solely because he wanted to avoid ultra-Leftist Justice Douglas writing the most expansive opinion possible. (Of course, Burger assigned the opinion to the “moderate” Justice Blackmun, who proceded to write an opinion so broad, creating such an absolute right to abortion, that it must have made Douglas blush.) And Roberts voting with the majority would not be as disingenuous as what Burger did, since at least Roberts does believe that Casey was wrongly decided and that states should be alliowed to prohibit abortion.

Once Roberts votes with the majority, he may decide to write the opinion himself, with a long explanation of why the need for judicial certainty dictated that such particular precedent, with its unmanageable test that depended on the eye of the beholder, be struck down, and that the issue that has long consumed American politics be returned fully to the political realm where it belongs. Or he might assign the opinion to Barrett, knowing that her language would be less harsh abd more limited than Thomas’s when striking down Casey and figuring that it would be better for his “legacy” if (i) a woman wrote the opinion and (ii) he won’t be remembered as “the judge tha struck down Roe v. Wade.”

So I think that it’s going to happen within the next couple of years. I think that January would be a good time for a state to pass a “heartbeat” abortion
ban without an exception for the “health of the mother.”