The Supreme Court overturned Ro Wade; States can ban abortion

The Supreme Court completed the constitutional protection of abortion, in place for nearly 50 years, with the decision of its conservative majority to strike it down against Ro Wade. Friday’s result is expected to lead to abortion bans in about half of the states.

The decision, unthinkable a few years ago, was the culmination of a decade-long effort by abortion opponents, made possible by a bold right-wing court backed by three nominees for former President Donald Trump.

The ruling came more than a month after Judge Samuel Alito shockingly leaked the draft conclusion, indicating that the court was ready to take this important step.

That puts the majority of Americans who supported keeping the roe in opposition to the courtroom, according to opinion polls.

Alito, in a final statement released on Friday, wrote that the deer and planned paternity against Casey, a 1992 ruling upholding the right to abortion, were wrong on the day they were decided and should have been rescinded.

The power to regulate abortion belongs to the political powers and not to the courts, wrote Alito.

Alito was joined by judges Clarence Thomas, Neil Gorsuch, Brett Cavanaugh and Amy Connie Barrett. The last three judges were appointed by Trump. Thomas first voted to reject Roy 30 years ago.

Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts has not ruled out ending abortion rights, saying he would keep Mississippi law at the center of the case, which prohibits abortion after 15 weeks, and doesn’t say that anymore.

Judges Stephen Breyer, Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan, the narrow side of the liberal wing of the judiciary, disagreed.

According to statistics analyzed by the Associated Press, the decision is expected to disproportionately affect minority women who already have limited access to health care.

Thirteen states, mostly in the South and Midwest, already have book laws that prohibit abortion if deer is abolished. Another half-dozen states have a near-total ban or a ban after 6 weeks of pregnancy until many women find out they are pregnant.

About half a dozen other states will fight for a ban on inactive abortion, which was enacted before Roe decided in 1973 to drastically limit abortions in new proposals, according to the Gutmacher Institute, a research group that supports abortion. rights.

More than 90% of miscarriages occur in the first 13 weeks of pregnancy, and more than half now occur with pills rather than surgery, according to data compiled by Gutmacher.

The decision came amid public opinion polls in which a majority of Americans oppose Roy’s ouster and the issue of full abortion permits in the states. Polls by the Associated Press-NORC Public Affairs Research Center and others also consistently show that 1 in 10 Americans want to make abortion illegal in every case. Most support the legality of abortion in all or most cases, but surveys indicate that many also support restrictions, especially in the later stages of pregnancy.

The Biden administration and other abortion rights advocates have warned that the decision to overthrow Rose would also undermine other Supreme Court decisions in favor of gay rights and potentially contraceptives.

But Alito wrote in his opinion that his analysis referred only to abortion and not to other rights that also derive from the right to privacy, which the Supreme Court considered in the Constitution, although it does not explicitly mention them. Abortion is different, wrote Alito, because of its unique moral issue.

Regardless of the intentions of the man who drafted Alito’s opinions, conservatives were adamant about taking down Roe and Casey.

In her draft, Alito rejected arguments in favor of maintaining two rulings, including that many generations of American women relied in part on abortion rights for economic and political power.

Changing the composition of the court was central to the anti-abortion side’s strategy. Mississippi and its allies made increasingly aggressive arguments as the case progressed, and two prominent abortion rights advocates resigned or died. Initially, the state argued that its law could be applied without overturning judicial precedents for abortion.

Then Government. Phil Bryant signed the 15-week measure in March 2018, when Justices Anthony Kennedy and Ruth Bader Ginsburg were still members of a five-judge majority that broadly advocated abortion rights.

Kennedy retired at the beginning of the summer and was replaced by Judge Brett Cavanaugh a few months later. Mississippi law has been blocked in the lower federal courts.

But the state has always appealed to the highest court in the country. He didn’t even request a hearing before three judges of the US Court of Appeals for the US 5th District, who finally declared the law invalid in December 2019.

In early September 2020, the Supreme Court was set to hear the state’s appeal.

The court has scheduled the hearing of the case at a personal conference of judges on September 29. But in the meantime, Ginsburg died and Barrett was quickly nominated and confirmed without a single vote from the Democrats.

The phase has already begun, although it took another half a year for the court to agree to hear the case.

By the time Mississippi filed its main written argument in court over the summer, its argument had changed and now required a major overhaul from Roy and Casey.

The first sign that the court might succeed in withdrawing the constitutional right to abortion came late in the summer, when judges allowed 5-4 Texas procedure permits to enforce the ban for about six weeks before some women refused. . they are pregnant This dispute led to the unique structure of the law, including its application by private citizens rather than government officials and how it can be appealed to the courts.

But Justice Sonia Sotomayor, in a fierce dispute over three liberal governments, said her conservative colleagues had refused to block a “blatantly unconstitutional law” that “violates federal precedent for nearly 50 years”. Roberts was among the opponents.

Then, in December, after hearing additional arguments about blocking the Texas law known as SB 8, the court again declined to do so, also by 5 to 4 votes. “The clear purpose and real effect of SB 8 was to reverse the decisions of this court,” Roberts wrote in a partial dissent.

During Senate hearings, Trump’s three Supreme Courts handpick questions about how they would vote on any case, including abortion.

While Democrats and abortion rights advocates predicted that Cavanaugh and Gorsucci would vote to abolish abortion rights if confirmed, both left at least one Republican senator with a different impression. Senator Susan Collins from Maine predicted that Gorsuch and Cavanaugh would not support repeal of abortion based on personal conversations with them when they were nominated to the Supreme Court.

Barrett was the biggest opponent of abortion in his time as a law professor before becoming a federal judge in 2017. He was a member of anti-abortion groups at the University of Notre Dame, where he taught law and signed a newspaper ad. He opposes “a la carte abortion” and defends “the right to life from fertilization to natural death.” He promised not to deviate from his personal opinions when considering the cases.

Meanwhile, Trump, as a candidate, predicted that whoever the court candidate would “automatically” vote for Rose’s resignation.