Washington, June 25 (BNA): The US Supreme Court has struck down constitutional protections for abortion, a fundamental and profoundly personal change to Americans’ lives nearly half a century later under Roe v. Wade.
The court’s overturning of the landmark court ruling is likely to ban abortion in nearly half of the states, according to the Associated Press.
The ruling, which would have been unimaginable just a few years ago, was the culmination of decades of efforts by abortion opponents, made possible thanks to the right side of the court that had been immunized by three appointees from former President Donald Trump.
Both sides expected the fight over abortion to continue in state capitals, Washington, and at the polls. Judge Clarence Thomas, part of the majority on Friday, urged colleagues to overturn other Supreme Court rulings protecting same-sex marriage and contraceptive use.
Pregnant women considering an abortion were already dealing with a near-total ban in Oklahoma and a ban after nearly six weeks in Texas. Clinics in at least eight other states — Alabama, Arizona, Arkansas, Kentucky, Missouri, South Dakota, Wisconsin and West Virginia — have stopped performing abortions after Friday’s decision.
In Ohio, the ban on most abortions in the first detectable fetal heartbeat became legal when a federal judge overturned an injunction that had kept the procedure suspended for nearly three years. Utah law was enforced by ruling, and entered into force with narrow exceptions.
Abortion opponents welcomed the ruling, but abortion rights proponents, including President Joe Biden, have expressed discontent and vowed to fight for the rights back.
Protests erupted in the evening in a number of cities, including thousands demonstrating against the decision outside the fortified Supreme Court. Thousands more chanted, “We will rise!” In Washington Square, New York.
“It’s a sad day for the court and for the country,” Biden said at the White House. He urged voters to make it a crucial issue in the November elections, declaring that “this decision should not be the last word.”
Outside the White House, Ansley Cole, a college student from Atlanta, said she was “scared because what’s coming next? … The next election cycle is going to be brutal, like it’s terrifying. And if they’re going to do this, again, then what?”
Marjorie Danenfelser, president of SBA Pro-Life America, agreed on the political risks.
“We are prepared to continue the offensive for life in every one of those legislatures, in every government building and in the White House,” Danenfelser said in a statement.
Trump praised the ruling, telling Fox News it “would work for everyone.”
The decision is expected to disproportionately affect minority women who already face limited access to health care, according to statistics analyzed by the Associated Press.
It also puts the court at odds with the majority of Americans who favored keeping Roe, according to polls.
Surveys by the Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research and others have shown that the majority are in favor of making abortion legal in all or most circumstances. But many also support restrictions, especially later in pregnancy. Surveys consistently show that about 1 in 10 Americans want abortion to be illegal in all cases.
The ruling came more than a month after the stunning leak of Judge Samuel Alito’s draft opinion indicating that the court was ready to take this important step.
Alito wrote, in Friday’s final opinion, that Roe and Planned Parenthood’s decision against Casey, the 1992 decision that reaffirmed the right to abortion, was wrong and should be overturned.
Therefore, we see that the Constitution does not grant the right to abortion. Roe and Casey must be abolished, and the power to regulate abortion must be returned to the people and their elected representatives,” Alito wrote, in an opinion very similar to the leaked draft.
Joining Alito Thomas and Judges Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Connie Barrett. The last three judges appointed by Trump. Thomas first voted to overturn the Roe ruling 30 years ago.
Four judges had left Roe and Casey in their place.
The vote was 6-3 in support of a Mississippi law banning most abortions after 15 weeks, but Chief Justice John Roberts did not join his conservative colleagues at Roe’s heart. He wrote that there was no need to overturn the rule’s broad precedent in favor of Mississippi.
Justices Stephen Breyer, Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan – the court’s dwindling liberal wing – were in dissent.
“With sorrow — for this court, but more so, for the millions of American women who today have lost basic constitutional protections — we dissent,” they wrote, warning that opponents of abortion can now demand a nationwide ban “from the moment of pregnancy and without exceptions in the case of rape or incest. kinship”.
Attorney General Merrick Garland said in a statement that the Department of Justice will protect abortion providers and those seeking abortions in states where the law is legal and “work with other arms of the federal government seeking to use their legal powers to protect and maintain access to reproductive care.”
In particular, Garland said the Federal Food and Drug Administration has approved the use of Mifepristone in medical abortions.
More than 90% of abortions occur in the first 13 weeks of pregnancy, and more than half are now done using the pill, not surgery, according to the Guttmacher Institute, a research group that supports abortion rights.
The only abortion clinic in Mississippi, which was the focus of Friday’s case, continued to receive patients Friday. Outside, the men used the trumpet to tell the people inside that they would burn in Hell. Clinic attendants in colorful jackets used large loudspeakers to blast Tom Petty’s “I Won’t Back Down” at the protesters.
Mississippi, Alabama, Kentucky, and Missouri are among the 13 states, mostly in the South and Midwest, that already have laws on the books to ban abortion if Roe is abolished. Another half a dozen states have bans or almost complete bans after 6 weeks of pregnancy, before many women even know they are pregnant.
In nearly six other states, including West Virginia and Wisconsin, the battle will be over the inactive abortion bans enacted before the Roe report in 1973 or new proposals to sharply limit when abortions can be performed, according to Gottmacher.
Outside the fortified Supreme Court, a crowd of mostly women grew to hundreds within hours of the decision. Some shouted, “The Supreme Court is illegitimate,” while others, wearing red T-shirts with “Voices of the Pro-Life Generation,” celebrated, danced and thrust their arms in the air.
The Biden administration and other abortion rights advocates have warned that the decision to overturn Roe would also threaten other Supreme Court decisions in favor of gay rights and even potential contraception.
The liberal justices made the same point in their joint opposition: The majority “repeals a 50-year-old constitutional right that protects women’s freedom and equal status. It violates a fundamental principle of the rule of law, designed to promote consistency in law. In doing so, it is putting other rights at risk, from preventing Pregnancy leads to same-sex intimacy and marriage. Finally, it undermines the legitimacy of the court.”
Thomas, the court’s most open member of retracting previous decisions, wrote a separate opinion in which he openly called on his colleagues to put the Supreme Court’s cases of same-sex marriage and contraception cases on the table.
But Alito emphasized that his analysis deals only with abortion. “Nothing in this view should be taken to cast doubt on non-abortion antecedents,” he wrote.
Whatever the intentions of the person who leaked Alito’s draft opinion, conservatives have stuck to Roe and Casey’s heart.
In his view, Alito rejected the arguments in favor of retaining both resolutions, including that multiple generations of American women had relied in part on the right to abortion for economic and political power.
Changing the court’s makeup was pivotal to the anti-abortion side’s strategy, as dissidents astutely noted. The liberal justices wrote: “The Court has changed course today for one reason and one reason only: because the composition of this Court has changed.”
Mississippi and its allies made increasingly aggressive arguments as the issue developed, and two abortion rights advocates retired or retired. The state initially argued that its law could be upheld without overturning abortion precedents in court.
Justice Anthony Kennedy retired shortly after the Mississippi law took effect in 2018 and Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg died in September 2020. Both were members of a five-judge majority that primarily protected abortion rights.
In Senate hearings, Trump’s three Supreme Court selection carefully sidestepped questions about how they would vote on any issue, including abortion.