August 2, 2022

On June 24, 2022, the US Supreme Court has overturned its 49-year-old landmark Roe v. Wade decision that legalized abortion throughout the US, upholding a Mississippi law banning the procedure after 15 weeks of pregnancy – and leaving the issue up to each of the 50 states.

The court’s decision doesn’t criminalize abortion at the federal level but returns jurisdiction to individual states. About half the states have laws restricting or banning abortion, and trigger laws that prohibit the procedure. New legislation surrounding the issue is also inevitable.

In the majority opinion in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health, issued Friday morning, Justice Samuel Alito wrote, “It is time to heed the Constitution and return the issue of abortion to the people’s elected representatives.” The court’s conservative majority said the Roe decision was “egregiously wrong from the start” in recognizing a constitutional right to abortion and said that error had been perpetuated by the court in the decades since.

The court voted 6-3 to side with Mississippi in the Dobbs case, but 5-4 on the broader question of whether to overrule Roe v. Wade.

Alito was joined by fellow conservative Justices Clarence Thomas, Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett. Chief Justice John Roberts, also a conservative, filed an opinion concurring in the judgment, meaning he agreed the Mississippi law should be upheld, but he didn’t support eliminating the right to an abortion all together.

“Both the Court’s opinion and the dissent display a relentless freedom from doubt on the legal issue that I cannot share,” Roberts wrote. He added that the court should “adhere closely to principles of judicial restraint here, where the broader path the Court chooses entails repudiating a constitutional right we have not only previously recognized, but also expressly reaffirmed.”

Liberal Justices Elena Kagan, Sonia Sotomayor and Stephen Breyer dissented and called out the majority for a “cavalier approach to overturning this Court’s precedents.”

“Whatever the exact scope of the coming laws, one result of today’s decision is certain: the curtailment of women’s rights, and of their status as free and equal citizens,” wrote the dissenting justices.

Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health looked at the Gestational Age Act, a 2018 Mississippi law banning most abortions after the first 15 weeks of pregnancy, much earlier than the precedent established by Roe v. Wade and subsequent cases.
It makes exceptions for medical emergency or severe fetal abnormality but not for pregnancies resulting from rape or incest.

The Supreme Court’s decision on abortion has raised concern that the court could revisit other decisions in the future, including on contraception and same-sex marriage.
In a concurring opinion, Thomas wrote that the high court should do away with the doctrine of “substantive due process,” specifically calling out three cases to reconsider: Griswold v. Connecticut, Lawrence v. Texas, and Obergefell v. Hodges. These earlier rulings established the right to contraception, the right for adults to engage in consensual same-sex intimacy and the right to same-sex marriage.

Source: CNET