The is Supreme court The constitutional protections for abortion that had been in place for nearly 50 years were ended by a decision of the conservative majority to repeal Raw vs. Wade. Friday’s result is expected to lead to abortion bans in nearly half of the states.
The decision, which would have been unimaginable only a few years ago, was the culmination of decades of efforts by abortion opponents, made possible by the right side of the court immunized by three former president appointees. Donald Trump.
The verdict came more than a month after the astonishing leak of an opinion draft before Judge Samuel Alito Noting that the court was ready to take this important step.
That puts the court at odds with the majority of Americans who favored keeping Roe, according to polls.
Alito wrote, in the final opinion released Friday, that Ru and Planned Parenthood vs Caseya 1992 decision that reaffirmed the right to abortion, was wrong on the day it was decided and should be overturned.
“We believe that Roe and Casey should be abolished,” Alito wrote. “The Constitution makes no reference to abortion, and no such right is implicitly protected by any constitutional provision.”
Alito wrote that the power to regulate abortion rests with the political branches, not the courts.
Alito was joined by judges Clarence Thomas, Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Connie Barrett. The last three judges were appointed by Trump. Thomas first voted to overturn the Roe ruling 30 years ago.
Judges Stephen Breyer, Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan were in dissent
President of the Supreme Court John Roberts He was going to stop ending the right to abortion, noting that he was going to support the Mississippi law at the heart of the issue, banning abortion after 15 weeks, and not saying more than that.
Justices Stephen Breyer, Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan – the court’s dwindling liberal wing – were in dissent.
They wrote, “With sorrow — for this court, but more so, for the many millions of American women who today have lost basic constitutional protections — we are opposed.”
The ruling is expected to disproportionately affect minority women who already face limited access to health care, according to statistics analyzed by The Associated Press.
Thirteen states, mostly in the South and Midwest, already have laws on the books banning 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, the battle will be over the inactive abortion bans enacted before the Roe decision in 1973 or new proposals to sharply reduce abortions, according to the Guttmacher 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 are now done using the pill, not surgery, according to data compiled by Guttmacher.
The decision came on the back of public opinion polls that found a majority of Americans opposed to overturning Roe and handing full abortion over to states. Polls conducted by the Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research and others have also consistently shown that 1 in 10 Americans who want an abortion are illegal in all cases. The majority support legalizing abortion in all or most circumstances, but polls indicate that many also support restrictions, especially later in pregnancy.
The Biden administration Other abortion rights advocates have warned that a decision to overturn the Roe would also threaten other Supreme Court decisions in favor of gay rights and even potential contraception.
But Alito wrote in his draft opinion that his analysis deals only with abortion, not other rights which also stem from the right to privacy which the Supreme Court found implicit, though not directly stated, in the Constitution. Alito writes that abortion is different because of the unique ethical question it poses.
Whatever the intentions of the person who leaked Alito’s draft opinion, conservatives have stuck to Roe and Casey’s heart.
In his draft, Alito rejected 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 composition of the court was central
Changing the composition of the court was central to the strategy of the anti-abortion side. 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.
Then- Gov. Phil Bryant signed the 15-week measure into law in March 2018, when Justices Anthony Kennedy and Ruth Bader Ginsburg were still members of a five-judge majority that primarily protected abortion rights.
By early summer, Kennedy had retired and was replaced by Judge Brett Kavanaugh a few months later. Mississippi law has been outlawed in lower federal courts.
But the state has always turned to the highest court in the country. He did not even request a hearing before a three-judge panel of the Fifth United States Court of Appeals, which ultimately ruled the law invalid in December 2019.
By early September 2020, the Supreme Court was ready to hear the state’s appeal.
The court set the case for consideration at the special conference of judges on September 29. But in the weeks that followed, Ginsburg died and soon Barrett was nominated and confirmed without a single Democratic vote.
The way is now cleared, although it took another half a year for the court to agree to hear the case.
By the time Mississippi presented its main written argument to the court in the summer, the thrust of its argument had changed and it was now calling for Roe and Casey’s ruling to be overturned in whole.
The first indication that the court might be receptive to clearing the constitutional right to abortion came in late summer, when the justices split 5-4 in allowing Texas to impose a ban on the procedure in about six weeks, before some women even knew they were. pregnant. This dispute turned into the unique structure of the law, including its application by private citizens rather than state officials, and how it can be challenged in court.
But Justice Sonia Sotomayor noted in vehement opposition to the three liberal justices that their conservative colleagues refused to block a “blatantly unconstitutional law” that “violates nearly 50 years of federal precedent.” Roberts was also among the dissenters.
Then in December, after hearing additional arguments about whether to block a Texas law known as SB 8, the court again refused to do so, also by 5-4 votes. Roberts wrote, in part dissenting: “The obvious purpose and actual effect of Subsidiary Eight was to invalidate the judgments of this court.”
In Senate hearings, Trump’s three Supreme Court selection carefully sidestepped questions about how they would vote on any issue, including abortion.
But even as Democrats and abortion rights advocates predicted that Kavanaugh and Gorsuch would vote to repeal abortion rights if it was confirmed, the two left at least one Republican senator with a different impression. Senator Susan Collins of Maine predicted that Gorsuch and Kavanaugh would not support the abolition of abortion cases, based on private conversations she had with them when they were Supreme Court nominees.
Barrett was perhaps the most vocal opponent of abortion in her time as a law professor, before becoming a federal judge in 2017. She was a member of anti-abortion groups at the University of Notre Dame, where she taught law, and signed an advertisement in a newspaper opposing “abortion on demand” and defending “the right to Life from fertilization to natural death. She promised to give up her personal opinions when adjudicating cases.
Meanwhile, Trump as a candidate has expected whoever he calls to court will “automatically” vote to veto Roe.
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