WASHINGTON –
The US Supreme Court has terminated the constitutional defense on abortion that had been in place for nearly 50 years with a decision by its conservative majority to repeal Rowe against Wade. Friday’s result is expected to lead to abortion bans in approximately half of the states.
The decision, unthinkable just a few years ago, was the culmination of decades of efforts by opponents of abortion, made possible by the encouraged right-wing side of the court, backed by three appointees to former US President Donald Trump.
The decision came more than a month after a stunning leak of a draft opinion by Judge Samuel Alito, which shows that the court is ready to take this important step.
This puts the court at odds with the majority of Americans who support the preservation of Roe, according to opinion polls.
Alito, in a final statement issued Friday, wrote that Roe and Planned Parenthood v. Casey, a 1992 decision confirming the right to abortion, were wrong on the day the decision was made and should be overturned.
“We believe that Rowe and Casey should be repealed. The constitution does not mention abortion and no such right is implicitly protected by a constitutional provision,” Alito wrote.
The power to regulate abortions lies with the political branches, not the courts, Alito writes.
Alito was joined by Judges Clarence Thomas, Neil Gorsuch, Brett Cavanaugh and Amy Connie Barrett. The last three judges have been appointed by Trump. Thomas first voted to repeal Roe 30 years ago.
Chief Justice John Roberts would stop terminating the right to abortion, noting that he would uphold the Mississippi law at the heart of the case, a ban on abortion after 15 weeks, and say no more.
Judges Stephen Brier, Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan – the court’s reduced liberal wing – disagreed.
“With grief – for this court, but more, for the many millions of American women who have lost basic constitutional protection today – we disagree,” they wrote.
The decision is expected to disproportionately affect women from minorities who already face limited access to health care, according to statistics analyzed by the Associated Press.
Thirteen states, mainly in the South and Midwest, already have book laws banning abortion if Rowe is repealed. Another half a dozen states have almost complete bans or bans after 6 weeks of pregnancy before many women find out they are pregnant.
In approximately half a dozen other states, the fight will be for dormant abortion bans that were passed before Roe’s decision in 1973, or new proposals to sharply reduce the possibility of abortion, according to the Gutmacher Institute, a research group that supports abortion. . rights.
More than 90% of abortions are performed in the first 13 weeks of pregnancy, and more than half are now performed with pills rather than surgery, according to data collected by Guttmacher.
The decision came amid opinion polls showing that a majority of Americans oppose Roe’s repeal and the transfer of the question of whether to allow abortion entirely in the United States. Surveys conducted by the Associated Press’s NORC Center for Public Affairs and others also consistently show that about 1 in 10 Americans want abortion to be illegal in all cases. The majority supports abortion being legal in all or most circumstances, but research shows that many also support restrictions, especially later in pregnancy.
The Biden administration and other abortion advocates have warned that a decision to overturn Rowe will also jeopardize other Supreme Court rulings in favor of gay rights and even potential contraception.
Liberal judges did the same in their disagreement: the majority “eliminates 50 years of constitutional law, which guarantees the freedom and equal status of women.” It violates the basic principle of the rule of law, designed to promote permanence in the law. By doing all this, it endangers other rights, from contraception to same-sex intimacy and marriage. Finally, it undermines the legitimacy of the Court. “
But Alito says his analysis only applies to abortion. “Nothing in this opinion should be understood to call into question precedents that do not affect abortion,” he wrote.
Whatever the intentions of the person who leaked Alito’s draft opinion, the Conservatives were adamant about repealing Rowe and Casey.
In his draft, Alito rejected arguments in favor of maintaining the two decisions, including that many generations of American women had relied in part on the right to abortion to gain economic and political power.
The change in the composition of the court was central to the country’s anti-abortion strategy. Mississippi and its allies made increasingly aggressive arguments as the case progressed, and two high-court abortion advocates retired or died. The state initially argued that its law could be upheld without overturning court abortion precedents.
Then-Gov. Phil Bryant signed the 15-week measure in March 2018, when Judges Anthony Kennedy and Ruth Bader Ginsberg were still members of the majority of five judges, who mainly defended abortion rights.
By the beginning of the summer, Kennedy was retiring, and a few months later he was replaced by Judge Brett Cavanaugh. Mississippi law was blocked in the lower federal courts.
But the state has always been directed to the nation’s highest court. He did not even request a hearing before a three-member panel of the 5th U.S. District Court of Appeal, which ultimately declared the law invalid in December 2019.
By early September 2020, the Supreme Court was ready to hear the state’s appeal.
The court scheduled the case for a private conference of judges on September 29th. But in the weeks that followed, Ginsberg died, and Barrett was quickly nominated and confirmed without a single Democrat vote.
The scene was ready, although it took the court another half year to agree to hear the case.
By the time Mississippi filed his main written argument in court over the summer, the meaning of his argument had changed and he was now calling for a complete rejection of Roe and Casey.
The first sign that the court may be receptive to the abolition of the constitutional right to abortion came in late summer, when judges split 5-4, allowing Texas to ban the procedure for about six weeks before some women even found out that they are pregnant. This dispute turned to the unique structure of the law, including its application by private citizens rather than civil servants, and how it can be challenged in court.
However, Judge Sonia Sotomayor noted in ardent disagreement for the three liberal judges that their conservative colleagues had refused to block an “apparently unconstitutional law” that “ignores almost 50 years of federal precedent.” Roberts was also among the dissidents.
Then in December, after hearing further arguments on whether to block Texas law, known as SB 8, the court again refused to do so, also by 5-4 votes. “The clear purpose and actual effect of SB 8 is to overturn the rulings of this court,” Roberts wrote in partial disagreement.
In their Senate hearings, Trump’s three high-ranking officials carefully circumvented questions about how they would vote in any case, including abortion.
But even when Democrats and proponents of abortion rights predicted that Cavanaugh and Gorsuch would vote to change abortion rights if confirmed, the two left at least one Republican senator with a different impression. Sen. Susan Collins of Maine predicts that Gorsuch and Cavanaugh will not support the cancellation of abortion cases, based on personal conversations she had with them when they were nominated for the Supreme Court.
Barrett was perhaps the most outspoken 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 teaches law, and signed an ad in a newspaper opposing “Abortion on demand” and protection of the “right to life from fertilization to natural death”. She promised to set aside her personal views when deciding cases.
Trump, meanwhile, predicts as a candidate that whoever he nominates in court will vote “automatically” to oust Rowe.
Add Comment