WASHINGTON (AP) – The Supreme Court has put an end to constitutional protections for abortion that had been in place for nearly 50 years in a decision by its Conservative majority to overturn Roe against Wade. Friday’s result is expected to lead to a ban on abortion in about 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 a emboldened right-wing side of the court that has been bolstered by three President Donald Trump appointees.
The verdict came more than a month after the impressive leak of a draft opinion by Judge Samuel Alito indicating that the court was willing to take this momentous step.
It puts the court at odds with most Americans who were in favor of preserving Roe, according to opinion polls.
Alito, in the final opinion issued Friday, wrote that Roe and Planned Parenthood v. Casey, the 1992 decision reaffirming the right to abortion, they were wrong on the day they were decided and had to be overturned.
“Therefore, we consider that the Constitution does not confer the right to abortion. Roe and Casey must be overturned and the authority to regulate abortion must be returned to the people and their elected representatives, “Alito wrote.
The authority to regulate abortion rests with the political branches, not the courts, Alito wrote.
Alito was joined by Judges Clarence Thomas, Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett. The last three judges are appointed by Trump. Thomas first voted to annul Roe 30 years ago.
Chief Justice John Roberts would have stopped before ending the right to abortion, noting that he would have kept Mississippi law at the center of the case, a ban on abortion after 15 weeks, and no I would have said more.
Judges Stephen Breyer, Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan, the court’s diminished liberal wing, were in dissent.
“With pain, for this Court, but more so, for the many millions of American women who today have lost fundamental constitutional protection, we disagree,” they wrote.
According to statistics analyzed by The Associated Press, the ruling is expected to disproportionately affect minority women who already face limited access to health care.
The only Mississippi abortion clinic in the center of the case continued to see patients Friday. Outside, the men used a megabyte to tell the people at the clinic that they would burn in hell. Clinic escorts wearing colorful vests used large stereo speakers to detonate Tom Petty’s “I Won’t Back Down” against protesters.
Mississippi is one of 13 states, mostly in the south and midwest, that already have books on laws banning abortion in case Roe is overruled. Another half a dozen states have bans or near-total bans after 6 weeks of pregnancy, before many women know they are pregnant.
In about half a dozen other states, the fight will be for bans on latent abortion that were enacted before Roe decided in 1973 or new proposals to drastically limit when abortions can be performed, according to the Guttmacher Institute, a research group that supports abortion. rights.
More than 90 percent of abortions occur in the first 13 weeks of pregnancy, and more than half are now done with pills, not surgery, according to data compiled by Guttmacher.
The decision came in the context of public opinion polls that find that most Americans are opposed to overturning Roe and handing over the question of whether abortion is allowed completely in the states. Surveys conducted by The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research and others have also consistently shown that approximately 1 in 10 Americans wants abortion to be illegal in all cases. Most are in favor of abortion being legal in all or most circumstances, but polls indicate many also support the restrictions, especially later in pregnancy.
The Biden administration and other advocates for abortion rights have warned that a decision overturning Roe would also threaten other high court decisions in favor of gay rights and even, potentially, contraception.
Liberal judges made the same point in their joint dissent: the majority “eliminates a 50-year constitutional right that safeguards women’s freedom and equality. It violates a basic principle of the rule of law, designed to promote the constancy of the law. By doing all this, it endangers other rights, from contraception to intimacy and same-sex marriage. And, finally, it undermines the legitimacy of the Court ”.
And Judge Clarence Thomas, the member of the court most open to rejecting previous decisions, wrote a separate opinion in which he explicitly asked his colleagues to put on the table cases of same-sex marriage, gay sex and even contraceptions of the Supreme Court.
But Alito said his analysis only addresses abortion. “Nothing in this opinion should be understood to call into question precedents that do not relate to abortion,” he wrote.
Whatever the intentions of the person who leaked Alito’s draft opinion, the Conservatives stood firm in toppling Roe and Casey.
In her view, Alito dismissed arguments in favor of retaining both decisions, including that several generations of American women have relied in part on the right to abortion to gain economic and political power.
Changing the composition of the court has been central to the strategy of the anti-abortion side, as dissenters strongly pointed out. “The Court reverses the course today for one reason and only one: because the composition of this Court has changed,” the Liberal judges wrote.
Mississippi and its allies presented increasingly aggressive arguments as the case unfolded, and two high-profile abortion rights advocates withdrew or died. The state initially argued that its law could be maintained without overturning the court’s abortion precedents.
Then the governor. Phil Bryant signed the 15-week measure into law in March 2018, when Judges Anthony Kennedy and Ruth Bader Ginsburg were still members of a five-judge majority that primarily protects abortion rights.
By early summer, Kennedy had retired and was replaced by Judge Brett Kavanaugh a few months later. Mississippi law was blocked in lower federal courts.
But the state always went to the highest court in the nation. He did not even ask for a hearing before a three-judge tribunal of the U.S. 5th Circuit Court of Appeals, which finally declared the law invalid in December 2019.
In early September 2020, the Supreme Court was willing to consider the state’s appeal.
The court scheduled consideration of the case at the judges’ private conference on Sept. 29. But in the following weeks, Ginsburg died and Barrett was quickly appointed and confirmed without a single Democratic vote.
The scenario was now ready, although the court took another half a year to accept the case.
When Mississippi filed its main written argument in court in the summer, the focus of its argument had changed and it was now seeking the general annulment of Roe and Casey.
The first sign that the court might be receptive to removing the constitutional right to abortion came in late summer, when judges split 5-4 to allow Texas to enforce the ban on the procedure in about six weeks. before some women find out they are pregnant. This dispute revolved around the unique structure of the law, including its application by private citizens rather than state officials, and how it can be challenged in the courts.
But Judge Sonia Sotomayor noted in a scathing dissent for the three Liberal judges that her Conservative colleagues refused to block “a blatantly unconstitutional law” that “almost 50 years of federal precedent is missing.” Roberts was also among the dissidents.
Then, in December, after hearing additional arguments about whether to block Texas law known as SB 8, the court again refused to do so, also by a 5-4 vote. “The clear purpose and real effect of SB 8 has been to overturn the judgments of this Court,” Roberts wrote, in a partial dissent.
In their Senate hearings, Trump’s three high-court elections carefully avoided questions about how they would vote in any case, including on abortion.
But while Democrats and abortion rights advocates predicted that Kavanaugh and Gorsuch would vote to revoke abortion rights if confirmed, the two left at least one Republican senator with a different impression. Sen. Susan Collins of Maine predicted that Gorsuch and Kavanaugh would not support annulling abortion cases, based on private conversations she held with them when they were Supreme Court candidates.
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 he taught law, and signed an advertisement in the newspaper. to oppose “abortion on demand” and to defend “the right to life from fertilization to natural death.” He promised to set aside his personal views when judging cases.
Trump, for his part, had predicted as a candidate that whoever nominated him to court would vote “automatically” to overturn Roe.