Supreme Court Overturns Roe v Ward, Takes a Fundamental Right Away From Women
Here's what happens next (theguardian.com)With Roe Overturned, How State Abortion Laws Are Changing (nytimes.com)
The Supreme Court ruled Friday that Americans no longer have a constitutional right to abortion, a watershed decision that overturned Roe v. Wade and erased reproductive rights in place for nearly five decades.
In the court’s most closely watched and controversial case in years, a majority of the justices held that the right to end a pregnancy was not found in the text of the Constitution nor the nation’s history.
Associate Justice Samuel Alito wrote the opinion for a 6-3 majority.
The decision instantly shifts the focus of one of the nation’s most divisive issues to state capitals: Republican lawmakers are set to ban abortion in about half the states while Democratic-led states are likely to reinforce protections for the procedure. Access to abortion, in other words, will depend almost entirely on where a person lives.
The decision, which echoed a leaked draft opinion published by Politico in early May, will result in a starkly divided country in which abortion is severely restricted or forbidden in many red states but remains freely available in most blue ones.
CNBC:
The court’s controversial but expected ruling gives individual states the power to set their own abortion laws without concern of running afoul of Roe, which for nearly half a century had permitted abortions during the first two trimesters of pregnancy.
Almost half the states are expected to outlaw or severely restrict abortion as a result of the Supreme Court’s decision. Other states plan to maintain more liberal rules governing the termination of pregnancies.
“The Constitution does not confer a right to abortion; Roe and Casey are overruled; and the authority to regulate abortion is returned to the people and their elected representatives,” a syllabus of the opinion said.
The Dobbs decision is certain to be one of the most consequential in generations. It will have profound, immediate and enduring consequences for the lives of tens of millions of American women and other people who can become pregnant, and unpredictable ripple effects that could play out over decades.
“This is kind of unparalleled, and even if it’s not completely unprecedented it’s extremely rare,” said Mary Ziegler, a visiting professor of constitutional law at Harvard Law School, professor at the University of California, Davis School of Law and a historian of abortion.
“It’s also extraordinary to do something like this so quickly, with no kind of advance notice,” said Ziegler.
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