Supreme Court overturns Roe v. Wade

The 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 opinion by Justice Samuel Alito also overturned a 1992 case, Planned Parenthood v. Casey, in which the court found that state laws restricting abortion should not impose an “undue burden” on women seeking the procedure.

“Abortion presents a profound moral question,” Alito wrote. “The Constitution does not prohibit the citizens of each State from regulating or prohibiting abortion. Roe and Casey arrogated that authority. We now overrule those decisions and return that authority to the people and their elected representatives.”

The decision was handed down more than eight weeks after a draft version of Alito’s opinion was leaked to Politico – sparking outrage and protests across the country. 

“Roe was egregiously wrong from the start,” Alito wrote in language held over from the leaked draft. “Its reasoning was exceptionally weak, and the decision has had damaging consequences. And far from bringing about a national settlement of the abortion issue, Roe and Casey have enflamed debate and deepened division.”

Alito was joined in his opinion by Justices Clarence Thomas, Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett. Thomas, Kavanaugh, and Chief Justice John Roberts filed separate opinions concurring in Alito’s judgement.

In his concurrence, Roberts wrote that Alito’s opinion was “is thoughtful and thorough, but those virtues cannot compensate for the fact that its dramatic and consequential ruling is unnecessary to decide the case before us.”

“Ample evidence thus suggests that a 15-week ban provides sufficient time, absent rare circumstances, for a woman ‘to decide for herself’ whether to terminate her pregnancy,” the chief justice went on before adding that both Alito’s opinion and the dissent by liberal justices Stephen Breyer, Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan “display a relentless freedom from doubt on the legal issue that I cannot share.”

While recent polling has found the majority of Americans wanted Roe v. Wade to be upheld, the decision will allow 22 states to implement total or near-total abortion restrictions. 

Those states include Alabama, Arizona, Arkansas, Georgia, Idaho, Iowa, Kentucky, Louisiana, Michigan, Mississippi, Missouri, North Dakota, Ohio, Oklahoma, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, West Virginia, Wisconsin and Wyoming.

Ahead of the decision, Democrats in Congress attempted to codify Roe v. Wade into federal law, but the bill failed to clear a test vote in the evenly split Senate, only garnering 49 votes last month.