The final nail in the coffin to federal protection of a woman’s right to abortion was likely delivered Monday night when a draft of a forthcoming decision of the U.S. Supreme Court was leaked to Politico.
The leaked opinion states the majority of justices support overturning Roe v. Wade, the landmark 1973 case that guarantees a woman’s right to abortion.
The context of the ruling is a Mississippi case that bans abortions after 15 weeks, and was expected to be decided in the next month or so. Until now, the court has allowed states to regulate but not ban abortion up to the gestational age of 24 weeks.
As feared, the justices are using the Mississippi case to overturn Roe v. Wade and give individual states the sole power to determine a woman’s access to abortion.
In the Feb. 10 draft opinion, Justice Samuel Alito said public opinion had no bearing on the court’s ruling.
“We cannot allow our decisions to be affected by any extraneous influences such as concern about the public’s reaction to our work,” Alito wrote.
In other words, he and fellow conservatives will refuse to take into account that in the 235 years since the Constitution was written, our conceptions and interpretations of individual liberties may have changed. That literal interpretation of the Constitution maintains it is not a living document to be interpreted as times change, but one set in stone.
Such a regressive perspective sends gender equality back generations.
OVERWHELMINGLY, Americans support a woman’s right to decide whether to carry a pregnancy. In a 2020 poll by AP VoteCast, 69% of voters said the Supreme Court should leave Roe v. Wade as is; just 29% said the court should overturn the decision.
That support, however, is not as black and white as it appears.
While a majority of Americans support a woman’s right to decide whether to bear a child, most think some kind of restrictions on abortion should apply.
Increasingly, researchers find that most people think abortions happen later in pregnancy than they typically do — and very few know that only a small share of abortions happen late in pregnancy.
An overwhelming majority of abortions — 92.7% — were performed at less than 13 weeks’ gestation, according to the CDC.
IF ROE V. WADE is overturned, abortion would become illegal in about half of states, 13 of which have instituted “trigger laws,” making abortion illegal as soon as the high court overrules Roe v. Wade.
States banning abortion would be concentrated in the Midwest and South.
Presently, Kansas is an outlier among its conservative cohorts. In 2019, the Kansas Supreme Court ruled that a law passed in 2015, Senate Bill 95, unconstitutionally infringed on a woman’s right to abortion because it prevented the most common procedures used.
