WASHINGTON – The Supreme Court on Friday overturned Roe v. Wade, eliminating the constitutional right to abortion after nearly 50 years in a decision that will transform American life, reshape the nation’s politics and lead to total bans on the procedure in about half of the states.
“Roe was hugely wrong from the start,” Judge Samuel A. Alito Jr. wrote. for the majority in the 6 to 3 decision, one of the most important in the court in decades.
The bans in at least seven states went into effect quickly after enacting laws aimed at enforcing them immediately after the fall of Roe. It is expected that there will be more states in the coming days, which reflects the main decision of the decision, that states are free to end the practice if they decide to.
The decision, which closely followed a leaked draft opinion, sparked celebrations and shouts across the country, underscoring the extent to which the issue of abortion continues after decades of uncommitted ideological and moral battles between those who they see the decision to terminate pregnancy as a right and those who see it as taking a life.
The result, although telegraphed both by the leaked draft opinion and by the positions taken by the judges during the arguments in the case, nevertheless produced waves of political shock, energizing conservatives increasingly focused on state-by-state struggles and generating a new determination among Democrats to make the restoration of the right to choose a central element of the midterm elections.
President Biden, warning that the decision would endanger the health of millions of women, urged people to go to the polls.
“It’s the realization of an extreme ideology and a tragic mistake by the Supreme Court,” Biden said.
Protesters for the right to abortion are protesting before the Supreme Court after the decision was published on Friday. Credit … Haiyun Jiang / The New York Times
The ruling will test the legitimacy of the court and vindicate a decades-old Republican project of installing conservative judges willing to dismiss the precedent, which had been repeatedly reaffirmed by previous courts. It will also be one of the signal legacies of President Donald J. Trump, who promised to appoint judges to overturn Roe. The three designated seats were the majority in the sentence.
Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. he voted by a majority, but said he would have taken “a more measured path,” without directly canceling Roe. The three liberal members of the court disagreed.
The case, Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, no. 19-1392, refers to a law enacted in 2018 by the Republican-dominated Mississippi legislature that banned abortion if it was determined that “the probable gestational age of the unborn human being” was more than 15 weeks. . The statute, a calculated challenge for Roe, included limited exceptions for medical emergencies or “a serious fetal abnormality.”
Judge Alito’s majority opinion not only upheld Mississippi’s law, but also said that Roe and Planned Parenthood v. Casey, the 1992 decision that affirmed Roe’s basic involvement, should be overturned.
Roe’s reasoning “was exceptionally weak and the decision has had detrimental consequences,” Judge Alito wrote. “And far from reaching a national agreement on the issue of abortion, Roe and Casey have ignited the debate and deepened the division. It is time to heed the Constitution and return the issue of abortion to the elected representatives of the people ”.
Six magistrates voted by a majority, while three disagreed. Credit … Erin Schaff / The New York Times
Judges Clarence Thomas, Neil M. Gorsuch, Brett M. Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett joined the majority opinion.
In a distressing joint dissent, Judges Stephen G. Breyer, Sonia Sotomayor, and Elena Kagan wrote that the court had seriously harmed women’s equality and their own legitimacy.
“A new and bare majority of this court, acting virtually as soon as possible, annuls Roe and Casey,” they wrote, adding that the majority had issued a decision that gave the green light even to the total ban on abortion “.
The dissent concluded, “With pity, for this court, but more so, for the many millions of American women who today have lost fundamental, dissident constitutional protection.”
The decision left important questions unanswered and revealed tensions between the five majority judges.
An open question was whether the Constitution required exceptions to the prohibition of abortion for the life or health of the mother, for victims of rape or incest, or for fetal disabilities. Majority opinion noted that Mississippi law made exceptions for medical emergencies and fetal abnormalities, but did not say those exceptions were necessary.
In a concurring opinion, Judge Kavanaugh indicated that an exception may be demanded for the mother’s life, but did not say so in so many words. “Abortion statutes traditionally and currently provide for an exception when abortion is necessary to protect the life of the mother,” she wrote. “Some statutes also provide for other exceptions.”
But some of the recent state laws were almost categorical, dissidents wrote.
“Some states have enacted laws that extend to all forms of abortion procedure, including taking medication at home,” the dissenting opinion said. “They have passed laws without exception for when the woman is the victim of rape or incest. Under these laws, a woman must have the son of her rapist or a young girl that of her father, no matter if doing so will destroy her life.
Another open question is whether other precedents are now at risk.
Anti-abortion activists held before the Supreme Court after the verdict. Credit … Shuran Huang for The New York Times
Judge Alito said the court’s decision was limited.
“To ensure that our decision is not misunderstood or misrepresented,” he wrote, “we emphasize that our decision concerns the constitutional right to abortion and no other right.”
But Judge Thomas, a member of the majority, issued a concurring opinion that sent a different message. He wrote that it was strictly true that the majority opinion only dealt with abortion, but said his logic required the court to reconsider decisions about contraception, gay sex and same-sex marriage.
“We have a duty to‘ correct the error ’set out in these precedents,” he wrote, citing an earlier opinion.
Judge Kavanaugh took the opposite approach in his concurring opinion, saying the precedents identified by Judge Thomas were safe.
Dissidents, noting that Judge Thomas “is not with the program,” said “no one should trust that most of them have finished their work.”
Promises, dissidents said, made no sense.
“The future importance of current opinion will be decided in the future,” they wrote. “And law often has a way of evolving.”
Chief Justice Roberts, who voted by a majority but did not accept his reasoning, said he would have ruled out only one element of Roe: the ban on abortion before fetal viability.
The right to abortion, he wrote, should be “extended enough to ensure a reasonable opportunity to choose, but no need to extend further, certainly not to viability.”
The chief judge added: “The court’s decision to overturn Roe and Casey is a serious shock to the legal system, regardless of how you view these cases. A more limited decision that would reject the wrong line of viability would be remarkably less disturbing, and nothing more is needed to decide this case. “
Judge Alito, once a close ally of the justice chief, said this was a recipe for unrest.
“If we only consider the Mississippi 15-week rule to be constitutional, we will soon be called upon to approve the constitutionality of a panoply of shorter-term or short-term laws,” he wrote.
The Jackson Women’s Health Organization is the only abortion clinic left in Mississippi. Credit … Gabriela Bhaskar / The New York Times
In defying the law, Mississippi’s only abortion clinic focused on the 14th Amendment, which says states cannot “deprive anyone of life, liberty, or property without due process of law.” Judge Alito wrote that the amendment, passed in 1868, had not been understood to address abortion, which he said at the time was a crime in most states.
The joint dissent responded that only men had participated in the adoption of the amendment. “Therefore, it may not be so surprising,” they wrote, “that the ratifiers were not perfectly attuned to the importance of reproductive rights for women’s freedom, or to their ability to participate as equal members of the our nation “.
These days, Judge Alito wrote, women have political influence. “In the last election in November 2020, women, who make up about 51.5% of the Mississippi population, made up 55.5% of the voters who voted,” she wrote.
In his concurring opinion, Judge Kavanaugh wrote that states could not prohibit their residents from traveling to other states for abortion. Dissidents responded that it was uncomfortable for women too poor to travel.
They added that the majority had left open the possibility that Congress could enact a nationwide ban. If that happens, “the challenge for a woman will be to fund a trip other than to New York [or] California but in Toronto.
When the court ruled Roe in 1973, it established a framework for governing abortion regulation based on trimesters of pregnancy. During the first quarter, it allowed almost no regulation. In the second, it allowed regulations to protect women’s health. In the third, it allowed states to ban abortion as long as exceptions were made to protect the life and health of the mother.
The court ruled out the quarterly framework in 1992 in Casey’s decision, but upheld what he called Roe’s “essential consideration”: that women have a constitutional right to dismiss …