Showdown looms in US over right to choose
US states are jostling for a showdown on abortion rights in 2019, with all eyes on the newly conservative highest court in a nation where passions run high on the issue among religious groups, conservatives and women’s rights advocates.
A number of states are seeking to prosecute doctors, recognise a foetus as a person and lengthen waiting periods for abortions, while others are eyeing ways to protect abortion access for women if the US Supreme Court does not.
At the heart of the controversy is the high court’s Roe vs Wade decision, which legalised abortion nationwide 45 years ago.
Overturning the landmark ruling – the goal of many religious groups – could place decision-making powers on abortion in the 50 states.
So far the 1973 decision has survived a handful of legal challenges before the Supreme Court, but the 2018 appointment of justice Brett Kavanaugh, selected by President Donald Trump, has locked in a newly conservative majority.
“I think 2019 could be pivotal for abortion rights,” said Elizabeth Nash, senior state issues manager at the Guttmacher Institute, an abortion research group.
“With the shift at the Supreme Court, state legislators of all stripes are looking to the court either with anticipation that abortion rights will be rolled back or with trepidation for the same reason.”
To test Roe vs Wade, the Supreme Court can decide to hear a case that has been challenged in lower courts – most likely if one court upholds an abortion law but another court elsewhere knocks down a similar law, setting up a showdown, experts say.
Among the conservative US states considering restricting abortion laws in 2019, Texas will look at a measure to revoke medical licences of physicians who perform abortions.
Alabama just voted to support giving foetuses the same rights as a person, and in the midwest, Missouri will weigh a law to ban abortion if a heartbeat is detected.
“There are a number of states that I would say are competing for the race to the bottom,” said Andrea Miller, head of the National Institute for Reproductive Health, an abortion rights group.
“And of course they have an ally in the White House who has not only been shifting the balance on the Supreme Court but has been packing the lower federal courts.”
Recently one federal judge in the American South remarked on the states’ strategy in a ruling that knocked down a restrictive abortion law in Mississippi.
“The real reason we are here is simple. The state chose to pass a law it knew was unconstitutional to endorse a decadeslong campaign, fuelled by national interest groups, to ask the Supreme Court to overturn Roe vs Wade,” judge Carlton Reeves wrote in the ruling.
I think 2019 could be pivotal for abortion rights