In historic reversal, Roe v. Wade overturned
WASHINGTON — In a historic reversal, the Supreme Court on Friday overturned the landmark 1973 Roe v. Wade decision and ruled states may again outlaw abortion.
The court’s conservative majority said the Constitution does not protect the rights of women to choose abortion, instead leaving these decisions in the hands of state lawmakers.
The 5-4 ruling marks the most significant curtailing of an established constitutional right in the court’s history.
The opinion written by Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. closely tracks a draft that was leaked by Politico in May.
“We hold that Roe and [the 1992 Planned Parenthood v.] Casey must be overruled,” Alito wrote. “The Constitution makes no reference to abortion, and no such right is implicitly protected by any constitutional provision, including the one on which the defenders of Roe and Casey now chiefly rely — the Due Process Clause of the 14th Amendment.”
The opinion was joined by Justices Clarence Thomas, Neil M. Gorsuch, Brett M. Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett.
Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. concurred but did not join the majority opinion in overturning Roe, saying he would have upheld only a Mississippi 15-week ban on abortion. That made the decision to uphold Mississippi’s law a 6-3 opinion.
“The court’s decision to overrule Roe and Casey is a serious jolt to the legal system,” Roberts wrote.
The court’s three liberal justices — Justice Stephen Breyer, Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan — dissented.
“Today, the court ... says that from the very moment of fertilization, a woman has no rights to speak of,” their dissent read. “A state can force her to bring a pregnancy to term, even at the steepest personal and
familial costs.”
The dissenting justices concluded, “Whatever the exact scope of the coming laws, one result of today’s decision is certain: the curtailment of women’s rights, and of their status as free and equal citizens.”
The ruling figures to set off a fierce political fight nationwide and state by state as politicians and voters weigh in on whether abortion should be restricted or prohibited entirely.
The ruling will almost certainly inject the abortion debate into the midterm election.
“This fall Roe is on the ballot,” Biden said, calling on Congress to pass legislation restoring a nationwide right to abortion. “The health and life of women in this nation are now at risk.”
Conservatives, meanwhile, promised to push for abortion bans in every state or antiabortion legislation at the federal level, particularly if they make gains in Congress in November’s elections.
Former Vice President Mike Pence said social conservatives in the post Roe era “must not rest and must not relent until the sanctity of life is restored to the center of American law in every state in the land.”
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi called the court’s action “an insult. It’s a slap in the face to women about using their own judgment to make their own decision about their reproductive freedom.”
Opinion polls show most Americans support access to abortion, at least in the early months of a pregnancy. Nevertheless, half the states are expected to seek to quickly enforce laws that make most abortions illegal.
The decision is the high court’s most far-reaching reversal on a matter of constitutional rights since 1954, when the justices reversed six decades of precedent and struck down laws authorizing racial segregation.
But that unanimous decision in Brown v. Board of Education expanded the rights of individuals and rejected conservative state laws, while today’s does the opposite. It empowers states and reverses what had been the most significant women’s rights ruling in the court’s history.
For the U.S. Catholics as well as evangelical Christians who believe abortion ends a human life and is immoral, the ruling is a triumph decades in the making. They had refused to accept the idea the Constitution protected abortion as a fundamental right.
Many legal conservatives say the constitutional right to abortion — and particularly the Roe ruling — was always built on a shaky legal foundation, leaving it vulnerable.