Roe v. Wade
The Supreme Court’s most recent additions, like their conservative brethren, are no friends to abortion rights.
Jonathan Ernst/Getty Images
The Supreme Court announced on Monday that it will reconsider part of
Roe v. Wade in its fall term, setting the stage for a major ruling to curtail access to legal abortion throughout America. The justices have not heard a direct challenge to
Roe since a troika of moderates saved its central holdings in
Planned Parenthood v. Casey in 1992. Now the court’s moderates are all gone, and the only thing that can stop the conservatives from demolishing
By Vivian KaneMay 17th, 2021, 2:23 pm
The Supreme Court announced today that it will review a case out of Mississippi regarding the state’s attempts to ban abortion at fifteen weeks gestation. Fifteen weeks is significantly before the point of viability (when a fetus can survive outside of the womb), and
Roe v. Wade explicitly says a person is entitled to choose to have an abortion prior to viability, so you would think this would be an easy pass for the Supreme Court, and yet here we are.
Remember during the confirmation hearings for Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett, when they were asked if they would seek to overturn
Roe v. Wade, reaffirmed in 1982. The
Roe v. Wade decision means that the court ruled that states could not ban abortion before the viability of the fetus outside the womb this basically means that states are blocked from enacting abortion restrictions before a fetus could survive on its own. Doctors generally view this marker to be around 23 or 24 weeks. That means that under Roe v. Wade, states could not ban abortion prior to 23 or 24 weeks.
What s happening in Mississippi?
In 2018, then-Gov. Republican Phil Bryant signed a 15-week ban into law. The ban only had exceptions for medical emergencies or cases in which there is a severe fetal abnormality, but not for instances of rape or incest. The law was a conscious, direct challenge to
Print
For the nearly five decades since the U.S. Supreme Court decided that a woman has a constitutional right to an abortion, that right has been under attack by state legislators. But the high court has stood by its landmark decision in Roe vs. Wade over and over again in the rulings that followed.
Now the justices have taken a case that could result in that bedrock precedent a pillar of a woman’s ability to control her body and her life being overturned. On Monday, the high court agreed to weigh in on a Mississippi state law that bans abortions at 15 weeks of pregnancy. A federal district court and the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals both found the law unconstitutional because Roe guarantees a right to an abortion up to the point when a fetus would be viable outside the woman’s body, which is around 24 weeks of gestation.