A Time for Courage on the Supreme Court | Opinion O. Carter Snead
, Professor of Law and Director of the de Nicola Center for Ethics and Culture, the University of Notre Dame On 5/20/21 at 6:30 AM EDT
Brown v. Board of Education and the precedent overruled was
Plessy v. Ferguson (1896), which for 58 years had allowed states to engage in separate but equal discrimination on the basis of race.
On May 17, 2021, the Court agreed to hear a dispute regarding a younger line of precedents namely,
Roe v. Wade (1973) and
Planned Parenthood v. Casey (1992) that has for many decades forbidden states from extending the basic, fair and equal protection of the law to every member of the human family, born and unborn. By granting certiorari in
A great deal has changed in the world since 1973. It’s not clear that striking down the landmark Supreme Court decision would change society very dramatically.
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 v. Wade over and over again in the rulings that followed.
Now the justices have taken a case that could result in that bedrock precedent â a pillar of a woman s ability to control her body and her life â 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.
Lynda M. Gonzalez-Pool/Getty Images
Texas Gov. Greg Abbott on Wednesday signed a bill that would ban abortions as soon as a fetal heartbeat can be detected. That’s as early as six weeks’ gestation, before many people know they are pregnant, making the bill a de facto ban on nearly all abortions.
The law contains an exception for medical emergencies, but no exceptions for cases of rape or incest.
“Our creator endowed us with the right to life and yet millions of children lose their right to life every year because of abortion,” Abbott said in signing the bill. “The heartbeat bill is now law in the Lone Star State.”
The United States Supreme Court has agreed to hear arguments in a case over a Mississippi law banning abortion in most circumstances before an unborn baby is viable.