Washington — The Supreme Court on Friday overturned its landmark decision in Roe v. Wade that established the right to an abortion, with a ruling that marks a seismic shift in abortion law and will usher in new rules limiting or banning access to the procedure in half of the states, in some places immediately.
The decision to undo nearly 50 years of precedent will have sweeping ramifications for tens of millions of women across the country as abortion rights are curtailed, particularly in GOP-led states in the South and Midwest, and lead to a patchwork of laws absent the constitutional protection. Thirteen states have so-called “trigger laws” on the books, in which abortion will swiftly be outlawed in most cases with Roe overturned.
The ruling came in a case involving a Mississippi law that banned abortions after 15 weeks of pregnancy, and the court reversed the decision of the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, which blocked the measure.
Justice Samuel Alito delivered the opinion for the court, and was joined by Justices Clarence Thomas, Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett. Chief Justice John Roberts delivered a concurring opinion, writing that while he agrees that the viability line established under Roe should be discarded and Mississippi’s law upheld, Roe and Casey should be left untouched. The court’s three liberal justices dissented.
“Roe was egregiously wrong from the start. Its reasoning was exceptionally weak, and the decision has had damaging consequences. And far from bringing about a national settlement of the abortion issue, Roe and Casey have enflamed debate and deepened division,” Alito wrote in his majority opinion. “It is time to heed the Constitution and return the issue of abortion to the people’s elected representatives.”
In a dissenting opinion written by Justices Stephen Breyer, Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan, the court’s liberal bloc declared, “With sorrow — for this court, but more, for the many millions of American women who have today lost a fundamental constitutional protection — we dissent.”
“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,” they wrote. “Yesterday, the Constitution guaranteed that a woman confronted with an unplanned pregnancy could (within reasonable limits) make her own decision about whether to bear a child, with all the life-transforming consequences that act…
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