The US has overturned Roe v. Wade — now, individual states control the right to abortion

Jun 24 2022, 2:45 pm

The US Supreme Court has overturned Roe v. Wade, the historic 1973 ruling which constitutionally allowed women seeking an abortion the autonomy to do so without excessive government intervention.

States can now individually decide if they want to ban abortions. The decision came on Friday morning.

Many are speculating that abortion bans will rampantly be imposed in several American states very quickly. “Friday’s outcome is expected to lead to abortion bans in roughly half the states,” reported the Associated Press.

The decision is being called dystopian and dark by women and human rights activists around the world.

One of the many cases that used Roe v. Wade as a stepping stone for its argument was Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization. It was filed against the Gestational Age Act of Mississippi.

A decision was reached for Dobbs today, prompting Roe v. Wade’s overturning.

The Gestational Age Act was passed as a bill in March of 2018. It banned abortion after 15 weeks of pregnancy, except in cases where the pregnancy could cause a medical emergency or certain fetal abnormalities were detected.

Roe‘s overturning comes a little under two months after The Politico unveiled a bombshell Supreme Court draft that showed plans to overturn the ruling.

The majority opinion draft was penned by Justice Samuel Alito and addressed to eight Supreme Court justices, including the Chief Justice.

In it, Justice Alito blatantly remarks that Roe was “egregiously wrong from the start,” calling its reasoning “exceptionally weak” and saying it led to “damaging consequences.”

The leak in early May followed validation from the US Supreme Court, which said the draft was “almost certainly authentic” but “[did] not reflect the comments or reactions of other Justices.”

What was Roe v. Wade?

In the late 1960s, young mom Norma McCorvey became pregnant with her third child and sought an abortion. She was in Texas and couldn’t find a clinic that would offer to perform an abortion for her legally.

After trying different ways to get an abortion, including a desperate story about being raped (which she later revealed was a fabrication), McCorvey fought a case against district attorney Henry Wade. She used the alias “Jane Roe.”

It took the court three years of trials to reach a decision; states could no longer ban abortion individually. After this, Jane Roe revealed her true identity.

Since then, several subsequent cases have quoted the ruling in support of abortion rights. The 1992 decision of Planned Parenthood v. Casey, which also makes an appearance in the leaked court draft, used the 1973 decision to further relax the rights of those seeking an abortion and loosen the standards that qualify an abortion request as legal.

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