The United States of America Supreme Court has overturned Roe v. Wade on June 24 declaring that Americans can no longer have a Constitutional right to abortion.
This has been the court’s most watched as well as controversial case for years. Most of the justices – who were appointed by the Republican presidents argued that the right to abortion was not found in the Constitution or the country’s history.
The court voted in 6-3 vote to uphold a Mississippi’s Republican-backed law that bans abortion.
“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.”
The Supreme Court’s 3 liberal justices dissented in the vote. The three justices: Sonia Sotomayor, Stephen Breyer and Elena Kagan criticized the majority stating that: “With sorrow … for this Court, but more, for the many millions of American women who have today lost a fundamental constitutional protection … we dissent.
“After today, young women will come of age with fewer rights than their mothers and grandmothers had,” Associate Justice Stephen Breyer added in a dissent joined by the court’s two other liberal justices.
“The majority accomplishes that result without so much as considering how women have relied on the right to choose or what it means to take that right away.”
Roe v. Wade was about ‘Jane Roe’ not a real name for Norman McCorvey – a single mother pregnant for the third time who wanted an abortion. She filed a case against the Dallas attorney general Henry Wade over the issue of a Texas law that illegalized abortion except in cases of incest, rape or when the mother’s life was in danger. She argued that the law violated her constitutional rights.
The Supreme Court’s ruling was pivotal for the Dobbs v Jackson Women’s Health Organization in which the last abortion clinic in Mississippi was against the efforts of the state to illegalize abortion after 15 weeks and overturn Roe in the process.
This ruling means that individual states have power to decide on whether to ban abortion or not.
According to Guttmacher Institute – pro-choice group- has stated that now 26 states are “certain or likely” to ban abortion going forward.
This also means that women with unwanted pregnancies in the United States will be forced to travel to states which allow abortion or to illegal abortion or purchasing abortion bills online.
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