Supreme Court Strikes Down Roe v. Wade, Ending Federal Abortion Protection

The U.S. Supreme Court has overturned the landmark Roe v. Wade case, ending nearly 50 years of constitutional protections for abortion.

The landmark ruling will allow states to ban access to abortions. Since 1973, Roe had permitted abortions during the first two trimesters of pregnancy in the United States.

Associate Justice Samuel Alito wrote the opinion for a 6-3 majority, with the court's liberal justices in dissent. Chief Justice John Roberts writing a separate concurring opinion.

“We hold that Roe and Casey must be overruled,” Alito wrote.

“The Constitution makes no reference to abortion, and no such right is implicitly protected by any constitutional provision, including the one on which the defenders of Roe and Casey now chiefly rely — the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment."

Alito added:

"Roe was egregiously wrong from the start. Its reasoning was exceptionally weak, and the decision has had damaging consequences."

Joining Alito were Justice Clarence Thomas, appointed by the first President Bush, and the three Trump appointees—Justices Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett.

"The Constitution does NOT confer a right to abortion; Roe & Casey are overruled. The authority to regulate abortion is returned to the people and their elected representatives."

Chief Justice John Roberts filed a concurring opinion, though he wrote he would have limited the decision to upholding the Mississippi law at issue in the case, which banned abortions after 15 weeks.

“A narrower decision rejecting the misguided viability line would be markedly less unsettling,” Roberts argued. “It cannot reasonably be argued that women have shaped their lives in part on the assumption that they would be able to abort up to viability, as opposed to fifteen weeks.”

"The Constitution does not prohibit the citizens of each State from regulating or prohibiting abortion. Roe and Casey arrogated that authority," the court's conservatives wrote in their majority opinion.

"The Court overrules those decisions and returns that authority to the people and their elected representatives."

The liberal Justices - Stephen Breyer, Sonia Sotomayor, and Elena Kagan - dissented.

"With sorrow — for this Court, but more, for the many millions of American women who have today lost a fundamental constitutional protection — we dissent."

In their scathing joint dissent, the court’s liberal justices wrote:

“The majority has overruled Roe and Casey for one and only one reason: because it has always despised them, and now it has the votes to discard them. The majority thereby substitutes a rule by judges for the rule of law.”

"After today, young women will come of age with fewer rights than their mothers and grandmothers had," Breyer wrote in the dissent.

"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."

Going forward, the liberal justices wrote, the Court

“[S]ays that from the very moment of fertilization, a woman has no rights to speak of. A State can force her to bring a pregnancy to term, even at the steepest personal and familial costs.”

The ruling came in a case involving a 15-week ban in Mississippi, Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health.

Today's ruling is expected to disproportionately affect minority women - who already face limited access to healthcare - according to an analysis by The Associated Press.

The decision comes while 85% of Americans favor legal abortion in at least some circumstances.

At least 26 states poised to effectively ban abortion

• 13 states have approved “trigger laws” that would ban abortion the moment SCOTUS overturns Roe.
• Nine states whose bans on abortion were ended by Roe but never removed would likely see those pre-Roe bans reinstated.
• Nine states currently have unconstitutional post-Roe bans that could be brought back into effect.
• Abortion would remain legal in some form in at least sixteen states and the District of Columbia, which have passed laws explicitly protecting the right for women to obtain an abortion.
• Forty-three states have passed limits on abortions after a specified point in pregnancy with some exceptions. 

This is a breaking story and will be updated.

-Josh Herman