Roe v. Wade • Supreme Court of the United States • Abortion

 

Roe v. Wade • Supreme Court of the United States • Abortion

Explained: What is Roe v. Wade, which the US Supreme Court has overturned — and why is it significant?

The landmark 1973 Roe v. Wade judgment that legalised abortion in the US has been struck down by the Supreme Court's conservative majority. Why is this decision important? What is the position on abortion in India?

The United States Supreme Court on Friday (June 24) overturned by a 6-3 majority ‘Roe v. Wade’, the court’s landmark 1973 judgment that made abortion a constitutional right.

The decision — an early draft of which was scooped by ‘Politico’ on May 3 — will transform life for women in America. Near total bans on abortion will come into effect in about half of the country’s states.

Soon after the Supreme Court decision on Friday, the attorney general of Missouri issued an opinion that activated the state’s “trigger” law, effectively ending abortion except in medical emergencies, ‘The New York Times’ reported. Trigger laws were set to come into effect in several other states as well.

What is ‘Roe v. Wade’?

The case is sometimes referred to simply as “Roe”, the listed name of the 22-year-old plaintiff, Norma McCorvey. ‘Wade’ was the defendant Henry Wade, the Dallas County (Texas) district attorney at the time.

‘Roe’ struck down laws that made abortion illegal in several states, and ruled that abortion would be allowed up to the point of foetal viability, that is, the time after which a foetus can survive outside the womb.

Foetal viability was around 28 weeks (7 months) at the time of the ‘Roe’ judgment nearly 50 years ago; experts now agree that advances in medicine have brought the threshold down to 23 or 24 weeks (6 months or a little less), and newer studies show this could be further pegged at 22 weeks. An average pregnancy lasts about 40 weeks.

Foetal viability is often seen as the point at which the rights of the woman can be separated from the rights of the unborn foetus. The length of a pregnancy is commonly calculated from the start of a person’s most recent menstrual period. Since many people identify pregnancy only after the sixth week, pre-viability timelines leave women with very little time and opportunity to make a decision to abort.

Abortion laws across the world rely on this metric but those opposing abortions argue that this is an arbitrary timeframe that legislation and the court in ‘Roe’ adopted.

What has the Supreme Court said?

Details of the judgment were not immediately available, but in the draft opinion obtained by ‘Politico’, Justice Samuel Alito, who wrote the opinion, had rejected ‘Roe’ as “egregiously wrong from the start”, and held that both ‘Roe’ and ‘Casey’ — another landmark abortion judgment of the court from 1992 that reaffirmed the central tenet of ‘Roe’, that women have the right to terminate pregnancies up to the point of foetal viability — “must be overruled”.

A draft version of the ruling indicating the court was likely to overturn Roe was leaked in May, igniting a political firestorm

The U.S. Supreme Court on Friday took the dramatic step of overturning the landmark 1973 Roe v. Wade ruling that recognized a woman's constitutional right to an abortion and legalized it nationwide, handing a momentous victory to Republicans and religious conservatives who want to limit or ban the procedure.

The court, in a 6-3 ruling powered by its conservative majority, upheld a Republican-backed Mississippi law that bans abortion after 15 weeks. The justices held that the Roe v. Wade decision that allowed abortions performed before a fetus would be viable outside the womb — between 24 and 28 weeks of pregnancy — was wrongly decided because the U.S. Constitution makes no specific mention of abortion rights.

A draft version of the ruling indicating the court was likely to overturn Roe was leaked in May, igniting a political firestorm.

Mississippi's law had been blocked by lower courts as a violation of Supreme Court precedent on abortion rights.

Jackson Women's Health Organization, the only abortion clinic remaining in Mississippi, challenged the 2018 law and had the support of Democratic President Joe Biden's administration at the Supreme Court. The law allows abortions when there is a "medical emergency" or a "severe fetal abnormality" but does not have an exception for pregnancies resulting from rape or incest

A federal judge in 2018 struck the law down, citing the Roe precedent. The New Orleans-based 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in 2019 reached the same conclusion.

Roe v. Wade recognized that the right to personal privacy under the U.S. Constitution protects a woman's ability to terminate her pregnancy. The Supreme Court in a 1992 ruling called Planned Parenthood of Southeastern Pennsylvania v. Casey reaffirmed abortion rights and prohibited laws imposing an "undue burden" on abortion access.

Chief Justice John Roberts denounced the May 2 leak of Justice Samuel Alito's draft opinion in the case and announced an investigation to identify the culprit. Supreme Court leaks are extremely rare, especially concerning internal deliberations before a ruling is issued. Following the leak, Biden condemned the overturning of Roe as a "radical" step and urged Congress to pass legislation protecting abortion access nationally.