The US Supreme Court has voted to strike down the landmark Roe v Wade decision.
Top News Today:
According to POLITICO, an initial draft majority opinion written by Justice Samuel Alito and circulated inside the court has revealed that a majority of the justices have decided to overturn the Roe v Wade decision. After hearing oral arguments as far back as December of 2021, 5 of the most conservative and Republican-appointed justices (Clarence Thomas, Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, Amy Coney Barrett, and Samuel Alito) are in favor of striking down a woman’s right to choose what’s best for her body. The more liberal and Democratically-appointed justices (Stephen Breyer, Sonia Sotomayor, and Elena Kagan) have remained in favor of maintaining Roe v Wade. Only the opinion of Chief Justice Roberts is unknown from the leaked draft.
“Roe was egregiously wrong from the start,” Alito wrote in what POLITICO is calling a full-throated, unflinching repudiation of the 1973 decision which guaranteed federal constitutional protections of abortion rights and a subsequent 1992 decision – Planned Parenthood v. Casey – that largely maintained the right. The Roe v Wade “survey of history ranged from the constitutionally irrelevant to the plainly incorrect,” Alito continued, adding that its reasoning was “exceptionally weak” and that the original decision has had “damaging consequences.”
“The inescapable conclusion is that a right to abortion is not deeply rooted in the Nation’s history and traditions,” Alito wrote.
“We hold that Roe and Casey must be overruled,” Alito continued in the document, labeled as the ‘Opinion of the Court.’ “It is time to heed the Constitution and return the issue of abortion to the people’s elected representatives.”
His skewering of Roe combined with the endorsement of at least 4 of his conservative colleagues is proof positive of the court’s rightward turn in recent decades. Interestingly, Roe was decided 7-2 in 1973, with 5 Republican appointees joining 2 justices nominated by Democratic presidents.
“The overturning of Roe would almost immediately lead to stricter limits on abortion access in large swaths of the South and Midwest, with about half of the states set to immediately impose broad abortion bans.”
– POLITICO
The leaked opinion of the court’s intention to overturn Roe v Wade is not yet formal or official. Deliberations involving controversial cases have been fluid in the past and justices can and sometimes do change their votes as draft opinions circulate. Additionally, major decisions can and do involve multiple drafts and vote-trading, sometimes until only days before a decision is unveiled.
Although the court’s decision will not be final until it is published (likely within the next 2 months), the opinion of the majority of the justices is clear. Individual states will hold the right to continue to offer abortion and planned parenthood services, however, the writing is on the wall for Roe v Wade. The conservative justices are hell-bent on ending it.
Elections have consequences!
OK WASSUP! discusses the Top News Today:
US Supreme Court to end Roe v Wade.
NPR: Roe v. Wade established a constitutional right to abortion in 1973. Although abortion rights looked to be in peril after arguments at the court late last year, it was unclear whether the justices would merely hollow out Roe or indeed strike it down. It now appears they have done the latter, though, as the Politico report itself noted, the leaked majority opinion was a draft that could still change. In the 98-page draft, Alito said Roe was wrongly decided, saying the issue should be decided by politicians, not courts. If Roe is reversed, it would not federally outlaw abortion. However, it would shift the power to states to decide on the procedure’s legality. Twenty-one states are poised to immediately ban or acutely curtail access to abortions if the Supreme Court chooses to overturn or weaken Roe v. Wade, according to the Guttmacher Institute, a research group in favor of… Read more »