Supreme Court could overturn Roe v Wade’s abortion protection

With the leak of the draft opinion striking down Roe v Wade’s abortion protections, the politicians and activists on the left and right had been bracing for the possibility of such a sweeping ruling.

No one imagined that for the first time in modern American history the actual text of the court’s draft majority opinion would be leaked in advance.

The prospect that the US Supreme Court will tear down Roe and leave the fight over the legality of abortion in the hands of politicians could change the political issues like the economy, immigration, and crime as the top concerns for voters. Now the abortion issue becomes much more concrete. In more than half the US states, the political landscape is such that the right to abortion will be all but guaranteed or doomed. But in others like Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, the fate of the procedure will depend on whether pro-choice Democratic governors win re-election or are defeated. If Roe fails the US Congress could pass a law that does essentially what the Supreme Court has mandated for the last 50 years – make abortion legal in every US state.

Every state has at least one abortion clinic. However, individual states can regulate and limit the use of abortion or create trigger laws that would make abortion illegal within the first and second trimesters if Roe were overturned by the Supreme Court of the United States. Eight states – Alabama, Arizona, Arkansas, Michigan, Mississippi, Oklahoma, West Virginia, and Wisconsin still have pre-Roe abortion bans in their laws, which could be enforced if Roe were overturned. In accordance with the US Supreme Court case of Planned Parenthood v Casey (1992) states cannot place legal restrictions posing an undue burden for “ the purpose of effect of placing a substantial obstacle in the path of a woman seeking an abortion of a nonviable fetus.