The wait is over and there can no longer be any question: in a 6-3 ruling the Supreme Court of the United States has overturned the Roe v. Wade, ruling while ruling in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization. The draft ruling which had been initially leaked to Politico on May 2nd has become official.
“Roe was egregiously wrong from the start,” Justice Samuel Alito wrote for the majority. “Its reasoning was exceptionally weak, and the decision has had damaging consequences.”
“We hold that Roe and Casey must be overruled. 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. That provision has been held to guarantee some rights that are not mentioned in the Constitution, butany such right must be “deeply rooted in this Nation’s history and tradition” and “implicit in the concept of ordered liberty.”
“It is time to heed the Constitution and return the issue of abortion to the people’s elected representatives. “The permissibility of abortion, and the limitations, upon it, are to be resolved like most important questions in our democracy: by citizens trying to persuade one another and then voting.” Casey, 505 U. S., at 979 (Scalia, J., concurring in judgment in part and dissenting in part). That is what the Constitution and the rule of law demand.”
Justice Alito concludes his decision in a fitting historical fashion,
“We end this opinion where we began. Abortion presents a profound moral question. The constitution does not prohibit the citizens of each State from regulating or prohibiting abortion. Roe and Casey Arrogated that authority. We now overrule those decisions and return that authority to the people and their elected representatives.”
The question of abortion’s legality will now be, again as it was prior to 1973 a question of state law with 17 Republican-led states set to ban abortion outright either through pre-existing laws or so-called ‘trigger laws’ and some 14 Democrat-led states enacting laws enshrining it according to USA Today.
In his dissent supported by the other two left-leaning justices, Stephen Breyer wrote,
“After today, young women will come of age with fewer rights than their mothers and grandmothers had, 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.”
