On Friday, June 24, the Supreme Court overturned the landmark Roe v. Wade decision that guaranteed abortion rights in the United States.
This undid decades of legal precedent and paved the way for around half of all states to ban the procedure.
“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,” Alito wrote.
This statement was backed by Justices Clarence Thomas, Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett.
“It is time to heed the Constitution and return the issue of abortion to the people’s elected representatives,” AlitoAltio wrote, after calling the original Roe decision “egregiously wrong and deeply damaging.”
The court’s ruling does not make abortion illegal, but with access to the procedure no longer deemed a constitutional right, individual states can now move to ban it.
In a furious dissent, liberal Justices Stephen Breyer, Elena Kagan, and Sonia Sotomayor said the court “reverses course today for one reason and one reason only: because the composition of this Court has changed.”
“Whatever the exact scope of the coming laws, one result of today’s decision is certain: the curtailment of women’s rights, and of their status as free and equal citizens,” the justices added.
“With sorrow — for this Court, but more, for the many millions of American women who have today lost a fundamental constitutional protection — we dissent,” they concluded.
“It’s a sad day for the court and a sad day for the country.” President Joe Biden said in remarks from the White House,
In a statement, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., in a statement, called the ruling “outrageous and heart-wrenching.””.
“Today, the Republican-controlled Supreme Court has achieved the GOP’s dark and extreme goal of ripping away women’s right to make their own reproductive health decisions. Because of Donald Trump, Mitch McConnell, the Republican Party, and their supermajority on the Supreme Court, American women today have less freedom than their mothers,” Pelosi said in her statement.
Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., said Friday was “one of the darkest days our country has ever seen. Millions upon millions of American women are having their rights taken from them by five unelected Justices on the extremist MAGA court.”
Sen. Joe Manchin, D-W.V., said he was “deeply disappointed” by the ruling and singled out Kavanaugh and Gorsuch, who he voted to confirm, for backing the overturning of Roe.
