US top court overturns 1973 precedent-setting decision, succeeding nearly 50 years of abortion access in the country.

 The US Supreme Court has reversed Roe v Wade, the landmark ruling that granted the right to abortion for nearly five decades in the United States, in what President Joe Biden has described as a “sad day” for the country.

In a decision released on Friday, the country’s top court ruled in a Mississippi case that “the Constitution does not confer a right to abortion”. The justices voted 6-3, powered by the court’s conservative supermajority.

“The authority to regulate abortion is returned to the people and their elected representatives,” the ruling reads.

The decision follows the leak last month of a draft opinion indicating that Roe v Wade would be overturned. That sparked widespread protests and condemnation across the US, with reproductive rights advocates saying millions of women would no longer have access to abortion services.

More than two dozen US states are likely to ban abortion now that the 1973 legal precedent has been overturned, according to the reproductive rights group Guttmacher Institute.

“The health and life of women in this nation is now at risk,” Biden said during a live address on Friday afternoon, describing the Supreme Court’s ruling as “a sad day for the court and for the country”.

“State laws banning abortion are automatically taking effect today, jeopardising the health of millions of women,” Biden added.

In Friday’s ruling, the justices held that the 1973 Roe v Wade decision that legalised abortions performed before a fetus would be viable outside the womb – between 24 and 28 weeks of pregnancy – was wrongly decided because the US Constitution makes no specific mention of abortion rights.

The Roe v Wade decision had argued that the right to personal privacy under the US Constitution protected a woman’s ability to terminate her pregnancy.

Later, 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.

“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,” Alito wrote.

Justices Clarence Thomas, Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett also voted to overturn Roe. The latter three justices were appointed by former President Donald Trump.

While Chief Justice John Roberts also voted in favor
of the decision, he wrote that he would have upheld the Mississippi law at the heart of the case – a ban on abortion after 15 weeks of pregnancy – and stopped there without overturning the Roe decision.

🅒Aljazeera