The 2018 Mississippi law at issue in the case, which has been paused during litigation, is just one of hundreds of abortion measures that state legislatures passed in recent years.Īccording to abortion rights advocacy group Guttmacher Institute, 22 states would be certain to attempt to ban abortion as quickly as possible.
Among those, 13 states have trigger laws already in place, designed to take effect automatically or by quick state action if Roe no longer applies. “This right of privacy, whether it be founded in the Fourteenth Amendment’s concept of personal liberty and restrictions upon state action, as we feel it is, or, as the District Court determined, in the Ninth Amendment’s reservation of rights to the people, is broad enough to encompass a woman’s decision whether or not to terminate her pregnancy.” In a footnote, Alito included a key passage from Justice Harry Blackmun’s 7-2 decision in Roe describing the constitutional underpinnings of the abortion right: “Roe … was remarkably loose in its treatment of the constitutional text”Ĭonservatives have long derided Roe as untethered from the Constitution - or as Alito put it in his draft opinion, “remarkably loose in its treatment of the constitutional text.”Įscaped Alabama inmate, wanted officer may be in Ford SUV, U.S.
