The U.S. Supreme Court set the nation ablaze on Friday as the landmark Roe Vs Wade ruling was overturned.
The Supreme Court of the U.S. on Friday this week struck down the ultimate prevailing shield of the federal abortion rights, the Roe Vs Wade ruling, first constituted in 1973.
On Friday this week, the Supreme Court in a 5-4 decision overruled the Roe court ruling giving states individual autonomy to consider their own abortion regulations. Almost half the states are expected to prohibit or limit abortions as a result of this decision.
The Roe Vs Wade, 1973, hearing that ruled ‘unduly restrictive state regulation’ of abortion as illegal in response to a set of Texas statutes criminalizing abortions, argued that its regulation in most instances hindered a woman’s constitutional right to privacy.
The right-wing majority of the U.S. Supreme Court in a 5-4 ruling in the Dobbs Vs Jackson Women’s Health Organization case on Friday, asserted in a majority opinion by Justice Samuel Alto that, “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.”
Roe over-ruled several statutes of courts at a time when nearly all states outlawed abortion excluding conditions of life at risk, rape, incest, and fetal anomaly.
While liberal states have offered to maintain a lenient position on the termination of pregnancies, almost half the states in the nation will push for the polar opposite. The U.S. today witnessed a huge gathering at the Supreme Court to appeal the decision.
The decision has set the nation on fire as this will restrict millions from quality healthcare around the country, who may have to travel across states to find help.
A brief history of the Roe Vs Wade debate
The Roe Vs Wade case commenced when plaintiff Norma McCorvey under the pseudonym Jane Roe, instituted federal action against state attorney Henry Wade.
Roe’s attorneys Sarah Weddington and Linda Coffee proceeded to file a lawsuit in the U.S. federal court as the courts rejected Roe’s assertion of an absolute right to pregnancy.
Roe who in 1969 became pregnant with her third child sought an abortion, which was illegal in the State of Texas (unless under the count of rape, incest, or threat to life). Roe’s team challenged Texas’s abortion regulations citing that they were unconstitutional.
The state rebutted her claims saying that to terminate the pregnancy at any time and anyway cannot be fulfilled as it would over-reach the state’s authority to balance a woman’s right to privacy with the state’s interest in regulating abortion.
Then Supreme Court Head Blackmun opined to the case that “only a “compelling state interest” justifies regulations limiting “fundamental rights” such as privacy, and added that legislators must therefore construct statutes narrowly “to express only the legitimate state interests at stake.”
The Texas statute was then asked to balance its distinct compelling interests in the area of the health of the pregnant woman and the life of the fetus. The Supreme Court concluded that it would curb the state’s compelling interest to only regulate abortions at the end of the first trimester.
The courts regarded the life of the fetus as follows, “capability of meaningful life outside the mother’s womb,” or viability, which occurs only at about 24 weeks of pregnancy.
In the case of Roe Vs Wade, the Supreme Court concluded that the woman’s right to form decisions freely about the termination of her pregnancy deserves the maximum level of constitutional defense. The court also acknowledged the idea that the right to privacy is not absolute and that the state may but is not required, to prohibit abortion after viability.
Finally, on January 22, 1973, the Supreme Court of the U.S. issued a 7-2 decision stating that the due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution provides a fundamental “right to privacy”, which in turn will serve to protect the highest defense to the choice of women on the case of terminating or not terminating her pregnancy.
For decades, pro-life politicians and activists fought to overturn the judgment. Although Planned Parenthood v. Casey overturned Roe’s trimester framework and dropped Roe’s “strict scrutiny” requirement in favor of a more flexible “undue burden” test, the Supreme Court reiterated its “central holding” in that case.
Roe Vs Wade abolished: Was Donald Trump the ‘X’ factor?
The landmark decision constituted by the Supreme Court on Friday to a great extent reverberates the historic single-term tenure of President Donald Trump.
Through the slam of Roe Vs Wade, Trump has successfully delivered what he promised to his core right-leaning constituencies full of evangelic Christians and anti-abortion Republicans. Trump who commented about the decision as ‘an act of god’ claimed in his statement early today, “only made possible because I delivered everything as promised.”
But how does yesterday’s President influence today’s choices?
To understand how Trump played an important role in this decision, we must look back to an abolished abortion law in 2018.
Dobbs Vs Jackson Women’s Health Organization is a case about the Mississippi state law that illegitimate abortions after the first 15 weeks of pregnancy. The case became the vehicle to overturn the Roe ruling when lower courts from the state prevented the immediate employment of the law through preliminary injunctions based on rulings from Parenthood Vs Casey. The ruling prevented states from banning abortion before ‘viability’ and promised constitutional protection to the woman whose rights are in check via the Right to Privacy under the Fourteenth Amendment to the U.S. constitution.
The Dobbs Vs Jackson Women’s Health Organization took the complete position of an ideological vehicle used by the conservative Trump authority to overturn the Roe rulings. The nail for the coffin took form when Donal Trump nominated Amy Coney Barret as an associate judge to the supreme court to fill Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s position.
Bennet is an outspoken pro-life advocate coupled with Trump’s favorites Brett Kavanagh and Neil Gorsuch.
The mechanical move to appoint the three conservative judges arrived as a planned attack to flank the Roe rulings.
Trump-appointed Barret just a week before the 2020 elections (which he lost).
Kavanagh’s nomination ran into serious troubles on allegations of sexual assault, the investigation of which was never followed through alighting a narrow confirmation by the state.
While Gorsuch’s nomination came in 2017 when minority Republican leader Mitch McConnell refused to conduct a confirmation hearing on Barack Obama’s pick for the supreme court followed by the death of Justice Antonin Scalia.
The justice committee that supported overturning the Roe rulings included conservative republican judges: Samuel Alito, Clarence Thomas, John Roberts, Brett Kavanaugh, Neil Gorsuch, and Amy Coney Barrett.
Reactions to the verdict
Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau commented that the U.S. Supreme Court decision was “horrific”.
“The news coming out of the United States is horrific. My heart goes out to the millions of American women who are now set to lose their legal right to an abortion,” Trudeau said on Twitter.
Former President Barack Obama claimed that the ruling was an attack on “essential freedoms,”.
He continued on Twitter, “Today, the Supreme Court not only reversed nearly 50 years of precedent, it relegated the most intensely personal decision someone can make to the whims of politicians and ideologues — attacking the essential freedoms of millions of Americans,”.
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