The justices will hear arguments Wednesday over a Mississippi law that bans abortion after 15 weeks in a direct challenge to Roe v. Wade.
The …
The justices will hear arguments Wednesday over a Mississippi law that bans abortion after 15 weeks in a direct challenge to Roe v. Wade. The case poses the clearest test yet of the 6-3 conservative court’s trajectory. Conservatives and anti-abortion activists have since 1973 sought to narrow or overturn the legal right to an abortion first recognized in the Roe decision. They hope the upcoming Mississippi case finally leads to its dismantling. The state’s Republican attorney general, in a court brief filed over the summer, explicitly urged the justices to overrule Roe and related rulings, calling the court’s precedent on abortion “egregiously wrong.” “This Court should overrule Roe and Casey,” Mississippi Attorney General Lynn Fitch (R) wrote, referring also to the court’s 1992 decision in Planned Parenthood v. Casey. “Roe and Casey are egregiously wrong. They have proven hopelessly unworkable…. And nothing but a full break from those cases can stem the harms they have caused.” Under Roe and Casey, states may regulate abortion up to the point of fetal viability, typically around 23 weeks, so long as the restriction does not pose an “undue burden” on abortion access. Mississippi’s law, which bans abortion after 15 weeks of pregnancy and makes exceptions only for medical emergencies or “severe fetal abnormality,” is a clear-cut violation of this framework, critics say. Compared to the recent past, however, abortion opponents now face a far more sympathetic Supreme Court bench. In a 2020 abortion decision, for example, a 5-4 court that ruled against a Louisiana abortion restriction included a vote by the late liberal stalwart Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who joined the court’s three other liberals and Chief Justice John Roberts to form a bare majority.
