Follow Us on Google
Joe Biden Friday lambasted the US Supreme Court’s over it ruling against the historic abortion law commonly called Roe V Wade after senior judges overturned the controversial Roe v. Wade decision that effectively legalised the procedure nation-wide.
In an address at the White House, the President said today was ‘a sad day for the court and the country’ and called the Supreme Court ‘wrong, extreme and out of touch’.
READ ALSO: Roe v Wade: US Supreme Court ends constitutional right to abortion
Accusing the court of ‘expressly taking away a constitution right that is so fundamental to so many Americans’, he vowed the fight over abortion rights ‘is not over’ and said his administration will do everything in its power to combat efforts to restrict women from travelling to other states to obtain abortions.
The Supreme Court today overturned a landmark 1973 ruling that effectively legalised abortions across the US by handing individual states the power to decide whether or not to permit the procedure.
The decision by the court’s conservative majority to overrule the landmark 1973 Roe v. Wade ruling has ended constitutional protections for abortion that had been in place for nearly 50 years.
The vote was 5-4 to overturn Roe, with Chief Justice John Roberts writing separately to say he would have upheld the Mississippi law but not taken the additional step of erasing the precedent altogether. At the same time, the court voted 6-3 to uphold a Mississippi law that bans abortions after 15 weeks, with very few medical exceptions.
The justices held that the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision that allowed abortions performed before a fetus would be viable outside the womb – between 24 and 28 weeks of pregnancy – was wrongly decided because the U.S. Constitution makes no specific mention of abortion rights.
Roe v. Wade was centered around ‘Jane Roe’, a pseudonym for Norma McCorvey, a single mother pregnant for the third time, who wanted an abortion. She sued the Dallas attorney general Henry Wade over a Texas law that made it a crime to terminate a pregnancy except in cases of rape or incest, or when the mother’s life was in danger – arguing that the law infringed on her constitutional rights.
‘The Constitution makes no reference to abortion, and no such right is implicitly protected by any constitutional provision,’ Conservative Justice Samuel Alito, who was nominated to the court in 2006 by George W Bush, wrote in the ruling on Friday.
The ruling means that individual states now have the power to decide on whether to ban abortion. The Guttmacher Institute, a pro-choice research group, has said that 26 states are ‘certain or likely’ to ban abortion now.
A total of 13 states – Arkansas, Idaho, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri, North Dakota, Oklahoma, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, Utah and Wyoming – have adopted so-called ‘trigger laws’ that will ban abortion virtually immediately.
The decision means that women with unwanted pregnancies in large swathes of America will now face the choice of traveling to another state where the procedure remains legal and available, buying abortion pills online or having a potentially dangerous illegal abortion.
The court’s ruling, unthinkable just a few years ago, was the culmination of decades of efforts by abortion opponents, made possible by an emboldened right side of the court that has been fortified by three appointees of former President Donald Trump.
In a statement following the decision, Trump said it was ‘the biggest WIN for LIFE in a generation’ and that the decision only happened because he ‘delivered’ on ‘everything’ he promised.
Outside the Supreme Court, a crowd of abortion supporters swelled to the hundreds after the ruling was issued. One chanted into a bullhorn, ‘legal abortion on demand’ and ‘this decision must not stand.’ Some shouted ‘the Supreme Court is illegitimate.’
