The Mississippi Attorney General asked the Supreme Court to overturn Roe V. Wade on Thursday.
QUICK FACTS:
- Mississippi attorney general Lynn Fitch urged the U.S. Supreme Court (SCOTUS) on Thursday to overturn its 1973 Roe v. Wade ruling that women have a constitutional right to abortion.
- AG Fitch also asked SCOTUS to sustain a state law that bans most abortions after 15 weeks of pregnancy.
- Mississippi argued that because the U.S. Constitution doesn’t mention ‘abortion’ specifically, adhering to Roe was “dangerously corrosive to our constitutional system,” according to USA Today.
- “If Roe falls, half the states in the country are poised to ban abortion entirely,” said one abortion advocate.
- The court will hear arguments in the case in the fall, according to The New York Times.
WHAT AG FITCH SAID:
- “The Constitution does not protect a right to abortion,” Ms. Fitch wrote. Adding, “The Constitution’s text says nothing about abortion. Nothing in the Constitution”s structure implies a right to abortion or prohibits states from restricting it.”
- “The national fever on abortion can break only when this court returns abortion policy to the states—where agreement is more common, compromise is often possible and disagreement can be resolved at the ballot box.”
- “Roe and Casey are unprincipled decisions that have damaged the democratic process, poisoned our national discourse, plagued the law—and, in doing so, harmed this court,” Fitch wrote.
WHAT MISSISSIPPI LAWYERS SAID:
- “Roe and Casey are egregiously wrong,” Mississippi lawyers told the court Thursday, notes USA Today. “The conclusion that abortion is a constitutional right has no basis in text, structure, history, or tradition.”
A SECTION FROM THE FILING:
- “On a sound understanding of the Constitution, the answer to the question presented in this case is clear and the path to that answer is straight. Under the Constitution, may a State prohibit elective abortions before viability? Yes. Why? Because nothing in constitutional text, structure, history, or tradition supports a right to abortion. A prohibition on elective abortions is therefore constitutional if it satisfies the rational basis review that applies to all laws.”
BACKGROUND:
- Sixteen states have attempted to ban abortions before viability.
- A 7-2 majority concluded in Roe that women have the right to an abortion during the first and second trimesters. However, the ruling also allows states to impose restrictions in the second trimester.
- In Planned Parenthood v. Casey, SCOTUS allowed states to ban most abortions at viability (roughly 24 weeks), when a fetus can survive outside the womb.
