Mississippi’s attorney general urged the Supreme Court in a Thursday brief to overrule Roe v. Wade next term when the justices review Mississippi’s ban on virtually all abortions after 15 weeks of pregnancy.
Calling the court’s precedent on abortion “egregiously wrong,” Attorney General Lynn Fitch (R) explicitly set the dispute over Mississippi’s restrictive law on a collision course with the landmark 1973 decision in Roe that first articulated the constitutional right to abortion.
“This Court should overrule Roe and Casey,” Fitch 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.”
Supreme Court precedent tracing back to Roe prohibits states from banning abortion before fetal viability, which occurs around 24 weeks. The Mississippi law to be reviewed during the court’s upcoming term, which begins in October, creates only narrow exceptions from its 15-week ban.
“The court cannot uphold this law in Mississippi without overturning Roe’s core holding,” Nancy Northup, president of the Center for Reproductive Rights, told reporters in May when the court took up the case. “The stakes here are extraordinarily high.”
The Mississippi restriction, passed in 2018, is just one of hundreds of abortion measure state legislatures passed in recent years, many with the explicit goal of overturning Roe v. Wade. This year alone, lawmakers in 46 states have introduced more than 500 abortion restrictions, according to an April analysis from the Guttmacher Institute. Of those, more than 60 measures have been enacted.
Abortion rights advocates have warned that overturning Roe would have a cascading effect at the state level, where anti-abortion activists have been carefully preparing for just such a contingency amid the Supreme Court’s conservative shift over recent years.
A decision in the case, Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization, is expected in summer 2022.
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