The State of Alaska has joined in with 22 other states in a lawsuit involving the overturn Roe vs. Wade, a 1973 landmark decision by the U.S. Supreme Court that legalized abortion in all 50 states.
The Jackson Women’s Heath Center’s challenge to Mississippi’s law, which prohibits abortions after 15 weeks of gestation, “presents the Court with an opportunity to remedy those problems by reconsidering and overruling their source—Roe v. Wade and Planned Parenthood of Southeastern Pennsylvania v. Casey,” the brief states.
The filing, signed for Alaska by Attorney General Treg Taylor, says that Roe vs. Wade was “Unlawful from the day each was decided, both have kept Amici States in continual litigation as the Court changes the constitutional test and rules. The time has come to return the question of abortion to where it belongs—with the States.”
The brief filed for the states of Texas, Alabama, Alaska, Arizona, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Idaho, Indiana, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, North Dakota, Ohio, Oklahoma, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee, Utah, West Virginia, and Wyoming, adds those states as “friends of the court” in support of the petitioners.
“Like Mississippi, Amici States do so by restricting abortions that ‘implicate additional ethical and moral concerns that justify a special prohibition,’ id., such as, in Mississippi’s case, an abortion which would inflict excruciating pain on a sentient child. Dogmatic abortion maximalists, unsatisfied by any legal regime short of nationwide abortion on demand, challenge these restrictions reflexively,” the states argue in their brief to the Supreme Court.
“And with some reason: This Court invites implacable challengers through a jurisprudence filled with abortion- specific exceptions to traditional legal doctrines. These ever-multiplying exceptions, from standing at the begin- ning of a case to res judicata following its conclusion, enable unprincipled legal innovations by abortion advocates and destabilize generally applicable doctrines for everyone else. As a result, Amici States have little on which they can rely when defending their abortion laws in court. Indeed, when it comes to abortion, the only constant is change—to the constitutional test and established rules that might otherwise hinder a plaintiff’s suit.”
The case is being heard by the U.S. Supreme Court this fall, and could be decided by early 2023.
Read the entire amicus brief:
