A document leaked by someone inside the Supreme Court shows that the court has overturned major portions of Roe vs. Wade, the 1973 decision that grants constitutional protection to women who get abortions.
No previous case has been leaked to the media by the Supreme Court in the history of the court, which is a vault of legal discretion.
“The Supreme Court has voted to strike down the landmark Roe v. Wade decision, according to an initial draft majority opinion written by Justice Samuel Alito circulated inside the court and obtained by POLITICO,” the news organization wrote.
“We hold that Roe and Casey must be overruled,” the draft says. “Roe was egregiously wrong form the start,” wrote Justice Samuel Alito, the author of the opinion for the majority.
“The draft opinion is a full-throated, unflinching repudiation of the 1973 decision which guaranteed federal constitutional protections of abortion rights and a subsequent 1992 decision – Planned Parenthood v. Casey – that largely maintained the right,” Politico wrote.
Politico said it received the document with someone inside the court.
The decision was reached in February but the draft is still being circulated among the justices. It’s likely that when it is released — or even before, at this point — it will cause civil unrest among leftists and abortion proponents across the country and may very well drive women to the polls in record numbers during the midterm elections. That could mean the anticipated Republican takeover of the Senate and House this November may slip away from conservatives, as women turn out to vote for Democrats who support abortion.
“Abortion presents a profound moral issue on which Americans hold sharply conflicting views. Some believe fervently that a human person comes into being at conception and that abortion ends an innocent life. Others feel just as strongly that any regulation of abortion invades a woman’s right to control her own body and prevents women from achieving full equality,” Alito wrote in his introduction to the opinion, which is weighs the question of Dobbs and the State of Mississippi Department of Health vs. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, specifically whether all “pre-viability” prohibitions on elective abortions are unconstitutional.
The U.S. Constitution makes no mention of abortion, Alito wrote. But the Court in 1973 conferred a broad right to obtain one. Without precedence, it broke pregnancies into three trimesters, with each one regulated differently. Roe vs. Wade was never constitutionally based law, “and gave almost no sense of an obligation to try to be,” wrote John Hart Ely in 1973 in the essay “The Wages of Crying Wolf,” a commentary on the Roe decision. Ely is quoted in the leaked draft of the opinion that has yet to be released that overturns Roe.
