Breaking: Supreme Court to Hear Abortion Ban Case Challenging Roe v. Wade
The Supreme Court has announced that it will hear a case involving a Mississippi law banning abortions after 15 weeks of pregancy. Mississippi passed this law in 2018, and it was immediately blocked and declared unconstitutional by a lower federal court with the decision later upheld by the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. This ruling affirmed the core tenet of Roe, that prevents state laws from banning abortions prior to viability, when a fetus can sustain life outside the womb.
It’s time to be worried. Roe v. Wade, the landmark Supreme Court decision that has protected abortion access for 50 years, is under direct threat.
In taking up the case, Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, the justices will decide “whether all pre-viability prohibitions on elective abortions are unconstitutional.”
By allowing this case to go forward, this 6-3 conservative Court seems poised to throw out 50 years of the highest court’s precedent, but it’s much more than that. Here are just some of the alarming issues:
There is no way the court can uphold Mississippi’s ban without overturning Roe’s core holding—that every pregnant person has the right to decide whether to continue their pregnancy prior to viability.
If Roe were overturned, 24 states could prohibit abortion outright and eleven states, including Louisiana, have “trigger bans” in place, which would ban abortion immediately.
The Louisiana 15-week ban, passed in 2018, rests on what the Supreme Court decides in this case.
The people hurt most by abortion restrictions are those who already face barriers to accessing health care—including women, Black, Indigenous and People of Color (BIPOC), those working to make ends meet,
This decision won’t come until next year, but here at Lift Louisiana, we won’t be patiently waiting, and nor should you. We must let anti-abortion politicians know that they are not working in a vacuum-- reproductive justice, women’s rights and the fundamental right for an individual to make decisions over their own body--are at stake, and we won’t sit idly by while they destroy people’s lives.