The Deacon's Bench
With the Supreme Court poised to get a new justice before the end of the year, it’s entirely possible SCOTUS will revisit the abortion issue and that someone, somewhere will seek to have Roe struck down.
The Washington Post offers this helpful breakdown (check the link for a map), regarding the legal nuances involved:
Regulating abortion would revert fully to state legislatures, many of which have become more conservative and have passed more than 400 laws that restrict access in the past six years alone.
There are four states where abortion would be banned as soon as Roe v. Wade were overturned; Louisiana, Mississippi and North and South Dakota enacted “trigger laws” with delayed effective dates. Ten other states still have pre-Roe abortion bans on the books that never were repealed. Eight states have laws that explicitly protect abortion rights.
Many state laws are challenged in the courts for placing an “undue burden” on women who seek abortions, the current federal standard that the Supreme Court, with Kennedy in the plurality, established in 1992. And some of those will land before the bench, where a new conservative justice may be more open to arguments that the state’s obligation to protect the health of mother and fetus outweighs a woman’s constitutional right to privacy…
…”Overturning Roe” will stay the rallying cry on both sides of the issue, but the antiabortion movement’s legal strategists plan to stick to their highly successful strategy of chipping away at abortion rights in the states, they told The Post’s Amy Gardner. Forty-three states have some kind of limit on abortions, and at least six are down to one provider.
And there are two laws on hold by injunction and now in U.S. appeals court — one from Alabama and one from Texas — either of which would effectively outlaw the vast majority of abortions after 14 weeks, says Elizabeth Nash, who leads research on state policy on reproductive rights for the Guttmacher Institute.
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