The US Supreme Court officially overruled Roe v. Wade today, the landmark case that made abortions a constitutional right. The court also overturned Planned Parenthood v. Casey. Now, abortions are no longer protected by the Constitution and individual states are able to decide for themselves how they want to grant access to abortion, if at all.
“The Constitution does not confer a right to abortion. Roe and Casey are overruled, and the authority to regulate abortion is returned to the people and their elected representatives,” read the Court’s opinion. The decision is in response to Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, a case that has been four years in the making and with the court since 2021.
Now that we are living in a post-Roe world, here’s what—and who—will be most at stake in our new reality.
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States are free to enforce abortion bans, preventing pregnant people from seeking this medical care
Like the issue that was discussed in the Dobbs case about a law in Mississippi that prohibits abortions after 15 weeks, many states have similar laws in place that now will be able to go freely and fully into effect since Roe is overruled. These are called “trigger laws,” and Arkansas, Idaho, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri, North Dakota, South Dakota, Tennessee, Utah, and Texas have them in place, according to the Guttmacher Institute.
Doctors who perform abortions could be sued and imprisoned
Texas’s “heartbeat bill” (a misleading name given that an embryo does not have a developed heart at six weeks’ gestation) forbids abortions after six weeks, and Idaho recently became the first state to pass a similar ban, following in Texas’s footsteps. Not only does Idaho’s law abide by the six-week determinant, but it also allows family members—even those of a rapist—to sue a medical provider for conducting an abortion. The law was passed, but the state’s highest court has prohibited it from being put into effect just yet.
But Oklahoma has a far more aggressive approach. As of mid-April 2022, abortions are only permitted if a pregnant person’s life is at risk in an emergency. If not, conducting the procedure is a felony for the medical professional that risks up to 10 years in prison. This law will be active by August 2022.
Those who receive abortions could also face legal consequences
In early April 2022, a 26-year-old woman was charged with murder in Texas for “the death of an individual by self-induced abortion” after getting the medical procedure. She was placed in a jail near the border with a $500,000 bond. The case was later dismissed, but it does offer a grim look into a possible future of what life could be like post-Roe.
Laws connected to Roe could be overturned in some states too
In its SCOTUS case, Mississippi pointed out that any case that relied on Roe for validity should also be revoked if that foundational law itself is no longer “relevant,” with special attention to laws that were passed between 1965 and 2015. Some of the laws passed during that time frame include decisions on same-sex marriage and permitting forms of birth control, which make this language incredibly scary.
The reality: Abortions won’t stop happening since Roe is overturned—they’ll just become dangerous
Abortions becoming restricted doesn’t mean they’ll go away—it just means the people who perform and receive them will be put at a higher risk both legally and medically, and the procedures done will likely result in more deaths, particularly among the country’s most vulnerable populations.
