If Roe Is Thrown Out, Roughly Half Of U.S. States Will Restrict Abortions

According to an organization that is the leading advocate for abortion, nearly half of the states in the nation already have laws that could restrict abortions if the Supreme Court invalidates Roe v. Wade.

That scenario became much more likely after Monday night’s revelation of a Supreme Court draft opinion that would indeed throw out the badly-decided 1973 Court decision.

The Guttmacher Institute, an ardent supporter of abortion access, wrote, “23 states have laws that could be used to restrict the legal status of abortion” while acknowledging, “16 states and the District of Columbia have laws that protect the right to abortion.”

The Guttmacher Institute declared, “13 states have post-Roe laws to ban all or nearly all abortions that would be triggered if Roe were overturned,” adding, “7 states have laws that express the intent to restrict the right to legal abortion to the maximum extent permitted by the U.S. Supreme Court in the absence of Roe.”

“[Nine] states retain their unenforced, pre-Roe abortion bans,” the report added.

In May 2021, The New York Times surmised about states eliminating abortion access, noting, “Ten states have passed so-called trigger laws, which would automatically ban all abortions without Roe. An additional 12 states are considered highly likely to pass new abortion bans in a new legal environment, based on recent legislative action and state court rulings.”

The pro-abortion access Center for Reproductive Rights estimated 25 states would likely ban abortion if Roe is overturned. Those states included Alabama, Arizona, Arkansas, Georgia, Idaho, Indiana, Kentucky, Louisiana, Michigan, Mississippi, Missouri, Nebraska, North Carolina, North Dakota, Ohio, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, West Virginia, Wisconsin and Wyoming.

Roe, in which Justice Harry A. Blackmun, writing the opinion for the majority, ruled that the “due process” clause in the Fourteenth Amendment included an implicit “right to privacy,” followed in the footsteps of the contraceptive case Griswold v. Connecticut from 1965, in which leftist Supreme Court Justice William Douglas invented privacy rights, which he had discovered in “penumbras, formed by emanations from” the Bill of Rights.

Writing for the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops in 2003, Attorney Susan E. Wills explained that the Supreme Court exceeded its constitutional authority in Roe v. Wade because it substituted the policy preferences of the Supreme Court for what was written in law; struck down criminal laws of Texas and Georgia which outlawed certain abortions by finding that they violated a “right of privacy” which is not mentioned in the Constitution, and misrepresented the history of abortion by claiming it had been widely practiced and unpunished until the Victorian era.

The decision ignored condemnation of abortion as far back as the Hippocratic Oath, which stated, “I will give no deadly medicine to anyone if asked, nor suggest any such counsel; and in like manner I will not give to a woman a pessary to produce abortion.”

Roe also misrepresented the common law of England by claiming “it now appears doubtful that abortion was ever firmly established as a common-law crime even with respect to the destruction of a quick fetus” as opposed to William Blackstone’s Commentaries on the Laws of England, which stated, “Life is the immediate gift of God, a right inherent by nature in every individual; and it begins in contemplation of law as soon as the infant is able to stir in the mother’s womb.”

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