The Supreme Court of USA decided this Friday that abortion is not a federal right in the country. The fact occurs by annulling the precedent established by the Roe vs. Wade, which in 1973 conferred constitutional status to the freedom of women to terminate a pregnancy.
The high court has issued the ruling corresponding to the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization case, a reproductive health clinic in the capital of Mississippi in which the constitutionality of a law enacted by that state in 2018 is being settled, and which prohibits most interventions after the first 15 weeks of pregnancy, according to a note published by the Spanish newspaper The country.
This medium recalls that, in the background, the continuity of the Roe v Wade precedent was discussed, that six of the nine magistrates of the Supreme Court They have preferred to knock down, which is why the dream of the anti-abortion organizations in the country is fulfilled, with decades of waiting and pressing to achieve this moment.
The decision places in the 50 states the power to legislate on the subject. The announcement was expected, even more so after an unprecedented leak that at the beginning of last May revealed the content of a draft with the majority opinion of the judges on the subject, written in a tone of great harshness by Samuel Alito, a member of the most conservative wing of the Supreme Court.
Specialists in the matter calculated that the document had been written in February and had the support of Judges Amy Coney Barrett, Brett Kavanaugh, Clarence Thomas and Neil Gorsuch, who have given the highest court the most conservative tone in the last eight decades. The president of the Supreme Court, Judge John Roberts, has also joined this position.
Liberal magistrates Elena Kagan, Sonia Sotomayor and Stephen Breyer, who announced his retirement in January and already have a replacement, have voted against a decision that affects the lives of some 36 million women of reproductive age, also liberal Ketanji Brown Jackson. .
With the idea of subjecting the right to the interruption of pregnancy by law, and not leaving it to the decisions of the Supreme Court, the Democratic Party recently introduced in the Senate an initiative that it knew was doomed to failure and that aspired to turn the right to abortion into a federal regulation.
The Democrats, who have 50 of the 100 seats, were far from the 60 needed by virtue of the tradition of filibustering, which requires qualified majorities for issues of this magnitude. It was not even possible to garner the support of all his people: Joe Manchin, a senator from West Virginia, spoke against it and left the score at 49-51.
In accordance with The country, the sentence literally splits the country in two. As some states have stepped up their harassment of women’s rights, others have seen their clinics flooded with patients from places where the bans have gone into effect.
