Many would like to believe the US Supreme Court’s 1973 Roe v. Wade decision legalising abortion settled the issue “once and for all”, but instead “all it did was establish a special-rules regime for abortion jurisprudence”, said Mississippi Attorney General Lynn Fitch.
This “has left these cases out of step with other court decisions and neutral principles of law applied by the court”, she said in an amicus, or friend of the court, brief filed with the high court July 22 in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organisation, a case involving a 2018 Mississippi abortion law banning most abortions after 15 weeks of pregnancy.
The court should overturn Roe v. Wade, she said, adding that a state can prohibit abortion before “viability” because “nothing in constitutional text, structure, history or tradition supports a right to abortion”.
The US Supreme Court said in a May 17 order that it will hear oral arguments during its next term on the Mississippi law. The court’s term opens in October and a decision is expected by June 2022.
Just after then-Mississippi Gov. Phil Bryant signed the law March 19, 2018, a federal judge blocked it temporarily from taking effect after the state’s only abortion clinic filed suit, saying it is unconstitutional.
It will be the biggest abortion case to come before the court since 1992’s Casey v. Planned Parenthood, which affirmed Roe and also stressed that a state regulation on abortion could not impose an “undue burden.