It’s Official: The Supreme Court Has Overturned Roe v. Wade

The decision effectively ends abortion access for roughly 40 million women and girls in more nearly two dozen states across the country.

Nearly half a century after the Supreme Court ruled that the ability to end a pregnancy was a constitutional right, the nation’s highest court has overturned Roe v. Wade.

The majority opinion, authored by Justice Samuel Alito, ruled that the 1973 decision was wrong in its determination that an implied right to privacy in the U.S. Constitution protected a patient’s decision to have an abortion.

“The Constitution does not confer a right to abortion; Roe and Casey are overruled,” Alito wrote for the 6-3 majority. “The authority to regulate abortion is returned to the people and their elected representatives.”

The decision effectively ends abortion access for roughly 40 million women and girls in more nearly two dozen states across the country. Thirteen of those states have pre-emptively enacted “trigger laws” intended to impose severe restrictions on the procedure in the event of a Supreme Court ruling overturning Roe. Others have pre-Roe bans that remain on the books or have passed subsequent laws that have been blocked by federal courts.

Most of the laws, many of which take immediate effect, make exceptions only in cases where pregnancy is the result of rape or incest, or if an abortion is necessary to save a patient’s life.

The ruling is the culmination of five decades of legal, political, and social action by abortion opponents, whose previous efforts to impose limitations on the procedure were stymied by Supreme Court precedent. A similar case brought before the court in 1992, Casey v. Planned Parenthood, reaffirmed the protections provided in Roe.

But a shift in the Supreme Court’s composition during the Trump administration gave hope to abortion opponents that justices could rule to overturn Roe.

Alito was joined in the opinion by Justices Amy Coney Barrett, Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, and Clarence Thomas, all of whom were nominated to the court by Republican presidents. Chief Justice John Roberts concurred with the judgment in a separate opinion.

The case, Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, began winding its way through the federal court system four years ago, when Mississippi’s sole abortion clinic sought to overturn a 2018 law that banned abortions performed after 15 weeks of gestation. Lower courts, in keeping with precedent, successively determined that the law violated Roe’s abortion protections.

The landmark decision in Dobbs comes seven weeks after a draft of the majority opinion was leaked to Politico. That draft, confirmed to be authentic by Roberts shortly after its release in early May, follows nearly verbatim the final ruling issued on Friday.

Publication of the draft opinion sparked a national uproar over what appeared to be Roe’s imminent demise, although supporters of abortion rights gained little ground in the weeks before the final decision was released. Congressional Democrats tried and failed to pass legislation that would have codified abortion access into federal law, and President Joe Biden was deeply criticized by abortion-rights leaders for his perceived reticence to address the issue on its face.

“After the 2020 election, they went on and on and on about how ‘Black women saved the Senate, Black women saved democracy.’ Black women were asking you to make sure that we have access to health care,” Renee Bracey Sherman, founder and executive director of We Testify, an organization that represents those who have had abortions, told The Daily Beast tearfully before the final decision was released. “Where were you?”