Supreme Court Ready To Overturn Roe v. Wade, according to Leaked Draft Opinion

In a draft opinion that would eviscerate almost 50 years of legal abortion rights for women in the United States, a majority of justices on the Supreme Court has apparently voted to overturn the Roe vs. Wade decision that effectively legalize the procedure nationwide.

The decision was made public through the unprecedented leak of the draft, written by Justice Samuel Alito, to Politico, which published the 98-page document on Monday evening. It is labeled “1st Draft” with a notice that the “opinion is subject to formal revision before publication.” Politico’s story noted that justices have in the past revised draft opinions in substantive ways before official rulings are issued.

Still, the draft signals that at least at present, a majority of Supreme Court justices, including one of three women on the court, intend to gut what for five decades has existed as women’s right to choose whether to take a pregnancy to term.

From Politico

The draft opinion is a full-throated, unflinching repudiation of the 1973 decision which guaranteed federal constitutional protections of abortion rights and a subsequent 1992 decision – Planned Parenthood v. Casey – that largely maintained the right. “Roe was egregiously wrong from the start,” Alito writes.

“We hold that Roe and Casey must be overruled,” he writes in the document, labeled as the “Opinion of the Court.” “It is time to heed the Constitution and return the issue of abortion to the people’s elected representatives.”

The draft was apparently written and circulated to the eight other members of the court in February. According to Politico, Alito was joined in the opinion by four other conservative justices: Amy Coney Barrett, Neil Gorsuch, Clarence Thomas and Brett Kavanaugh. That means Chief Justice John Roberts, who was nominated by Republican President George W. Bush, joined the three associate justices nominated by Democratic presidents in dissent.

Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson, who was confirmed to be the first Black woman Supreme Court justice designee last month, hasn’t yet been seated, but her vote wouldn’t have changed the court’s ideological makeup and therefore likely wouldn’t have changed the decision.

The ruling culminates two generations of conservative political strategy that attempted to seat enough SCOTUS justices to reverse Roe vs. Wade, the 1973 decision that legalized abortion based on women’s right to privacy over their medical decision. That decision was decided by a margin of 7-2, with five justices appointed by Republicans and two appointed by Democrats in a majority decision.

Left-leaning groups weighed in on Monday night.

“If this report is true, this Republican attack on abortion access, birth control and women’s health care has dramatically escalated the stakes of the 2022 election,” said Christie Roberts, executive director of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee. “At this critical moment, we must protect and expand Democrats’ Senate majority with the power to confirm or reject Supreme Court justices.”