US Supreme Court is weighing a Mississippi abortion case that could ultimately overturn landmark 1973 Roe v Wade ruling.
Sarah Weddington, a Texas lawyer who as a 26-year-old successfully argued the landmark abortion rights case Roe v. Wade before the U.S. Supreme Court, died Sunday. She was 76.
Susan Hays, Weddington's former student and colleague, said she died in her sleep early Sunday morning at her Austin home. Weddington had been in poor health for some time and it was not immediately clear what caused her death, Hays told The Associated Press.
Raised as a minister's daughter in the West Texas city of Abilene, Weddington attended law school at the University of Texas. A couple years after graduating, she and a former classmate, Linda Coffee, brought a class-action lawsuit on behalf of a pregnant woman challenging a state law that largely banned abortions.
The case of "Jane Roe," whose real name was Norma McCorvey, was brought against Dallas County District Attorney Henry Wade and eventually advanced to the Supreme Court.
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Weddington argued the case before the high court twice, in December 1971 and again in October 1972, resulting the next year in the 7-2 ruling that legalized abortion nationwide.
Weddington's death comes as the Supreme Court is considering a case over Mississippi's ban on abortions after 15 weeks of pregnancy that's widely considered to be most serious challenge in years to the Roe decision.
Full obituary:
In their own words and votes: The 9 Supreme Court justices, on abortion
Intro
WASHINGTON (AP) — Abortion already is dominating the Supreme Court’s new term, months before the justices will decide whether to reverse decisions reaching back nearly 50 years. Not only is there Mississippi's call to overrule Roe v. Wade, but the court also soon will be asked again to weigh in on the Texas law banning abortion at roughly six weeks.
The justices won't be writing on a blank slate as they consider the future of abortion rights in the U.S. They have had a lot to say about abortion over the years — in opinions, votes, Senate confirmation testimony and elsewhere. Just one, Clarence Thomas, has openly called for overruling Roe and Planned Parenthood v. Casey, the two cases that established and reaffirmed a woman’s right to an abortion. Here is a sampling of their comments:
Chief Justice John Roberts
Chief Justice John Roberts voted to uphold restrictions in two major abortion cases, in the majority in 2007 to uphold a ban on a method of abortion opponents call "partial-birth abortion" and in dissent in 2016 when the court struck down Texas restrictions on abortion clinics in a case called Whole Woman's Health. But when a virtually identical law from Louisiana came before the court in 2020, Roberts voted against it and wrote the opinion controlling the outcome of the case and striking down the Louisiana law. The chief justice said he continues to believe that the 2016 case "was wrongly decided" but that the question was "whether to adhere to it in deciding the present case."
Roberts' views on when to break with court precedent could determine how far he is willing to go in the Mississippi case. At his 2005 confirmation hearing, he said overturning precedent "is a jolt to the legal system," which depends in part on stability and evenhandedness. Thinking that an earlier case was wrongly decided is not enough, he said. Overturning a case requires looking "at these other factors, like settled expectations, like the legitimacy of the Court, like whether a particular precedent is workable or not, whether a precedent has been eroded by subsequent developments," Roberts said then.
In the same hearing, Roberts was asked to explain his presence on a legal brief filed by the George H.W. Bush administration that said Roe's conclusion that there is a right to abortion has "no support in the text, structure, or history of the Constitution.'' Roberts responded that the brief reflected the administration's views.
Justice Clarence Thomas
Associate Justice Clarence Thomas voted to overturn Roe in 1992, in his first term on the court, when he was a dissenter in Planned Parenthood v. Casey. He has repeatedly called for Roe and Casey to be overturned since.
In 2000, he wrote in dissent when the court struck down Nebraska's ban on "partial-birth abortion." Recounting the court's decision in Roe, he wrote, "In 1973, this Court struck down an Act of the Texas Legislature that had been in effect since 1857, thereby rendering unconstitutional abortion statutes in dozens of States. As some of my colleagues on the Court, past and present, ably demonstrated, that decision was grievously wrong. Abortion is a unique act, in which a woman's exercise of control over her own body ends, depending on one's view, human life or potential human life. Nothing in our Federal Constitution deprives the people of this country of the right to determine whether the consequences of abortion to the fetus and to society outweigh the burden of an unwanted pregnancy on the mother. Although a State may permit abortion, nothing in the Constitution dictates that a State must do so."
Justice Stephen Breyer
Associate Justice Stephen Breyer has been the lead author of two court majorities in defense of abortion rights, in 2000 and 2016. He has never voted to sustain an abortion restriction, but he has acknowledged the controversy over abortion.
Millions of Americans believe "that an abortion is akin to causing the death of an innocent child," while millions of others "fear that a law that forbids abortion would condemn many American women to lives that lack dignity," he wrote in the Nebraska case 21 years ago, calling those views "virtually irreconcilable." Still, Breyer wrote, because the Constitution guarantees "fundamental individual liberty" and has to govern even when there are strong divisions in the country, "this Court, in the course of a generation, has determined and then redetermined that the Constitution offers basic protection to the woman's right to choose."
Justice Samuel Alito
Associate Justice Samuel Alito has a long track record of votes and writings opposing abortion rights, as a jurist and, earlier, a government lawyer.
Alito has voted to uphold every abortion law the court has considered since his 2006 confirmation, joining a majority to uphold the federal "partial-birth" abortion law and dissenting in the 2016 and 2020 cases.
As a federal appeals court judge, he voted to uphold a series of Pennsylvania abortion restrictions, including requiring a woman to notify her spouse before obtaining an abortion. The Supreme Court ultimately struck down the notification rule in Casey and reaffirmed the abortion right in 1992 by a 5-4 vote.
Working for the Reagan administration in 1985, Alito wrote in a memo that the government should say publicly in a pending abortion case "that we disagree with Roe v. Wade." Around the same time, applying for a promotion, Alito noted he was "particularly proud" of his work arguing "that the Constitution does not protect a right to an abortion."
Justice Sonia Sotomayor
Associate Justice Sonia Sotomayor joined the court in 2009 with virtually no record on abortion issues, but has voted repeatedly in favor of abortion rights since then. Recently, when the court allowed Texas' restrictive abortion law to take effect, Sotomayor accused her colleagues of burying "their heads in the sand." She was in the majority in the Texas and Louisiana abortion clinic cases.
Sotomayor's displeasure with the court's recent Texas ruling was evident at a recent virtual appearance she made. "I can't change Texas' law, but you can," she said.
Justice Elena Kagan
Associate Justice Elena Kagan also has repeatedly voted in favor of abortion rights in more than 11 years as a justice. She is also arguably the most consistent voice on the court arguing for the importance of adhering to precedents and can be expected to try to persuade her colleagues not to jettison constitutional protections for abortion.
Kagan was in the majority when the court struck down the Texas and Louisiana restrictions on abortion clinics. More recently, Kagan called Texas' new abortion law "patently unconstitutional" and a "clear, and indeed undisputed, conflict with Roe and Casey."
Kagan had already grappled with the issue of abortion before becoming a justice. While working in the Clinton White House she was the co-author of a memo that urged the president for political reasons to support a late-term abortion ban proposed by Republicans in Congress, so long as it contained an exception for the health of the woman. Ultimately, President George W. Bush signed a similar late-term abortion ban without a health exception. The Supreme Court upheld it.
Justice Neil Gorsuch
Associate Justice Neil Gorsuch has perhaps the shortest record on abortion among the nine justices. He was in the majority allowing Texas' restrictive abortion law to take effect. In dissent in 2020, he would have upheld Louisiana's abortion clinic restrictions. As an appeals court judge before joining the Supreme Court in 2017, Gorsuch dissented when his colleagues declined to reconsider a ruling that blocked then-Utah Gov. Gary Herbert from cutting off funding for the state branch of Planned Parenthood. But Gorsuch insisted at his Senate confirmation hearing that he was concerned about procedural issues, not the subject matter. "I do not care if the case is about abortion or widgets or anything else," he said.
Justice Brett Kavanaugh
Associate Justice Brett Kavanaugh's name was added to former President Donald Trump's shortlist of Supreme Court candidates shortly after he sided with the administration in a 2017 case involving abortion. Trump chose him for the court the following year. As a justice, Kavanaugh dissented from the Louisiana decision and voted to allow the new Texas law to take effect, though he has taken a less absolutist stance than some of his conservative colleagues. In the Louisiana case, for example, Kavanaugh wrote that more information was needed about how the state's restrictions on clinics would affect doctors who provide abortions and seemed to suggest his vote could change knowing that information.
Kavanaugh's most extensive writing on abortion came while he was a judge on the federal appeals court in Washington. The Trump administration had appealed a lower court ruling ordering it to allow a pregnant 17-year-old immigrant in its custody to get an abortion. The administration's policy was to decline to help those minors get abortions while in custody.
Kavanaugh was on a three-judge panel that postponed the abortion, arguing that officials should be given a limited window to transfer the minor out of government custody to the care of a sponsor. She could then obtain an abortion without the government's assistance. The full appeals court later reversed the decision and the teenager obtained an abortion. Kavanaugh called that decision out-of-step with the "many majority opinions of the Supreme Court that have repeatedly upheld reasonable regulations that do not impose an undue burden on the abortion right recognized by the Supreme Court in Roe v. Wade."
Kavanaugh was criticized by some conservatives for not going as far as a colleague, Judge Karen Henderson, who stated unambiguously that an immigrant in the U.S. illegally has no right to an abortion. At his appeals court confirmation hearing, Kavanaugh dodged questions on his own personal beliefs on Roe v. Wade.
Justice Amy Coney Barrett
Associate Justice Amy Coney Barrett's one public vote on the Supreme Court concerning abortion was to allow the Texas "fetal heartbeat" law to take effect. She also cast two votes as an appeals court judge to reconsider rulings that blocked Indiana abortion restrictions.
In 2016, shortly before the election that would put Trump in office, she commented about how she thought abortion law might change if Trump had the chance to appoint justices. "I ... don't think the core case — Roe's core holding that, you know, women have a right to an abortion — I don't think that would change," said Barrett, then a Notre Dame law professor. She said limits on what she called "very late-term abortions" and restrictions on abortion clinics would be more likely to be upheld.
Barrett also has a long record of personal opposition to abortion rights, co-authoring a 1998 law review article that said abortion is "always immoral." At her 2017 hearing to be an appeals court judge, Barrett said in written testimony, "If I am confirmed, my views on this or any other question will have no bearing on the discharge of my duties as a judge."
Abortion laws around the world
Abortion laws around the world
Across the world, abortion is a controversial and emotional topic. Pro-choice activists are adamant that abortion is a fundamental human right that gives women control over their own bodies and reproductive futures. Their conservative opponents are equally obstinate, with many believing that life begins at conception, and that aborting a fetus is tantamount to murder.
And in countries all around the world right now, abortion laws are shifting rapidly. In some conservative countries and provinces—like Turkey and the American state of Texas—longstanding protections of the right to an abortion are being curtailed. In other countries with dominant Catholic religious traditions—such as Argentina and Ireland—activists have waged and won years-long campaigns to make access to abortion the law of the land. In the case of one such country, Mexico, activists have hypothesized that the country’s new legalization of abortion may end up making it a destination for women from Texas, who previously had greater access to abortions than Mexican women, but no longer do.
Stacker compiled a list of abortion laws in 15 countries around the world from news and government reports. Keep reading for a look at the shifting tides of abortion access around the world in 2021.
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Poland
In 2021, Poland made international headlines for instituting a near-total abortion ban. Although the majority of Poles support access to abortion, the country’s conservative government is aligned with the Catholic church, which opposes abortion. Upon the ruling that access to abortion would only be permitted in the cases of rape and incest, huge crowds of Poles took to the streets to protest. Poland already had highly restrictive abortion laws, and an estimated 200,000 women leave the country each year to seek access to abortion elsewhere.
Mexico
Until 2021, having an abortion in Mexico was considered a crime. The Supreme Court decriminalized abortion in September of that year, but pro-choice activists warn there is a long road ahead to ensure open access to abortions in the country. The same month in the United States, however, restrictive abortion laws went into effect in Texas, across the border, raising the prospect of Mexico becoming a destination for American women looking for abortions, in a reversal of longstanding trends.
United States
In September 2021, the Supreme Court refused to block a piece of Texas legislation that bans abortions in the state after six weeks. Pro-choice activists in Texas—and their allies across the nation—decried the move as a de facto near total ban on abortions, as many women do not even know they are pregnant at six weeks. The court’s decision may set up a showdown over abortion rights on a national level at the Supreme Court, as current conditions in Texas cut against the landmark ruling guaranteeing abortion access across the country, Roe vs. Wade.
Japan
Abortions are legal in Japan up to 21 weeks and 6 days of pregnancy. One key difference between abortion laws in Japan and much of the rest of the world is that Japan requires the father of the baby to give consent before a pregnancy is terminated, although many women circumvent this by bringing a man along who is not the father but has agreed to pretend he is. Japan is only one of 11 countries in the world that require third-party consent, and activists are pushing the country to end this requirement.
Russia
Russia has one of the world’s highest abortion rates. President Vladimir Putin is attempting to stop Russia’s high rate of termination in an attempt to redress the country’s population decline. Russia currently pays for abortions under the country’s medical insurance program. Putin’s government—along with the country’s conservative church leaders—are trying to redirect this funding into material support for women who choose to continue the pregnancy.
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China
China is moving to limit abortion access in order to increase its falling birthrate. The country’s birth rate has fallen to its lowest level since 1961, which concerned government officials enough to reverse China’s decades-long one-child policy in 2015. The announcement that China would attempt to limit abortions via improved contraceptive access or restricted abortion access or both has worried some women in the country, who fear they may be left without control of their reproductive futures should the state ban abortions entirely.
Argentina
Until 2020, abortion was only legal in Argentina in the case of rape and incest. But at the end of 2020, Argentina’s congress voted to legalize abortion up to 14 weeks of pregnancy. The legislation’s success was attributed in part to a massive protest movement of Argentinian women and their allies, whose years-long campaign culminated in the new law. Legalization is a blow to the country’s religious establishment, the Catholic church, which opposes abortion access.
South Africa
Abortion was legalized in South Africa in 1996, during the country’s transition from apartheid to democracy. A 2008 amendment to the law expanded access by allowing trained nurses to administer abortions. However, despite the strength of existing laws protecting the right to an abortion, there is a significant access divide in the country, with women in rural areas experiencing difficulty in finding a willing provider compared to their urban counterparts.
Australia
Expanded access to abortion in Australia has been a piecemeal effort, as various states across the country moved to decriminalize the procedure. The most populous state, Sydney, voted to allow abortions up to 22 weeks in 2019, overturning a 119-year-old law prohibiting it. In 2021, South Australia became the final state to overturn the prohibition of abortions, making the procedure legal across the entire country.
Italy
Italy’s highly Catholic culture has led to restrictive abortion laws in the country. Although legal for the first 90 days of pregnancy, acquiring an abortion in Italy is a cumbersome process. Providers are allowed to opt out of providing abortions due to “conscientious objection,” which leaves many women and girls scrambling to find providers in the required time frame. This difficulty was exacerbated during the coronavirus pandemic, when borders were sealed and women could not travel outside the country to find a willing provider.
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Saudi Arabia
In Saudi Arabia, abortion is allowed only in cases where the mother’s life is at risk, or to protect her physical or mental health. Rape and incest exceptions are taken on a case-by-case basis, and can be allowed under the aegis of potential harm to a woman’s mental health. Despite the restrictions, abortion activists have pointed out that women actually have greater access to abortions in Saudi Arabia than they do in American states like Alabama and Georgia, where politicians decry Islamic law in countries like Saudi Arabia as hostile to women’s rights, while curtailing them even further at home.
Turkey
Although abortion has been legal in Turkey since 1983, the procedure is becoming increasingly difficult to access. The country’s conservative president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, has said that he believes abortion is a crime, and that women should all have three children. Public hospitals are allowed to refuse to provide abortions based simply on the president’s point of view, making it difficult for many women to afford abortions at private clinics, and thus access abortions at all.
South Korea
In 2021, South Korea decriminalized abortion across the country. Before this landmark ruling legalizing abortion, an estimated 50,000–500,000 dangerous illegal abortions were performed in the country each year. Women caught trying to get illegal abortions were subject to punishments of up to a year in prison.
India
In 2021, India passed a law significantly expanding access to abortions. The Medical Termination of Pregnancy Amendment Act of 2021 extends the grounds on which abortions will be permitted to include therapeutic, humanitarian, eugenic, and social grounds, allowing for near-universal access. India’s stated goal in expanding access is to decrease the country’s maternal mortality rate.
Ireland
Ireland legalized abortion across the country in a seismic 2018 referendum. The Catholic nation imposed a near-total abortion ban in 1983 that gave the mother and fetus equal legal rights. Thirty-five years later, voters rejected this provision by nearly 2-to-1, and a law was passed the following year establishing the country’s state-run abortion service providers.
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