Report | Leaked draft shows Supreme Court would overturn Roe v. Wade

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Jordan Palmer, Chief Digital Content Officer

According to a leaked draft opinion published by Politico on Monday, it appears a majority of the U.S. Supreme Court has voted to overturn the landmark 1973 ruling Roe v. Wade that established the right to abortion nearly 50 years ago,

In the Politico report, Justice Samuel Alito wrote the draft which was circulated among the Justices in February. Politico says that Alito was joined by justices Clarence Thomas and all three of former President Donald Trump’s nominees – Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett.  Justices Stephen Breyer, Elana Kagan, and Sonia Sotomayor were working on dissents. It was unclear how Chief Justice John Roberts voted.

The landmark 1973 case of Roe v. Wade, ruled that women had a constitutional right to terminate a pregnancy in consultation with their physician. Through the years since Roe, successive majorities on the Supreme Court have struck down all previous attempts to modify the finding that women have a constitutionally protected right to an abortion at any stage in pregnancy.

“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 in the draft. “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.”

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