With a solid 6-3 majority, the court’s right wing is increasingly emboldened to make big rulings on divisive issues.
has highlighted the growing power of its conservative majority and raised questions about how far it might go in reconsidering precedents on other social issues such as contraception and same-sex marriage.
“It is time to heed the constitution and return the issue of abortion to the people’s elected representatives,” he added, in a decision that was joined by fellow conservatives Clarence Thomas, Amy Coney Barrett, Brett Kavanaugh and Neil Gorsuch. Chief Justice John Roberts joined the court’s judgment, but not the more expansive majority opinion.
Michele Goodwin, professor at the University of California, Irvine School of Law, said the court in its decision on Friday has accepted “Mississippi’s invitation to rid the country of a national right . . . such that these issues will now devolve to something that is closest to the time that we had in American slavery, where there were free states and there were states in which people’s . . . independence [and] freedom were not recognised”.
Although he agreed with his colleagues’ judgment in favour of the Mississippi law, Roberts said he would have preferred a more “measured course” that would have kept Roe in place while rejecting a rule articulated in that decision — and a subsequent case affirming it, Planned Parenthood vs Casey — that abortion was permitted up until a foetus is deemed “viable”, or able to survive outside the womb.
In their dissent, the court’s liberal wing decried many of the ruling’s outcomes, among them, how it “undermines the court’s legitimacy . . .[and] betrays its guiding principles”. The conservative majority downplayed those concerns, saying they were “designed to stoke unfounded fear that our decision will imperil those other rights”.
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