Breaking

Fetal Viability, Long an Abortion Dividing Line, Faces a Supreme Court Test - The New York Times
Nov 28, 2021 2 mins, 40 secs
Wade, the Supreme Court drew a line.

The Constitution, it said, did not allow states to ban abortions before the fetus could survive outside the womb.

The case concerns a Mississippi law that bans most abortions after 15 weeks, long before fetal viability.

The court could overrule Roe entirely, allowing states to ban abortions at any point.

But at least some justices may want to find a way to sustain the Mississippi law without overturning Roe in so many words, requiring them to discard the viability line and replace it with another standard that would allow a cutoff at 15 weeks.

They said the court could revise another existing standard, one prohibiting an “undue burden” on the right to abortion, to allow the 15-week cutoff by focusing on the fact that a substantial majority of abortions take place by then.

Or, the lawyers wrote, the court could simply uphold the Mississippi law and leave for another day the knotty problem of drawing a new line.

“The state offers no alternative to the viability line that could sustain a stable right to abortion,” they wrote.

The Supreme Court considered other approaches in Roe itself.

Blackmun, who wrote the majority opinion, initially chose another place to draw the line, at around 13 weeks.

In the United States, the Supreme Court has repeatedly reaffirmed viability as the line required by the Constitution.

Casey, which established that states could not place an “undue burden” on women seeking abortions before fetal viability, the court said viability was part of Roe’s “essential holding.”.

Lawyers for the state spent all but the last few pages of their main Supreme Court brief on a frontal attack on Roe and Casey, saying they were “egregiously wrong” and should be overruled, allowing states to ban abortions at any time.

The brief’s final pages did propose two approaches that would allow the Supreme Court to uphold the Mississippi law but avoid overruling Roe.

The court is poised to use a challenge to a Mississippi law that bars most abortions after 15 weeks to undermine and perhaps overturn Roe v.

First, the state’s brief said, “the court could hold that the state’s interests in protecting unborn life, women’s health and the medical profession’s integrity are, at a minimum, compelling at 15 weeks’ gestation” and “leave for another day the question of what standard applies in the absence of a viability rule.”.

Second, the brief said, the court could transform Casey’s “undue burden” standard to allow outright bans on abortions before viability if they do not impose a substantial obstacle to a significant number of women seeking abortions.

Since most women obtain abortions in the first trimester and the sole abortion clinic in Mississippi performs abortions until 16 weeks, the brief said, the law does not impose an undue burden.

“If people are still able to get 95 percent of the abortions that happen in this country at 15 weeks or before, that’s still very significant,” he said.

“One of the questions many of us will be interested in is whether it’s possible to sever viability from Roe and Casey and have anything left — if the court can pull off the trick it did in Planned Parenthood v

RECENT NEWS

SUBSCRIBE

Get monthly updates and free resources.

CONNECT WITH US

© Copyright 2024 365NEWSX - All RIGHTS RESERVED