Supreme Court has overturned the pivotal 1973 Roe v.

Wade ruling that recognized a woman's constitutional right to an abortion and legalized it nationwide.

Jackson Women's Health Organization, centred on a Mississippi law banning abortion after 15 weeks.

Wade decision and leading up to the Dobbs ruling, the abortion issue has been marked by debates around regulation of the medical procedure, access to it and shifting public opinion, as well as occasional instances of deadly violence.

Wade, the case was seen as revealing changing attitudes concerning a woman's right to choose to terminate a pregnancy in certain circumstances, with 52 per cent of respondents telling a Gallup survey at the time that Finkbine was doing the right thing, and 32 per cent opposed to her decision.

In that opinion, the court ruled that states could not ban abortion, as a woman's decision to terminate her pregnancy was protected under the right to privacy that flows from the 14th Amendment of the U.S.

It was a Catholic woman named Nellie Gray who started the still-ongoing March for Life rallies against abortion. And it was Catholic religious leaders who objected most vociferously to the ruling. At the time, Cardinal Patrick O'Boyle called the Supreme Court opinion a "catastrophe for America" and said the court had "embraced a policy of death.".

When the Roe opinion came down, the organization's Baptist Press news service concluded that "religious liberty, human equality and justice are advanced by the Supreme Court abortion decision.".

The so-called Republican Revolution of the 1994 midterms that gave the party control of both houses of Congress saw lawmakers influenced by the vocal opposition to abortion rights reach Washington, D.C.

As for Catholics, while leadership is still opposed to abortion 50 years later, 56 per cent of the American Catholics who responded to the Pew survey this spring agreed that abortion should be legal in all or most cases.

"On average, an abortion at 10 weeks costs around $550 [US], which could be someone's entire monthly rent payment, and the cost increases as a pregnancy progresses," the group said in a 2021 news release on the amendment.

Biden, a practising Catholic, has struggled with the abortion issue through the years but pivoted during the 2020 presidential campaign.

American anti-abortion extremist James Kopp was known to have entered Canada but never definitively connected to three non-fatal attacks on abortion providers in Winnipeg, Vancouver and Hamilton in the 1990s.

The Supreme Court upheld the right to abortion in a 5-4 decision, again leaning heavily on the 14th Amendment

The push by states to regulate abortion accelerated after the Trump presidency saw the confirmation of three conservatives to the top court, making the Supreme Court composition a 6-3 majority of justices nominated by Republican presidents

Texas then upped the stakes by introducing a law in which individuals can sue abortion providers, seen as a new front in the effort to limit the procedure, while Mississippi appealed the legal challenge of its abortion ban all the way to the Supreme Court