Court’s liberals on abortion ruling: No rights from ‘moment of fertilization’

The Supreme Court’s three liberals in a fierce dissent Friday said the conservative majority’s decision overruling Roe v. Wade means that “from the very moment of fertilization, a woman has no rights to speak of.”

The 6-3 ruling erases the nearly 50-year-old constitutional right to abortion first recognized under the 1973 landmark decision and hands states the power to drastically limit or even ban the procedure outright.

The court’s liberal trio of Justices Stephen Breyer, Elena Kagan and Sonia Sotomayor, in a blistering 66-page dissent, condemned the conservatives for toppling the delicate balance of interests that Roe and related decisions sought to strike.

“Today, the Court discards that balance,” they wrote in dissent. “It says that from the very moment of fertilization, a woman has no rights to speak of. A State can force her to bring a pregnancy to term, even at the steepest personal and familial costs.”

“Whatever the exact scope of the coming laws, one result of today’s decision is certain: the curtailment of women’s rights, and of their status as free and equal citizens,” they added. “As of today, this Court holds, a State can always force a woman to give birth, prohibiting even the earliest abortions. A State can thus transform what, when freely undertaken, is a wonder into what, when forced, may be a nightmare.”

The majority ruling upholds Mississippi’s 15-week abortion ban, which directly clashed with Roe’s requirement that states permit abortion up to the point of fetal viability, around 24 weeks

Justice Samuel Alito, writing for the majority, called Roe “egregiously wrong from the start,” adding: “It is time to heed the Constitution and return the issue of abortion to the people’s elected representatives.”

The Friday ruling will fundamentally reshape American society and yield a complex patchwork of state laws that will effectively block large swathes of the population from terminating unwanted pregnancies.

More than two dozen states, primarily in the South and Midwest, are expected to tighten abortion access as a result of Roe falling, including 13 states with “trigger bans” set to take effect automatically or through minimal effort by state officials.