In a 6-3 vote, US Supreme Court Justices have overturned one of the most controversial decisions in history—Roe v. Wade. The 1973 landmark decision that stripped states of the right to prohibit abortion is over half a century old.

The Supreme Court ruling effectively ends the constitutional right to abortion and gives individual states the power to allow, limit, or ban the practice altogether. The ruling essentially says the right to kill unborn children is not in the United States Constitution.

Fox News reports – The ruling came in the court’s opinion in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, which centered on a Mississippi law that banned abortion after 15 weeks of pregnancy. The Republican-led state of Mississippi asked the Supreme Court to strike down a lower court ruling that stopped the 15-week abortion ban from taking place.

“We end this opinion where we began. Abortion presents a profound moral question. The Constitution does not prohibit the citizens of each State from regulating or prohibiting abortion. Roe and Casey arrogated that authority. We now overrule those decisions and return that authority to the people and their elected representatives,” Justice Samuel Alito wrote in the court’s opinion.

On May 2, a vote that took place within the Supreme Court Justice chambers on Roe v. Wade was leaked to the media. To date, the person who leaked the information has not been identified or charged for the unprecedented leak.

In my lifetime, I never thought I would see the day when a majority of Supreme Court Justices would agree that abortion rights should not have been decided in the Supreme Court but instead, left up to the individual states to decide.

Thanks to President Donald J. Trump, a historic decision by three of his appointees to the Supreme Court, Justices, Gorsuch, Kavanaugh, and Coney Barrett as well as George W. Bush appointed Justice Alito and George H. W. Bush appointed Thomas, an untold number of lives will be saved.

Politico was provided with the leak –

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.

 

“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.”

Deliberations on controversial cases have in the past been fluid. Justices can and sometimes do change their votes as draft opinions circulate and major decisions can be subject to multiple drafts and vote-trading, sometimes until just days before a decision is unveiled. The court’s holding will not be final until it is published, likely in the next two months.

The immediate impact of the ruling as drafted in February would be to end a half-century guarantee of federal constitutional protection of abortion rights and allow each state to decide whether to restrict or ban abortion. It’s unclear if there have been subsequent changes to the draft.

No draft decision in the modern history of the court has been disclosed publicly while a case was still pending. The unprecedented revelation is bound to intensify the debate over what was already the most controversial case on the docket this term.