Mississippi attorney general asks Supreme Court to overturn Roe v. Wade

From Washington Examiner.com (July 22):

Mississippi Attorney General Lynn Fitch asked the Supreme Court to overturn the landmark 1973 decision Roe v. Wade that legalized abortion nationwide, calling the ruling "egregiously wrong."

“Under the Constitution, may a State prohibit elective abortions before viability? Yes. Why? Because nothing in constitutional text, structure, history, or tradition supports a right to abortion," Fitch wrote in a brief filed to the court on Thursday.

The request pertains to Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization involving a 2018 Mississippi law that would ban abortions after 15 weeks of pregnancy, with narrow exceptions for medical emergencies. The law was blocked in lower courts before it could take effect, and the Supreme Court announced in May it would take the case to decide “whether all pre-viability prohibitions on elective abortions are unconstitutional."

Court precedent, first established with the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision and reaffirmed in the 1992 Planned Parenthood of Southeastern Pennsylvania v. Casey decision, is that there is a right to legal abortion before the fetus reaches the gestational age at which it's likely to survive outside the womb.

The conservative-majority Supreme Court has the power to throw out that law in its next term.

“There are those who would like to believe that Roe v. Wade settled the issue of abortion once and for all. But all it did was establish a special-rules regime for abortion jurisprudence that has left these cases out of step with ... neutral principles of law applied by the Court,” Fitch said. "Artificial guideposts have stunted important public debate on how we, as a society, care for the dignity of women and their children. It is time for the Court to set this right and return this political debate to the political branches of government.” [read more]

It probably won’t happen, but the attorney general had to try. The abortion decision should go back to the states anyway. 

Another article on the subject: Mississippi Challenges Roe at the Supreme Court