FATE OF ABORTION ACCESS LOOMS OVER NEW SUPREME COURT TERM

The Supreme Court is slated to hear a number of hot-button issues in the new term that started Monday, but one case looms largest: a clash over a Mississippi abortion law that directly challenges Roe v. Wade.

Conservatives and anti-abortion activists hope the case will mark the culmination of nearly five decades of their concerted effort to narrow the constitutional right to abortion first recognized by the court in 1973.

Mississippi officials have made no secret of their goal. The state’s Republican attorney general in a court brief filed over the summer explicitly urged the justices to use the dispute over Mississippi’s 15-week abortion ban as a vehicle to overrule Roe and related rulings, calling the court’s precedent on abortion “egregiously wrong.”

“This Court should overrule Roe and Casey,” Mississippi Attorney General Lynn Fitch wrote, referring also to the court’s 1992 decision in Planned Parenthood v. Casey. “Roe and Casey are egregiously wrong. They have proven hopelessly unworkable. … And nothing but a full break from those cases can stem the harms they have caused.”

Abortion rights advocates have warned that if the Supreme Court were to dramatically undermine the constitutional right to abortion, then “chaos would ensue.”

“The fallout would be swift and certain,” abortion providers argued in their court brief opposing Mississippi’s law, which has been put on pause during litigation. “As abortion bans are enforced — or the threat of enforcement looms — large swaths of the South and Midwest would likely be without access to legal abortion.”