65M women could lose abortion rights

More than 65 million American women would immediately lose access to an abortion in their home states if the U.S. Supreme Court strikes down the landmark case that established the right to seek the procedure nearly half a century ago.

Existing laws on the books in 20 states ban abortions or impose substantial restrictions on women or on abortion providers. Those laws are on hold, either blocked by courts or superseded by the high court’s 1973 decision in Roe v. Wade that protected a woman’s right to an abortion without excessive restrictions.

But the high court is now considering arguments in another case, Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, that gives the conservative majority their most significant chance in decades to gut the Roe precedent. In oral arguments Wednesday, the six conservatives seemed open to allowing a Mississippi law that bars abortions after 15 weeks to stand, undermining the core principles of the Roe verdict.

Post-Roe landscape: Twelve states — Arkansas, Idaho, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri, North Dakota, Oklahoma, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas and Utah — have passed laws that would bar all or nearly all abortions, written in a way that would allow them to take effect after the Supreme Court overturns Roe, according to the Guttmacher Institute, a pro-abortion rights research institution.

Eight states — Alabama, Arizona, Arkansas, Michigan, Mississippi, Oklahoma, West Virginia and Wisconsin — still have abortion bans on the books that were passed years, and sometimes decades, before Roe was decided. Texas has a similar law that is under injunction by a federal court.

But if the precedent is struck down, those laws would be enforceable once again, and the Supreme Court ruling would likely allow Texas’s law to take effect.