The State of Missouri becames the first state to seize on the Supreme Court decision overturning Roe v. Wade and has officially banned abortion in the state.
“Nearly all abortion is now banned in Missouri following the U.S. Supreme Court decision Friday ending the federal right to the procedure that marks the culmination of a decades-long campaign by Missouri abortion opponents to restrict – and one day eliminate – the lawful ability to end a pregnancy,” The Kansas City Star reported.
“The U.S. Supreme Court opinion overturns the federal right to abortion established by the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision,” the report added.
“Missouri has a ‘trigger law’ prohibiting abortions except those necessary because of medical emergencies in the event Roe is overturned,” the report continued. “The sole clinic in the state offering surgical abortions — in St. Louis — is almost certain to immediately stop performing the procedure. The decision is a historic moment not only for the country but for Missouri, ending nearly half a century of legal abortion in a state with deep anti-abortion roots. Missouri law barred abortion as early as 1825 – a prohibition that only ended with Roe 49 years ago.”
The Dobbs case handed down by the Supreme Court on Friday made it remarkably clear that despite all of the Democratic Party’s hyperbole and spin, there is no guaranteed right to abortion in the U.S. Constitution.
“The Court has been ‘reluctant’ to recognize rights that are not mentioned in the Constitution,” the court majority held. “Guided by the history and tradition that map the essential components of the Nation’s concept of ordered liberty, the Court finds the Fourteenth Amendment clearly does not protect the right to an abortion.”
“Until the latter part of the 20th century, there was no support in American law for a constitutional right to obtain an abortion,” the decision added. “No state constitutional provision had recognized such a right. Until a few years before Roe, no federal or state court had recognized such a right. Nor had any scholarly treatise. Indeed, abortion had long been a crime in every single State. At common law, abortion was criminal in at least some stages of pregnancy and was regarded as unlawful and could
have very serious consequences at all stages.”
“American law followed the common law until a wave of statutory restrictions in the 1800s expanded criminal liability for abortions,” the ruling continued. “By the time the Fourteenth Amendment was adopted, three-quarters of the States had made abortion a crime at any stage of pregnancy. This consensus endured until the day Roe was decided. Roe either ignored or misstated this history, and Casey declined to reconsider Roe’s faulty historical analysis.”
The Supreme Court then delivered the final blow to the respondents’ argument that abortion is a Constitutionally protected right.
“Respondents’ argument that this history does not matter flies in the face of the standard the Court has applied in determining whether an asserted right that is nowhere mentioned in the Constitution is nevertheless protected by the Fourteenth Amendment,” the court added.
The Dobbs decision not only hands a victory to conservatives who are opposed to abortion for religious and moral reasons, but it also firmly re-establishes the independence of the judiciary after a damaging internal leak of the majority opinion and threats made against the justices’ lives.
Syndicated with licensed permission from Becker News. Follow Becker News on Telegram.
Current Founder, CEO and Chief Editor of Becker News. Former Writer & Associate Producer at Fox News for #1 top-rated prime-time cable news show. Former Director of Viral Media and Senior Managing Editor for award-winning startup website IJReview, which grew to a readership of 20-30 million Americans a month. Led editorial and social media team that was #1 ranked news & politics publisher on Facebook for story engagement. Writer whose thousands of digital articles have been read by over 100 million unique users.