The US Supreme Court heard oral arguments in a landmark abortion case out of Mississippi, which seeks to overturn the high court’s landmark Roe v Wade ruling which cemented abortion rights in the country in 1973.
Conservative justices signalled their likelihood to uphold the Mississippi law at the centre of the case, which bans abortions after 15 weeks. The Supreme Court’s ruling isn’t expected until June 2022.
Overturning Roe would immediately or quickly ban most abortions in more than 20 states, forcing women who can afford it to travel hundreds of miles to safely access care.
Members of Congress joined hundreds of abortion rights activists and anti-abortion demonstrators who braved a chilly Washington DC morning to rally outside the court on Wednesday. US Capitol Police arrested at least 33 people for obstructing traffic near the court.
In her opening remarks, Justice Sonia Sotomayor grilled Mississippi solicitor general Scott Stewart about the overt politics of the abortion case before them, despite 50 years of precedent.
She added: “Now the sponsors of this bill ... are saying, ‘We’re doing this because we have new justices on the Supreme Court’. Will this institution survive the stench that this creates in the public perception that the Constitution and its reading are just political acts?”
“If people believe it’s all political, how will we survive? How will the court survive?” she said.
Justices repeatedly returned to the question of fetal viability outside the womb, at around 24 weeks of pregnancy and a barrier against prohibitive laws established under Roe precedent and later affirmed in Planned Parenthood v Casey.
After nearly two hours of arguments, the Supreme Court’s six conservative justices appeared willing to undermine such precedents.
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