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Mississippi Files Brief Calling on Supreme Court to Overturn Roe v. Wade: 'Nothing in Constitutional Text, Structure, History, or Tradition Supports a Right to Abortion'

Calvin Freiburger : Jul 23, 2021
LifeSiteNews.com

Now the only remaining question is how the court's Republican-appointed majority will vote. Only Justice Clarence Thomas is explicitly on the record as anti-Roe, and only he and Justice Samuel Alito have established consistently conservative records over a significant period of time.

airlift[LifeSiteNews.com] Mississippi officially submitted its brief to the United States Supreme Court Thursday in defense of its law banning abortion at 15 weeks of pregnancy, in which it makes the case that the nation's highest court should take the opportunity to finally overturn Roe v. Wade. (Screengrab image)

The Court announced in May that it would be hearing Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization, which concerns Mississippi's HB 1510 law banning abortions from being committed past 15 weeks for any reason other than physical medical emergencies or severe fetal abnormalities. After its enactment in 2019, the law was temporarily blocked, then declared unconstitutional by the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals.

The federal appellate court claimed that an "unbroken line dating to Roe v. Wade," the 1973 ruling which imposed on all 50 states a "right" to pre-viability abortion, but that "unbroken line" is precisely what pro-life activists have long hoped to challenge.

"[N]othing in constitutional text, structure, history, or tradition supports a right to abortion," declares the brief from the Mississippi Attorney General's Office, before making what it calls an "overwhelming" case for overruling the "egregiously wrong" Roe, along with 1992's Planned Parenthood v. Casey (which opened the door to some abortion regulations while reaffirming the "right" to abort itself).

"Roe based a right to abortion on decisions protecting aspects of privacy under the Due Process Clause," but "broke from prior cases by invoking a general 'right of privacy' unmoored from the Constitution," the brief notes. "Notably, Casey did not embrace Roe's reasoning," but instead defended "Roe's result—based on the liberty this Court has afforded to certain 'personal decisions,'" while similarly "failing to tie a right to abortion to anything in the Constitution"... Subscribe for free to Breaking Christian News here

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