Roe V. Wade Overturned: What It Means In Maryland

MARYLAND — In a historic move, the U.S. Supreme Court struck down Friday the nearly 50-year-old Roe v. Wade decision that legalized abortion. Twenty-six states are expected to enact strict restrictions or bans on abortion in light of the ruling, but Maryland isn't likely to be one of them.

Maryland passed legislation in 1991 to protect a woman's right to abortion if the Supreme Court should ever restrict abortions, according to the Associated Press.

"The Supreme Court has said states may regulate abortion. Maryland is choosing right now to not regulate abortion, so abortions will take place as they always have in Maryland," Mark Graber, regents professor at the University of Maryland Carey School of Law, told WBAL-TV.

With Roe v. Wade overturned following a 6-3 vote, Garber said Maryland health care providers who offer abortion services will likely see an increase in demand — especially since Maryland is one of a number of states that enacted laws this year to protect abortion rights.

"Providers will likely have lots of visitors from states where abortion does become illegal or more difficult to obtain," he said.

In April, Maryland lawmakers passed the Abortion Care Access Act, which expands who can offer abortion services. Currently, only physicians can perform abortions. However, effective July 1, nurse practitioners, nurse midwives and physician assistants will also be able to perform them, Johns Hopkins School of Nursing reports.

SEE ALSO:

• Roe V. Wade Overturned: Abortion Rights Left To States To Decide

The court’s repudiation of the landmark 1973 Roe v. Wade decision and a subsequent case on fetal liability, Planned Parenthood v. Casey, was expected. In May, Justice Samuel Alito Jr.’s majority opinion draft was leaked to Politico, setting the stage for a seismic shift in abortion rights.

More than two dozen states are certain or likely to make it nearly impossible for a woman to get a procedure that was legal for her mother, grandmother or even great-grandmother, according to the Guttmacher Institute, an abortion rights research and policy group

With the decision, abortion would be illegal or a nearly impossible procedure to get in about half of U.S. states, including large swaths of the South, Midwest and Northern Plains.

Abortion is already illegal or soon will be in 13 states with pre-existing “trigger” laws banning abortion set to take effect with the dismantling of Roe and Casey, and another four are poised to ban it, according to the Guttmcher Institute. Nine have so-called fetal heartbeat laws that make the procedure illegal before many women know they are pregnant.

Abortion rights were long considered settled law; and even as conservative states pushed at-the-time unconstitutional fetal heartbeat laws and others restricting abortion access to bring the court to this moment, many legal scholars doubted a right that generations of women and men had counted on was in serious jeopardy.

The case that made it to a full hearing before the court, Mississippi’s 15-week ban on abortion, came after former President Donald Trump appointed three conservative judges — Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh and, a few months before his term ended, Amy Coney Barrett, who replaced liberal stalwart Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who died in September 2020.

The court heard oral arguments on the Mississippi case in December.

Lawyers for the state of Mississippi had proposed an array of mechanisms to uphold the 15-week abortion ban but said the court ultimately should overturn the "egregiously wrong" Roe and Casey rulings.

If the court "does not impose a substantial obstacle to 'a significant number of women' seeking abortions," the state argued at the time, the justices should reinterpret the "undue burden" standard established in Roe and give the state the authority to "prohibit elective abortions before viability" of the fetus.