Roe V. Wade Overturned: What It Means For New York City

NEW YORK CITY — The Supreme Court has overturned Roe v. Wade, a seismic decision that will gut abortion rights in dozens of states — and will have a huge ripple effect even in pro-choice areas like New York.

The decision, authored by Justice Samuel Alito, was released Friday — more than a month after a draft of the opinion leaked. Although the ruling on the Dobbs case was 6-3, the decision to strike down Roe and the 1992 case Planned Parenthood v. Casey was 5-4, with Chief Justice John Roberts writing a concurring opinion that said overturning the landmark statute went too far.

"We therefore hold that the Constitution does not confer a right to abortion," Alito wrote. "Roe and Casey must be overruled, and the authority to regulate abortion must be returned to the people and their elected representatives."

The Court's three liberal justices dissented, saying the majority's decision deprives"many millions of American women" of "a fundamental constitutional protection."

The ruling will have an immediate impact on abortion rights in 13 states, largely in the south and west, that have laws in place to ban abortion as soon as Roe is overturned.

At least 26 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.

New York, on the other hand, is certain to keep its abortion protections in place — indeed, the state codified the right to abortion in 2019, when it also repealed a ban on abortions after 24 weeks. (Efforts to add abortion rights to the state constitution have not yet succeeded, however.)

The biggest local impact of the Court's decision may be to turn New York into a "safe haven" for people seeking abortions — much as it was before Roe was decided in 1973, when thousands of women flocked here to get abortions after the state legalized it in 1970.

In a May rally at Foley Square after the Court's draft opinion leaked, Attorney General Letitia James told protesters that New York "will not go back to the days when we used wire hangers."

"We women, we are the majority," she said.

New York officials were quick to condemn the Court's ruling on Friday. Gov. Kathy Hochul tweeted that the Court had "rolled back the rights of millions of Americans, disregarding their interests and — more importantly — their lives."

"Access to abortion is a fundamental human right, and it remains safe, accessible, and legal in New York," she said.

With the Court's decision, abortion may become 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 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, centering on 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 after her death 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.

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