Supreme Court Overturns Right To Abortion; NY Safeguards Choice

NEW YORK — The United States Supreme Court has officially said there is no constitutional right to an abortion, but women in New York will likely not see any changes.

The court’s overturning of the landmark 1973 Roe v. Wade decision and a subsequent case on fetal liability, Planned Parenthood v. Casey, was not a surprise. In May, Justice Samuel Alito Jr.’s majority opinion draft was leaked to Politico, setting the stage for a major setback in abortion rights.

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, which is a pro-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.

Although the ruling on the Dobbs case was 6-3, the decision to strike down Roe and Casey was 5-4, with Chief Justice John Roberts writing a concurring opinion that said overturning the landmark statute went too far.

In New York, however, the state legislature in 2019 enacted the Reproductive Health Act, which decriminalized and safeguarded abortion and ensured women had greater access to reproductive health care.

In other words, abortion is still legal in the Empire State.

More recently in May, Gov. Kathy Hochul, anticipating the worst outcome from the Supreme Court, announced a $35 million investment in support of abortion providers.

RELATED: Protestors Gather After Supreme Court Strikes Down Roe V. Wade

The state Health Department was directed to create a $25 million fund to help reproductive health care centers expand their capacity and ensure access for those women seeking abortion care in New York. Additionally, $10 million in security grants would be made available to the centers through the state's Division of Criminal Justice Services.

On Monday, Hochul signed a package of bills that protect women seeking abortions and those providing them in anticipation of Roe's demise.

Included in the bills were establishing a cause of action for unlawful interference with protected rights, prohibiting courts from cooperating with out-of-state civil and criminal cases stemming from legal abortions, prohibiting malpractice insurance companies from taking any adverse action against health care practitioners who provide reproductive health care or perform a legal abortion for someone who is from out of state and allowing reproductive health care services providers, employees, volunteers, patients or immediate family members of providers to enroll in the state's address confidentiality program to protect themselves from threats.

At the signing of the legislation, Hochul said that reproductive rights are human rights.

"Today, we are taking action to protect our service providers from the retaliatory actions of anti-abortion states and ensure that New York will always be a safe harbor for those seeking reproductive health care," she said.

Hochul, who is running for her first full-term as governor, has also been touting in campaign ads a push for an amendment to the state Constitution that would protect a woman's right to an abortion, the Times Union reported.

The governor could bring lawmakers back to Albany to pass such an amendment so it could be on the ballot by 2024, but that is not certain.

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 Guttmacher 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.