Supreme Court Overturns Roe V. Wade: What It Means For Washington

SEATTLE — After decades of protecting the right to access safe, legal abortions, the Supreme Court overturned the landmark Roe v. Wade decision Friday.

The court’s repudiation of the 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.

The decision was released more than a month after a draft was leaked.

"We therefore hold that the Constitution does not confer a right to abortion," Alito said in the decision. "Roe and Casey must be overruled, and the authority to regulate abortion must be returned to the people and their elected representatives," he added, referring to the 1992 case Planned Parenthood v. Casey.

At least 26 states were 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 Guttmacher Institute. Nine have so-called fetal heartbeat laws that make the procedure illegal before many women know they are pregnant.

Washington, however, was unlikely to see any drastic changes. Many local leaders went on record to stand up for a woman's right to choose in the weeks since the majority opinion draft was leaked.

"Washington state was a pro-choice state," said Gov. Jay Inslee at a pro-choice rally at Seattle's Kerry Park in early May. "Washington state is a pro-choice state, and we are going to fight like hell to keep Washington a pro-choice state."

The people of Washington voted in 1991 in favor of the Reproductive Privacy Act, which protected the right to choose in the Evergreen State. As a result, even though the Supreme Court struck down Roe v. Wade, abortions will remain legally protected in Washington.

The state has touted a few new abortion protections. This spring, Inslee signed a bill banning lawsuits against people seeking an abortion and those who aid them, The Associated Press reported. That was an apparent response to an Idaho bill that allowed lawsuits from prospective family members against anyone who received an abortion after six weeks of pregnancy.

Inslee has said he would consider an amendment to secure abortion rights in the state constitution, protecting access to abortions even if the Reproductive Privacy Act is later overturned.

The governor also promised further protections in the weeks and months to come, including possibly offering protections to those who travel to Washington seeking abortions and expanding resources to provide abortion services to more Washingtonians and to people who come to Washington state for help.

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 then-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.