- The Supreme Court on Wednesday heard nearly two hours of arguments on the biggest abortion challenge before the court in decades.
- Mississippi has asked the court to uphold its law that bans abortion after 15 weeks of pregnancy and to overturn the landmark 1973 ruling, Roe v. Wade.
- The court's conservative justices seemed open to Mississippi's position.
The Supreme Court on Wednesday seemed open to upholding a 15-week abortion ban in Mississippi in a major case whose decision could ultimately overturn or curtail abortion rights established in the landmark 1973 ruling, Roe v. Wade.
The case, Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization, centers on a 2018 Mississippi law that bans abortion after 15 weeks of pregnancy. That's ahead of the standard set in Roe, which declared that states cannot prohibit abortion before roughly 24 weeks of pregnancy, the point when a fetus can survive outside of the womb, commonly referred to as viability.
Mississippi has asked the nation's highest court to overrule Roe, as well as another major 1992 abortion decision, Planned Parenthood v. Casey, which established that states cannot impose an "undue burden" on abortion rights.
Scott Stewart, Mississippi's solicitor general, opened his arguments on Wednesday by ripping into the decades-old rulings.
"They're damaged the democratic process. They've poisoned the law. They've choked up compromise," he said. "No where else does this court recognize a right to end human life."
During nearly two hours of oral arguments, the justices grappled with the potential implications of a future without Roe and Casey. The court's conservative justices, through their questioning, appeared inclined to go somewhat in that direction.
Conservative Justice Samuel Alito questioned the viability mark and argued that "the fetus has an interest in having a life."
"On the other side, the fetus has an interest in having a life," he said. That doesn't change, does it, from the point before viability to the point after viability?"
The Center for Reproductive Rights' Julie Rikelman, defending Mississippi's sole abortion provider, Jackson Women's Health Organization, responded: "In some people's view it doesn't, your honor, but what the court said is that those philosophical differences couldn't be resolved."
Justice Brett Kavanaugh, a Trump appointee, also raised the interests of fetal life versus a pregnant woman on Wednesday.
"You can't accommodate both interests. You have to pick. That's the fundamental problem," he said. "One interest has to prevail over the other at any given point in time, and that's why this is so challenging."
Kavanaugh also pointed out a series of decisions in which the court overturned precedent, including ending school segregation and legalizing same-sex marriage, and questioned the role of the court.
"If we think that the prior precedents are seriously wrong, if that, why then doesn't the history of this court's practice with respect to those cases tell us that the right answer is actually a return to the position of neutrality?" Kavanaugh asked. "Why should this court be the arbiter rather than Congress?"
On the other end of the ideological spectrum, the court's liberals, including Justice Sonia Sotomayor, questioned Mississippi's position that the right to an abortion is not embedded in the Constitution.
"There is so much that is not in the Constitution," Sotomayor said. "There is not anything in the Constitution that says that the court, the Supreme Court, is the last word on what the Constitution means."
"We have recognized that sense of privacy in people's choices about whether to use contraception or not. We recognize that in their right to choose who they want to marry," she added. "I fear none of those things are written in the Constitution."
The court will hand down a decision on the closely watched case by next June.