The Supreme Court Is Likely to Overturn Roe—What Then?

The Supreme Court Is Likely to Overturn Roe—What Then?

By Molly Jong-Fast

Earlier this week, the Supreme Court started its blockbuster session. It’s the first full session involving all three of Donald J. Trump’s new conservative justices. You’ll remember that Trump promised to overturn Roe, telling the American public during a October 2016 debate, “And that’ll happen automatically, in my opinion, because I am putting pro-life justices on the court. I will say this: It will go back to the states, and the states will then make a determination.”  

So, in some odd way, Trump predicted what this post-Roe America will look like: His anti-choice justices likely will give the states free rein with highly restrictive laws. (It’s important when writing about this new Trumpy Supreme Court to note the irony of a thrice-married adulterer making abortion illegal.) According to many Supreme Court watchers, this is the most conservative Supreme Court since the 1930s.

On December 1, the Supreme Court will hear Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, a case that will look at the constitutionality of a Mississippi law banning abortions after 15 weeks, well before viability. (Roe established the right to an abortion prior to viability; a fetus is generally not considered viable outside of the womb until after 24 weeks of gestation.) It’s likely that they will either overturn Roe completely or gut the statute so much that it’s essentially overturned. Look no further than their refusal to block the blatantly unconstitutional Texas bill banning abortions after six weeks—allowing the law to go into effect until last night, when a federal district-court judge in Austin, Robert L. Pitman, paused Texas’s draconian abortion ban. (As he pointed out: “From the moment S.B. 8 went into effect, women have been unlawfully prevented from exercising control over their own lives in ways that are protected by the Constitution.”)

If the Supreme Court dismantles Roe, it sets us up for a larger question: What will a post-Roe America look like? “Many people, especially Texans, are already living life in a post-Roe America,” says president and CEO of Planned Parenthood Affiliates of California Jodi Hicks. “What’s potentially even more frightening is the thought of more states following Texas.” Hicks is making the point that if the Supreme Court overturns Roe, it’s very likely that the surrounding states of Oklahoma, Louisiana, and Arkansas will follow Texas’s lead, just as Florida is already threatening to do and likely will. If you are a pregnant woman in Houston who wants an abortion, you will likely have to miss multiple days of work and drive 12 and a half hours to New Mexico.