June 24, 2022 Roe v. Wade news

Speaking after the Supreme Court ruling overturning Roe v. Wade, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said the Republicans are "plotting a nationwide abortion ban."

"They cannot be allowed to have majority in the Congress to do that. But that's their goal," she said Friday.

Juxtaposing the Friday ruling against Thursday's ruling on guns, Pelosi criticized the court's stance.

"Such a contradiction. Yesterday, to say the states cannot make laws governing the constitutional right to bear arms. And today, they're saying the exact reverse that the states can overturn a constitutional right — for 50 years a constitutional right for women having the right to choose."

"The hypocrisy is raging, but the harm is endless," she added.

A broad majority of Americans did not want to see Roe vs. Wade overturned, polling taken before the Supreme Court's decision shows. Here's a recap of the latest data on the public's views of abortion, from CNN and elsewhere:

Views on overturning Roe vs. Wade 

In a May CNN poll conducted immediately after the leak of the Supreme Court's draft opinion, Americans said, 66% to 34%, that they did not want the Supreme Court to completely overturn its decision. In CNN's polling dating back to 1989, the share of the public in favor of completely overturning Roe has never risen above 36%.

Just 17% of Americans in the CNN poll said they'd be happy to see Roe vs. Wade overturned, with 12% saying they'd be satisfied, 21% that they'd be dissatisfied, 36% that they'd be angry, and 14% that they wouldn't care. Most Democrats (59%) and nearly half of adults younger than 35 (48%) said they'd be angry. And a 59% majority of Americans said they'd support Congress passing a law to establish a nationwide right to abortion, with just 41% opposed.

In a May CBS/YouGov poll, 63% of Americans said they expected that overturning Roe would make abortion access harder for poor women, with 58% saying it would make abortion access more difficult for women of color. Fewer expected similar difficulties for White women (35%) or wealthy women (19%). And a majority of women (54%) said that generally, overturning Roe would make life worse for most American women. 

Views on state abortion laws

In the CNN poll, 58% of US adults said that, if Roe were overturned, they'd want their state to set abortion laws that were more permissive than restrictive. About half (51%) said they'd like to see their state become a safe haven for women who wanted abortions but couldn't get them where they lived. 

But not everyone was aware in advance how their own state would be affected. Of Americans living in states with trigger laws to immediately ban abortion after the overturn of Roe, only 45% realized that was the case, according to a Kaiser Family Foundation poll conducted in May. Another 42% living in those states were unsure what the impact of the ruling would be where they live.

Political implications

It's still too soon to know how views on abortion might shift in the wake of the Court's decision, or to forecast how the aftermath of the decision might affect the upcoming election. There are some early signs that the blow to abortion access could be particularly motivational to abortion rights supporters. A significant share of core Democratic backers such as young people and women said they would be angry in the wake of the ruling, and several surveys this spring found Democratic voters more likely than Republican voters to see abortion as a highly relevant issue to this year's election. But it’s less clear how that motivation might manifest itself, or to what extent it'll alter the overall political landscape. 

A May poll from Monmouth University found that 48% of Democrats considered a candidate’s alignment with their views on abortion to be extremely important to their vote, up from 31% in 2018; among Republicans, the number was 29%, down from 36% four years ago.

CNN polling conducted immediately before and after the leak of a draft Supreme Court decision on Roe v. Wade found a 7-point rise in the share of Americans who said their views on abortion align more with Democrats than Republicans. But there was little immediate evidence of a sea change in any of the Republicans’ early advantages heading into the midterms.

Views of the Supreme Court

The decision could also affect Americans' views of the Supreme Court. Following the leak of the draft opinion, Marquette Law School polling found, public approval of the Court fell, from 54% in March to 44% in May. The change was largely due to a shift among Democrats: while 49% of Democrats approved of the Supreme Court in March, just 26% felt the same in May. Marquette's May poll also found that 23% of Americans viewed the Supreme Court as "very conservative," an uptick from 15% in March.

Justices Stephen Breyer, Sonia Sotomayor, and Elena Kagan issued a dissenting opinion to the Supreme Court's decision that strikes down Roe v. Wade.

In their joint opinion, the three justices heavily criticized the majority, closing:

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said the Supreme Court's "cruel ruling" overturning Roe v. Wade is "outrageous and heart-wrenching."  

Pelosi vowed that Democrats will keep fighting to "enshrine Roe v. Wade into law."

“A woman’s fundamental health decisions are her own to make, in consultation with her doctor and her loved ones – not to be dictated by far-right politicians," she said.

“This cruel ruling is outrageous and heart-wrenching.  But make no mistake: the rights of women and all Americans are on the ballot this November,” her statement continued.

The final opinion released by the Supreme Court on Friday is strikingly similar to the draft written by Justice Samuel Alito that was leaked earlier this year. It repeats Alito’s scornful language towards the original Roe v. Wade decision that enshrined abortion rights. 

“Roe was egregiously wrong from the start,” both the formal and draft said. “Its reasoning was exceptionally weak, and the decision has had damaging consequences. And far from bringing about a national settlement of the abortion issue, Roe and Casey have enflamed debate and deepened division.”  

Like the draft opinion, Alito included a list of cases that also rested on a right to privacy, as Alito asserted that Roe was distinct from those cases. 

“What sharply distinguishes the abortion right from the rights recognized in the cases on which Roe and Casey rely is something that both those decisions acknowledged: Abortion destroys what those decisions call ‘potential life’ and what the law at issue in this case regards as the life of an ‘unborn human being,’” Alito wrote, in a line that was also present in the draft. 

So what's new? Alito’s response to the dissent, jointly written by the three liberal justices. The dissent would not have been written at the time that the ultimately leaked draft was circulated around the court. 

“The dissent is very candid that it cannot show that a constitutional right to abortion has any foundation, let alone a ‘deeply rooted’ one, ‘in this Nation’s history and tradition.’” Alito wrote. “The dissent does not identify any pre-Roe authority that supports such a right — no state constitutional provision or statute, no federal or state judicial precedent, not even a scholarly treatise.” 

In that four-page section, Alito said that the dissent’s failure “engage with this long tradition is devastating to its position.” 

Former President Barack Obama criticized Friday’s ruling by the Supreme Court overturning Roe v. Wade, saying the court “not only reversed nearly 50 years of precedent, it relegated the most intensely personal decision someone can make to the whims of politicians and ideologues—attacking the essential freedoms of millions of Americans.”

Read his statement:

Former first lady Michelle Obama also issued a statement Friday saying she was “heartbroken” over the Supreme Court’s decision.

“I am heartbroken for people around this country who just lost the fundamental right to make informed decisions about their own bodies,” Obama wrote.

She wrote that the decision “must be a wake-up call, especially to the young people who will bear its burden.”

The Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade Friday, holding that there is no longer a federal constitutional right to an abortion.   

Here are key lines from the majority opinion: 

New York Attorney General Letitia James has responded to the Supreme Court overturning Roe v. Wade, a decision that holds that there is no longer a federal constitutional right to an abortion.

“I will work tirelessly to ensure our most vulnerable and people from hostile states have access to this lifesaving care. Everyone in this nation deserves the right to make their own decisions about their bodies," she added.

Groups of protesters are demonstrating outside the Supreme Court after the court overturned Roe v. Wade.

Video footage showed them holding signs and chanting through megaphones.

"It's a heartbreaking betrayal of half of the country," former federal prosecutor Jennifer Rodgers said on CNN, choking up a bit while seeing the protesters. "I'm getting — watching the women there — it's emotional."

The opinion is the most consequential Supreme Court decision in decades and will transform the landscape of women’s reproductive health in America.

Going forward, abortion rights will be determined by states, unless Congress acts.