Questions in wake of historic decision

The Supreme Court’s decision Friday to overturn the landmark Roe v. Wade decision ended nearly 50 years of federal abortion rights across the US. Here are answers to some questions about the impact of Friday’s decision:

What does overturning Roe v. Wade mean?

The 1973 ruling established a constitutional right to abortion under the “due process” clause of the 14th Amendment, which the court previously said includes a right to privacy. Friday’s ruling means that right no longer exists on a national level and returns the question to the states.

What are trigger laws?

Trigger laws are legal measures to ban or restrict abortions that would take effect automatically or with little effort upon Roe v. Wade’s overturn. Thirteen states — Arkansas, Idaho, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri, North Dakota, Oklahoma, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, Utah and Wyoming — enacted trigger laws ahead of Friday’s ruling.

Has the Supreme Court ever reversed itself before?

A chart posted on the congressional Constitution Annotated website lists 233 rulings, dating to 1810, in which the Supreme Court overturned its own previous decisions.

Did Roe stop women from dying as a result of abortions?

Shortly after Alito’s draft opinion was published by Politico, the progressive group Occupy Democrats posted a photo of a lawn sign that said, “Roe wasn’t the beginning of women having abortions — Roe was the end of women dying from abortions.”

PolitiFact cited studies that found the advent of antibiotics and birth control pills made abortion-related deaths of women rare even before Roe v. Wade, declining from thousands during the 1930s to just 63 in 1972.

Data published by the CDC in 2020 show that the number of women who died from abortions, both legal and illegal, has since ranged from 47 in 1973 to two in 2011 and 2017.