“All of this has been implied because they’re understood to be core, basic human rights,” said Murray. Gay rights, contraceptives, certain fertility treatments and even interracial marriage, “are imperiled because they’re all rooted in that right to privacy”, Melissa Murray, a law professor at New York University law school and an expert in constitutional, family and reproductive rights law, told the Guardian. Legal scholars warned that the impacts of such a move would likely be widespread, because abortion rights are rooted in the same implied constitutional right to privacy that is the foundation for other intimate personal decisions Americans now take for granted.
A decision in the Dobbs case is expected June 2022.Īlthough supreme court opinions are notoriously difficult to predict, a majority of justices on the conservative-leaning court appeared inclined to severely curtail or overturn Roe v Wade, which protects abortion rights in states hostile to the procedure. The Mississippi case is widely regarded as the most important abortion rights case since Roe v Wade, when the supreme court effectively legalized abortion nationally in 1973.
