Where abortion rights stand across the US

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

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

Legislators in 13 states have passed so-called “trigger laws,” meaning that abortion will almost immediately be banned with Roe no longer in effect. In some cases, the law requires an official such as an attorney general to certify that Roe has been struck down before the law can take effect.

Here’s a look at where abortion rights stand across the US:

Louisiana Attorney General Jeff Landry issued a statement on the Supreme Court’s decision overturning Roe v. Wade. Louisiana is one of 13 states with trigger laws that take effect after the court’s decision.

“As noted in both my legal brief to the Supreme Court and the majority’s opinion: the Constitution makes no reference to abortion, and no such right is implicitly protected by any constitutional provision,” according to his statement.

“Because of the Court’s ruling in this case about a Mississippi law limiting abortions after 15 weeks of gestation with exceptions for health emergencies and fetal abnormalities, Louisiana’s trigger law banning abortion is now in effect,” he said.

“My office and I will do everything in our power to ensure the laws of Louisiana that have been passed to protect the unborn are enforceable, even if we have to go back to court,” his statement continued.

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

Five justices signed onto the majority opinion, striking down the landmark decision. They are:

And three justices dissented:

Chief Justice John Roberts did not join the majority, writing in a concurring opinion that he would not have overturned Roe but instead would have only upheld Mississippi’s law banning abortions after 15 weeks.

The Supreme Court’s opinion on abortion Friday could open the door for courts to overturn same-sex marriage, contraception and other rights. 

It’s already set off a debate among justices over whether overturning Roe puts those precedents in danger. 

The majority opinion attempted to wall of its holding in Friday’s abortion case from those other rulings, but Justice Clarence Thomas wrote separately to call explicitly for those other rulings to be revisited – a concurrence that the liberals seized upon to argue that those rulings are now at risk. 

In their dissent, the liberal justices wrote “no one should be confident that this majority is done with its work.” 

“The right Roe and Casey recognized does not stand alone,” they wrote. “To the contrary, the Court has linked it for decades to other settled freedoms involving bodily integrity, familial relationships, and procreation. Most obviously, the right to terminate a pregnancy arose straight out of the right to purchase and use contraception. In turn, those rights led, more recently, to rights of same-sex intimacy and marriage.” 

Justice Samuel Alito, in a new section of the opinion that was not present in the leaked draft, responded to the dissenters’ warnings. 

He emphasized a line the majority opinion that said “[n]othing in this opinion should be understood to cast doubt on precedents that do not concern abortion.” 

Alito’s assertions were undercut by a concurrence by Justice Thomas, who explicitly called for the court to reconsider its rulings striking down state restrictions on contraceptives, state sodomy bans and state prohibitions on same sex marriage. 

“Because any substantive due process decision is ‘demonstrably erroneous,’” Thomas wrote, “we have a duty to ‘correct the error’ established in those precedents.” 

The liberal dissenters used Thomas’ concurrence to go after Alito’s assurances that the court was not putting those precedent at risks by overturning Roe. 

“The first problem with the majority’s account comes from JUSTICE THOMAS’s concurrence — which makes clear he is not with the program. In saying that nothing in today’s opinion casts doubt on non-abortion precedents, JUSTICE THOMAS explains, he means only that they are not at issue,” the liberals wrote, as they quoted from Thomas’ concurrence. 

“So at least one Justice is planning to use the ticket of today’s decision again and again and again,” they said.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi also called Friday’s Supreme Court ruling a hypocrisy that will cause endless harm.

“The hypocrisy is raging, but the harm is endless. What this means to women is such an insult. It’s a slap in face to women about using their own judgment to make their own decisions about their reproductive freedom,” she said Friday.

She again criticized the Republicans for supporting pregnancy but opposing “any family planning.”

“I always have said: determination of a pregnancy is just their opening act. It’s just their front game. Behind it and for years, I have seen in this Congress, opposition to any family planning domestic or global.”

Looking ahead to the November elections, she said, reproductive freedom will be on the ballot.

“This is deadly serious,” she said. “A woman’s right to choose, reproductive freedom is on the ballot in November. We cannot allow them to take charge so that they can institute their goal which is to criminalize reproductive freedom.”

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.