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Abortion continues to be in the spotlight nationally as the Supreme Court gets ready to take on a pivotal abortion case and states continue passing more laws restricting its availability.

The most high-profile action currently is the case of Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization, which the Supreme Court has agreed to hear, although it hasn't yet specified a date. The case involves a law passed in March 2018 by the Mississippi legislature banning abortion after 15 weeks of pregnancy; the Center for Reproductive Rights, a pro-abortion rights group, and was initially granted a temporary injunction by the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Mississippi blocking it from taking effect.

In its lawsuit, the center argued that the law violated longstanding Supreme Court precedent that a state may not ban abortion before viability. Proponents of the law took a different view, with Notre Dame professors Mary Ann Glendon and O. Carter Snead that the law, which includes exceptions for medical emergencies and fetal abnormalities, "offers the cleanest opportunity since Roe v. Wade was decided in 1973 for the Court to revisit its deeply flawed and harmful jurisprudence." Roe v. Wade was the Supreme Court decision upholding a woman's right to an abortion.

The Mississippi district court in November 2018, saying that it was contrary to previous rulings finding that states can't ban abortion before viability. "The State chose to pass a law it knew was unconstitutional to endorse a decades long campaign, fueled by national interest groups, to ask the Supreme Court to overturn Roe v. Wade," wrote Judge Carlton Reeves.

Such an outcome is a real possibility given that the nine-member high court current has a 6-3 majority of justices who tend to lean conservative. The fact that the court accepted the case "signals its willingness to totally revisit the fundamental protections for abortion rights," said Andrea Miller, president of the National Institute of Reproductive Health, a pro-abortion rights organization, who spoke during a phone interview with a public relations person present. "So there's great concern the court could totally gut if not overturn outright Roe v. Wade."

The National Right to Life Committee (NRLC), an anti-abortion rights group, was cautious in its assessment. "Right now, parties on both sides of the abortion debate are speculating," Ingrid Duran, the group's director of state legislation, said in an email. "NRLC hopes that [the Supreme Court] will rule favorably in order to protect unborn babies from abortion." She added that "While no one can predict how the court will rule, I feel hopeful because people are finally unlearning the radical acceptance of abortion-on-demand policies. We are all learning more and more about the developing unborn baby."

If the court does strike down Roe v. Wade, what will happen? Currently, roughly half of the states have laws they could use to effectively ban abortion; 10 of those are "trigger laws" that would immediately ban all abortions if Roe is overturned, said Miller. "We already have a patchwork when it comes to abortion access around the country," she said. "So anything that would suggest more latitude, more leeway to states to restrict abortion further, coming from the Supreme Court, would dramatically exacerbate that patchwork."

In addition to the Supreme Court case, states also have been enacting other laws related to abortion. "Over the last several years, since probably 2019, we've seen a real wave of more and more extreme abortion laws passing in a number of conservative states," said Miller. "Those have included bans on abortion outright, bans on abortion at 6 weeks of pregnancy, which is effectively a ban outright ... These are on top of a whole host of other restrictions many of these same states already put in place, from forced delays to preventing coverage for abortion care in public or private insurance, to creating extreme barriers for healthcare facilities in terms of adding medically unjustified regulations to how they're supposed to operate."

Duran, of the NRLC, said that in terms of new laws on abortion, "there are many different pro-life trends that aim to protect unborn children and their mothers from the risks associated from abortion," including laws requiring that women getting a medication abortion be given information on reversing the procedure, laws regulating the use of medication abortions, laws protecting unborn children seen as capable of feeling pain, and constitutional amendments against abortion.

One state law that has been particularly controversial is a Texas law, set to take effect on September 1, that bans abortions after 6 weeks of pregnancy and allows any citizen to file suit against someone who participates in or helps a woman obtain an abortion, with successful plaintiffs being paid up to $10,000. "And so it really just throws the floodgates open and says, 'If you have a problem with abortion, you can sue somebody over it,'" Miller said. "Just imagine what that suggests; if there's even one claim that they make that has some justification and is found by some court to be valid, there's actually a financial reward ... This is an example of how there seems to be no limit on the harsh punishments they want to bring on people who provide abortion care."

But Duran said that type of civil monetary penalty wasn't especially unusual. "NRLC has a long history of providing for civil remedies in all of the models and legislation that is drafted by us," she said. "This is important because if a state prosecutor fails to bring an action against the abortionist for breaking the law, civil remedies give mothers and, their parents if she's a minor, legal standing to sue the abortionist that broke the Texas law."

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