By contrast, another brief was filed by European law scholars on behalf of the Jackson Women’s Health Organization, which as the only abortion clinic in Mississippi is at the center of the case. It asserted that 37 European countries allowed for abortion at least until 22 weeks either upon request, on broad socioeconomic grounds or based on the health of the mother that does not entail a risk to her life.
What Justice Alito Wrote
“The legislature then found that at five or six weeks’ gestational age an ‘unborn human being’s heart begins beating.’”
Whether the sound described is a “heartbeat” is a matter of dispute, as The New York Times has previously reported. At six weeks, cells in the embryo begin to form a hollow tube that will develop into a heart, and they emit electrical pulses that a machine translates into a sound.
To many medical experts, this is not the same as a heart beating — defined as when heart valves open and close to pump blood — because the tube in a six-week-old embryo does not yet have valves. Abortion opponents contend that a heart tube is still a heart, and many doctors and medical practitioners use the word “heartbeat” to describe the sound.
What Justice Alito Wrote
“It found that most abortions after 15 weeks employ ‘dilation and evacuation procedures, which involve the use of surgical instruments to crush and tear the unborn child,’ and it concluded that the ‘intentional commitment of such acts for nontherapeutic or elective reasons is a barbaric practice, dangerous for the maternal patient and demeaning to the medical profession.’”
The State of Roe v. Wade
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What is Roe v. Wade? Roe v. Wade is a landmark Supreme court decision that legalized abortion across the United States. The 7-2 ruling was announced on Jan. 22, 1973. Justice Harry A. Blackmun, a modest Midwestern Republican and a defender of the right to abortion, wrote the majority opinion.
What was the case about? The ruling struck down laws in many states that had barred abortion, declaring that they could not ban the procedure before the point at which a fetus can survive outside the womb. That point, known as fetal viability, was around 28 weeks when Roe was decided. Today, most experts estimate it to be about 23 or 24 weeks.
What else did the case do? Roe v. Wade created a framework to govern abortion regulation based on the trimesters of pregnancy. In the first trimester, it allowed almost no regulations. In the second, it allowed regulations to protect women’s health. In the third, it allowed states to ban abortions so long as exceptions were made to protect the life and health of the mother. In 1992, the court tossed that framework, while affirming Roe’s essential holding.
Dilation and evacuation is the most common procedure used in second-trimester abortions, as Justice Alito and the Mississippi Legislature correctly note. But contrary to their warnings about its danger to maternal health, the procedure is generally considered the safest for most women in that stage of pregnancy.
The procedure involves dilating the cervix, then removing the fetus in parts. Abortion opponents and several Republican states that have passed laws banning the practice and have called it “dismemberment abortion.” Supporters of abortion rights say such language is inflammatory and medically inaccurate.