United States (Washington Insider Magazine) -Back in May, the United States Supreme Court said it will make a decision by 2022 to determine how abortions will carry out moving forward – in an upcoming Dobbs v Jackson Women’s Health case set for Dec. 1 – by looking into international laws on abortions.
The was brought to the Supreme Court’s attention after Mississippi passed a law to ban abortion after the 15th week of pregnancy in 2018, which overrules the Roe v Wade case that the court ruled the Constitution protects the right to have an abortion before the fetus can survive outside the womb. Jackson Women’s Health, the only clinic for abortions in Mississippi, went to court to challenge if it was constitutional.
After a federal district court sided with the clinic, the state went to the Supreme Court during this past summer and asked the justices to rule pre-viable abortions unconstitutional. According to PubMed, viability occurs around 24 weeks of pregnancy.
After being pressured for months since the beginning of the year, the justices agreed they would take up the first question in the state’s petition: whether all pre-viability bans on abortions violate the Constitution.
Until then, the Supreme Court will not only look at Roe v Wade, and Planned Parenthood v Casey, but at some of the international abortion laws in other countries. The United States is one of eight other countries to allow abortions beyond 20 weeks, but conservatives want the Supreme Court to look at how the other countries decide.
According to the Center for Reproductive Rights, 24 of 117 countries do not allow abortion at all, while the other 93 only allow abortions to protect the mother’s health, or in the case of rape or incest. For other countries, they ban abortions beyond 14 weeks, but according to Florida State University’s Mary Ziegler who is a law professor, they have public health insurance to back them up.
“People who are anti-abortion are disingenuous about this because they’re not proposing 12 weeks, they’re proposing six weeks or fertilization,” she told The New York Times.
