Supreme Court Overturns Roe v. Wade: What It Means For CT

CONNECTICUT — The U.S. Supreme Court ruled 6-to-3 to overturn the precedent set by Roe v. Wade, which will lead to a number of states making it nearly impossible for women to have abortions.

The decision will leave abortion laws up to states to decide. Although the ruling on the Dobbs case was 6-3, the decision to strike down Roe and Casey was 5-4, with Chief Justice John Roberts writing a concurring opinion that said overturning the landmark statute went too far.

Connecticut has a 32-year-old law on the books that reinforces the right to an abortion.

Gov. Ned Lamont also signed a bill into law this year that expands access to abortion in the state. It allows physician assistants and advanced practice registered nurses to perform aspiration abortions in the first trimester.

The state law also limits how much information Connecticut authorities and doctors can share when a person comes to Connecticut for an abortion. It will make it harder to bring successful legal action under Texas’s abortion law and any similar state laws.

State Attorney General William Tong said the decision was the beginning of a right-wing effort to rewrite decades of legal precedent.

"This decision carves our nation in two," he said in a statement. "States that trust the personal and professional decisions of women and doctors, and states where craven politicians control and criminalize those choices. Connecticut is a safe state, but we will need to be vigilant, aggressive and proactive to defend our rights."

Lamont said he was grateful to live in Connecticut, where state law makes it clear women have a right to choose.

"This ruling will not only result in a patchwork of unequal laws among the states, but more importantly it will result in dangerous and life-threatening situations similar to what this country witnessed countless times in the era prior to the landmark Roe case in which women died or were left severely injured because they could not access the medical care that they should have every right to access on their own," he said in a statement.

State Department of Public Health Commissioner Dr. Manisha Juthani said that the ruling will disproportionately affect women of low-income households and women of color.

"In Connecticut, we are fortunate that there will be no change to continuing to provide women safe choices in their medical care," she said. "At DPH, we will always be committed to optimizing public health. In Connecticut, a woman’s right to choose is still protected.DPH is committed to ensuring safe and quality care is provided to all and will continue to work to keep things this way.”

The court’s repudiation of the landmark 1973 Roe v. Wade decision and a subsequent case on fetal liability, Planned Parenthood v. Casey, was expected. In May, Justice Samuel Alito Jr.’s majority opinion draft was leaked to Politico, setting the stage for a seismic shift in abortion rights.

At least 26 states are certain or likely to make it nearly impossible for a woman to get a procedure that was completely legal for her mother, grandmother or even great-grandmother, according to the Guttmacher Institute, a pro-abortion rights research and policy group.

With the decision, abortion would be illegal or a nearly impossible procedure to get in about half of U.S. states, including large swaths of the South, Midwest and Northern Plains.

Abortion is already illegal or soon will be in 13 states with pre-existing “trigger” laws banning abortion set to take effect with the dismantling of Roe and Casey, and another four are poised to ban it, according to the Guttmcher Institute. Nine have so-called fetal heartbeat laws that make the procedure illegal before many women know they are pregnant.

Abortion rights were long considered settled law; and even as conservative states pushed at-the-time unconstitutional fetal heartbeat laws and others restricting abortion access to bring the court to this moment, many legal scholars doubted a right that generations of women and men had counted on was in serious jeopardy.

The case that made it to a full hearing before the court, Mississippi’s 15-week ban on abortion, came after former President Donald Trump appointed three conservative judges — Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh and, a few months before his term ended, Amy Coney Barrett, who replaced liberal stalwart Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who died in September 2020.

The court heard oral arguments on the Mississippi case in December.