Supreme Court Overturns Roe v. Wade, Triggering Michigan's 1931 Abortion Ban

MICHIGAN — A 1931 state law banning abortion in nearly all circumstances went back into effect Friday as the United States Supreme Court overturned the landmark 1973 Roe v. Wade decision that guaranteed women a right to an abortion.

However, Michigan Court of Claims Judge Elizabeth Gleicher recently suspended immediate enforcement of the 1931 law, arguing the law violates the state's constitution under provisions that protect bodily integrity.

Even though the ruling temporarily suspends the law, its ultimate fate resides in the state's supreme court, where Gov. Gretchen Whitmer filed a lawsuit asking the court to recognize abortion rights under the state's constitution.

The court’s repudiation of the 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 also be illegal or nearly an impossible procedure to get in about half of U.S. states, including large swaths of the South, Midwest and Northern Plains.

In addition to Michigan, 12 other states also have 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 Guttmacher 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.

Lawyers for the state of Mississippi had proposed an array of mechanisms to uphold the 15-week abortion ban, but said the court ultimately should overturn the "egregiously wrong" Roe and Casey rulings.

If the court "does not impose a substantial obstacle to 'a significant number of women' seeking abortions," the state argued at the time, the justices should reinterpret the "undue burden" standard established in Roe and give the state the authority to "prohibit elective abortions before viability" of the fetus.