Roe V. Wade Overturned: What It Means In Virginia

VIRGINIA — The Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, a seismic decision that will gut abortion rights in dozens of states — and will have a huge ripple effect even in pro-choice areas such as Virginia.

The decision, authored by Justice Samuel Alito, was released Friday — more than a month after a draft of the opinion leaked.

"We therefore hold that the Constitution does not confer a right to abortion," Alito said in the decision. "Roe and Casey must be overruled, and the authority to regulate abortion must be returned to the people and their elected representatives," he added, referring to the 1992 case Planned Parenthood v. Casey.

The 6-3 decision will have an immediate effect on abortion rights in 13 states, including large swaths of the South, Midwest and Northern Plains, that have laws in place to ban abortion as soon as Roe is overturned.

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

Abortion is legal in Virginia, and the state does not have an anti-abortion law that would be triggered by the Supreme Court's ruling overturning Roe v. Wade.

Democrats in Virginia, who control the state Senate, are vowing to block any attempts by Gov. Glenn Youngkin and his fellow Republicans to make abortion illegal in the state. But Republicans are only one vote away from controlling the Senate in the 2023 elections and already hold the House of Delegates and the governor’s office.

Related: Roe V. Wade Overturned: Abortion Rights Left To States To Decide

On June 17, Senate Democrats blocked a proposal by Youngkin to prevent state funds from paying for abortions for low-income women whose unborn children suffer gross fetal abnormalities. Approved by Republicans on a party-line vote in the House of Delegates, the matter failed in the Senate as the Democratic majority united against it.

Virginia could see an increase in abortions if Roe v. Wade is struck down because women from nearby states with trigger laws might travel to the commonwealth to have the procedure.

Fairfax County Commonwealth's Attorney Steve Descano has pledged that he would not prosecute a woman for having an abortion or for being suspected of inducing one if abortion becomes illegal in Virginia.

"If the Supreme Court overturns Roe v. Wade, the rights of thousands of Virginia women will be thrown into question," Descano wrote in a New York Times Op-Ed last week. "While the commonwealth does not have an abortion ban on the books, our governor has said that he is 'staunchly, unabashedly' against abortion and fully committed to 'going on the offense' against abortion rights in our legislature."

"For hundreds of thousands of American women, access to an abortion soon may depend not only on which state they live in but also on how hard-line their local prosecutor is," he said. "That’s why I hope prosecutors across the country will join me in choosing to lead on behalf of the women we represent."

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.

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 then-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.