Mississippi filed a brief Thursday asking the Supreme Court to overturn Roe v. Wade in a case dealing with the state’s restrictive abortion ban, Politico reports.
The Supreme Court is set to review Mississippi’s 15-week abortion ban in the fall.
“The national fever on abortion can break only when this Court returns abortion policy to the states,” Mississippi Attorney General Lynn Fitch said in a brief to the court, arguing that the country has changed since the Roe decision.
“In 1973, there was little support for women who wanted a full family life and a successful career,” she wrote. “Maternity leave was rare. Paternity leave was unheard of. The gold standard for professional success was a 9-to-5 with a corner office. The flexibility of the gig economy was a fairy tale.”
Mississippi enacted its law in 2018 amid a number of similar laws passed in Republican-led states. All of those laws were later blocked by lower courts.
Major turnaround:
Mississippi asked the court to review the lower court ruling blocking its ban last year before the death of liberal Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg.
It stressed at the time that there was no need to overturn Roe to uphold the state’s law.
“To be clear, the questions presented in this petition do not require the Court to overturn Roe or Casey,” Fitch wrote at the time.
But the state has had a significant shift after former President Donald Trump replaced Ginsburg with conservative Justice Amy Coney Barrett.
With a 6-3 conservative majority, the Supreme Court in May said ti would review the Mississippi case.
What’s next?:
Legal experts generally doubt that the court would outright overturn Roe but many believe that the court will chip away at abortion rights protections.
The Center for Reproductive Rights, which filed the lawsuit that led to the law being blocked, called the state’s new push to overturn Roe “extreme and regressive.”
“Their goal is for the Supreme Court to take away our right to control our own bodies and our own futures—not just in Mississippi, but everywhere,” the group said.
