Politics & Government

Roe V. Wade Struck Down: Abortion Could Soon Be Illegal In Arizona

Gov. Ducey has said a 15-week limit will take precedent, but Arizona still has a total ban on the books dating back more than 100 years.

The U.S. Supreme Court on Friday struck down the landmark Roe v. Wade decision made in 1973, leaving abortion rights up to the states to decide.
The U.S. Supreme Court on Friday struck down the landmark Roe v. Wade decision made in 1973, leaving abortion rights up to the states to decide. (Jenna Fisher/Patch)

ARIZONA — Abortion could soon be illegal in Arizona after the U.S. Supreme Court struck down Roe v. Wade on Friday.

The decision, authored by Justice Samuel Alito Jr., was released 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.

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Arizona is one of five states with abortion laws on the books that predate the landmark 1973 decision and could begin enforcing the more than 100-year-old law now that the right to abortion has been revoked at the federal level.

Arizona's pre-Roe v. Wade abortion ban dates back to 1901, when Arizona was still a U.S. territory. The law was blocked by Roe v. Wade but could become enforceable again now that the decision has been overturned.

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Gov. Doug Ducey, in an April interview with Capitol Media Services, said that Arizona would not revert to the old law but that a ban on abortion after 15 weeks signed into Arizona law in March would go into effect instead.

Under that law, doctors could perform abortions after 15 weeks of pregnancy only if a woman's life was in danger. It does not include exceptions for rape or incest. Doctors accused of performing illegal abortions could face felony charges and lose their medicals licenses if convicted.

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, Alito’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 legal for her mother, grandmother or even great-grandmother, according to the Guttmacher Institute, an abortion rights research and policy group.

Despite Ducey's comments about the 15-week ban, Arizona was listed among those states.

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 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. Arizona's 15-week ban is at least in part based on the Mississippi law.

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.


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