(NewsNation) — The Supreme Court ended nearly five decades of federal protections for abortion access Friday in a controversial decision that could lead to abortion bans in roughly 26 states.
Roe v. Wade, which was decided in 1973, decreed that the Constitution protects the right to an abortion. Now that the decision has been overturned, abortion rights are in flux throughout the country.
Here is a timeline of significant abortion rulings in the United States in the last 50 years:
Before 1973: Prior to the landmark Roe case, abortion was legal in several states under certain conditions but laws varied in each state.
1973: In the landmark 7-2 Roe decision, the all-male Supreme Court solidified access to abortions nationwide by ruling that they were protected under the Constitution.
1980: The Supreme Court upheld the Hyde Amendment — legislation that banned the use of Medicaid funds for abortions.
1992: Litigation against Pennsylvania’s Abortion Control Act reached the Supreme Court in Planned Parenthood vs. Casey. The Casey ruling reaffirmed Roe, but did away with the framework based around trimesters and instead created an “undue burden standard.”
2007: The Supreme Court upheld a federal ban on dilation and extraction, a procedure opponents call partial-birth abortion.
Almost a decade later, beginning in 2016, the composition of the Supreme Court changed significantly, potentially changing the political dynamics of future rulings by the High Court. Former President Donald Trump confirmed three justices during his term in office to the bench — Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett. This gave conservatives a 6-3 supermajority.
With the new group of freshly appointed justices, the high court agreed to consider Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization last year. The case was a challenge to Mississippi’s ban on abortion after 15 weeks.
Justice Samuel Alito, in the final opinion issued Friday, wrote that Roe and Planned Parenthood v. Casey, the 1992 decision that reaffirmed the right to abortion, were wrong the day they were decided and must be overturned. Authority to regulate abortion rests with the political branches, not the courts, Alito wrote.
The decision of whether to allow abortion access now falls to individual states, 13 of which already had so-called trigger laws in place to ban abortion. Among those states poised to criminalize the act of providing abortion are: Kentucky, Louisiana, South Dakota, Idaho, Tennessee, Texas, Arkansas, Mississippi, Missouri, North Dakota, Oklahoma, Utah and Wyoming.
Exemptions vary by state and include cases in which pregnancy has been a result of rape or incest, whether there is danger to the pregnant person’s life and medical treatment that unintentionally leads to a terminated pregnancy.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
