Leading Democrats have condemned the reported decision of the US Supreme Court to overturn the Roe v Wade ruling that legalised abortion nationwide nearly 50 years ago. Joe Biden vowed to fight the court’s decision in a statement he released early on Tuesday.
House speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate majority leader Chuck Shumer said the Republican-appointed justices who were said to have backed the decision were “poised to inflict the greatest restriction of rights in the past 50 years”.
They said the leaked draft opinion, as reported by Politico, was “an abomination, one of the worst and most damaging decisions in modern history”.
In the draft, Justice Samuel Alito, states “Roe was egregiously wrong from the start.”
The decision indicates that he and four other Republican-appointed justices voted in the case Dobbs v Jackson Women’s Health Organisation to uphold a Mississippi law criminalising termination of a pregnancy after 15 weeks.
Ms Pelosi and Ms Shumer are among many Democrats to publicly state their disapproval of the decision. The Democratic governors of California and New York have both promised to fight the Supreme Court.
Several Republican governors meanwhile expressed their support for the justices.
