Roe v Wade...

It looks like SCOTUS is about to overturn it. This may have implications in other areas as well...

“The Supreme Court has voted to strike down the landmark Roe v. Wade decision, according to an initial draft majority opinion written by Justice Samuel Alito circulated inside the court.”

See the draft opinion here: https://s3.documentcloud.org/documents/21835435/scotus-initial-draft.pdf

The summary:

“We end this opinion where we began. Abortion presents a profound moral question. The Constitution does not prohibit the citizens of each State from regulating or prohibiting abortion. Roe and Casey arrogated that authority. We now overrule those decisions and return that authority to the people and their elected representatives.”

The analysis is exhaustive, and it comes out with what I think is a correct result, that the matter is up to the states and not the national government. Some states, such as California and New York, may choose to make abortion legal at all points in a pregnancy, including “late term abortions”, others may choose to prohibit it entirely. This is ultimately an application of the Tenth Amendment although the opinion for some reason does not bring that in explicitly, but it is certainly implied:

“The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.” https://scholarship.law.nd.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1243&context=ndlr

As the opinion notes, in great detail, there is no precedent for the “right to an abortion” in the Constitution at all. There’s not the least bit of a mention, either. And the states, at the time of Roe v Wade in 1973 had various laws in place regulating or prohibiting abortion. So what Roe v Wade did was to - unconstitutionally - invade the right of each of the states and of their citizens, respectively, to choose how they should be governed, and to create a national law to override their desires previously set out in legislation.

Although the Court attempts to limit this ruling to abortion, I can see its application to other issues, such as a federal requirement to obtain a vaccine passport or other sort of internal passport - or various other federal mandates, the substances of which are not touched upon in the Constitution. So this decision may have ramifications going well beyond abortion.