Arguments in the US Supreme Court will start this week regarding Mississippi’s abortion law. Governor Tate Reeves on Sunday defended the state’s 2018 law banning abortions after 15 weeks of pregnancy, saying that he believed 1973’s Roe v. Wade decision, by which the high court legalized abortion nationwide, should be overturned.
“I believe, in a simple reading of the United States Constitution, that when Roe was decided in 1973 there is no fundamental right in our United States Constitution to an abortion,” Reeves said.
The Constitution gives powers not outlined within it to the individual states.
Mississippi’s law bans abortions after 15 weeks of pregnancy, however, The Supreme Court has never allowed states to ban abortion before the point at roughly 24 weeks when a fetus can survive outside the womb. The Supreme Court had never before even agreed to hear a case over a pre-viability abortion ban.
Mississippi’s only abortion clinic in Jackson offers abortions up to 16 weeks of pregnancy.
Reeves argued that Mississippi’s law is not out of line because many European countries restrict abortion after the first trimester.
“Mississippi will still have a law on the books in which 39 countries, 39 out of 42 in Europe, have more restrictive abortion laws than what I believe to be one of the most conservative states in the United States,” Reeves said.
