Washington D.C., Jul 23, 2021 / 11:00 am
Mississippi Attorney General Lynn Fitch on Thursday asked the Supreme Court to overturn two of its landmark rulings on abortion, arguing those decisions “shackle states to a view of the facts that is decades out of date.”
The high court recently agreed to hear the case of Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, involving Mississippi’s ban on most elective abortions after 15 weeks. Activists on both sides of the abortion debate have argued that the case might prompt the court to re-examine its 1973 ruling in Roe v. Wade that legalized abortion nationwide, as well as its 1992 decision in Planned Parenthood v. Casey that built upon the Roe ruling.
The high court is expected to hear the Dobbs case in the fall. In a brief filed with the Supreme Court on Thursday, Fitch said that the Roe and Casey rulings created more questions than answers, and that the issue of abortion should be returned to lawmakers rather than to the courts.
Fitch said that rather than settling debate over the issue of abortion, the Roe and Casey decisions established “a special-rules regime for abortion jurisprudence that has left these cases out of step with other Court decisions and neutral principles of law applied by the Court.”