The Supreme Court declined to decide whether fetuses are entitled to constitutional rights. The rebuff comes after the top court made a ruling in June that overturned the half-century precedence set in the 1973 Roe v. Wade ruling that abortions are a federal constitutional right.
The justices turned away an appeal by a Catholic group and two women of a lower court’s ruling against their challenge to a 2019 Rhode Island law that codified the right to abortion in line with the Roe precedent.
The two women, pregnant at the time when the case was filed, sued on behalf of their fetuses and later gave birth. The Rhode Island Supreme Court decided that fetuses lacked the proper legal standing to bring the suit.
Rhode Island Governor Daniel McKee welcomed the action taken by the justices on Tuesday. A spokesperson for the governor said the appeal was frivolous.
Lawyers for the group Catholics for Life and the two Rhode Island women – one named Nichole Leigh Rowley and the other using the pseudonym Jane Doe – argued that the case “presents the opportunity for this court to meet that inevitable question head on” by deciding if fetuses possess due process and equal protection rights conferred by the Constitution’s 14th Amendment.
The Rhode Island Supreme Court relied on the now-reversed Roe precedent in finding that the 14th Amendment did not extend rights to fetuses. The Roe ruling recognized that the right to personal privacy under the U.S. Constitution protected a woman’s ability to terminate her pregnancy.
When the court overturned the constitutional right to an abortion, Conservative Justice Samuel Alito wrote in the ruling that in the decision the court took no position on “if and when prenatal life is entitled to any of the rights enjoyed after birth.”
The overturning of Roe has opened floodgates for Republican states to continue to go after reproductive rights.
Some Republicans at the state level have pursued what is called fetal personhood laws.
In Georgia, pregnant women will be able to deduct their fetuses as dependents on their taxes under a 2019 anti-abortion law that a judge allowed to go into effect in July. It affects fetuses starting at around six weeks of pregnancy and would grant fetuses before birth a variety of legal rights and protections like those of any person.
Under such laws, the termination of a pregnancy legally could be considered murder.
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