Governor Kay Ivey on Thursday joined 10 other Republican governors in signing on to an amicus brief led by South Carolina Gov. Henry McMaster asking the U.S. Supreme Court to overturn Roe v. Wade, the court’s landmark abortion decision.
“Alabama will continue to fight for life so that every unborn child is protected. We must stand strong for those babies who do not have a voice, and I assure my fellow Alabamians that we will continue this fight until they are protected once and for all,” Ivey said in a statement. “We will not rest until Roe v. Wade is overturned.”
The governors are joined by nearly 230 Republican members of Congress who filed a separate amicus brief Thursday seeking the same, CNN reported.
Plaintiff’s in the Mississippi case sought to strike down the state’s 15-week ban on abortions, a law that does not make exceptions for rape or incest. Two lower courts sided with the plaintiff, Jackson’s Women Health Center, the last remaining clinic in the state.
“In an unbroken line dating to Roe v. Wade, the Supreme Court’s abortion cases have established (and affirmed and re-affirmed) a woman’s right to choose an abortion before viability,” wrote a panel of judges on the 5th US Circuit Court of Appeals in December 2019. “States may regulate abortion procedures prior to viability so long as they do not ban abortions,” the court held and concluded that “the law at issue is a ban.”
The U.S. Supreme Court on May 17 agreed to hear Mississippi’s appeal to consider “whether all pre-viability prohibitions on elective abortions are unconstitutional.”
