A Look at the Five Conservative Judges Who Could Overrule Roe v Wade

Chief Justice John Roberts has exhibited malleability in his track record and has thus been kept out of this list.

(This was first published on 4 May 2022. It has been republished from The Quint's archives over US Supreme Court overturning Roe v Wade)

"Roe was egregiously wrong from the start. Its reasoning was exceptionally weak, and the decision has had damaging consequences."

"We hold that Roe and Casey must be overruled. The Con​stitution makes no reference to abortion, and no such right is implicitly protected by any constitutional provision..."

These are probably the two most important passages in the opinion delivered by Associate Justice Samuel Alito in the US Supreme Court's leaked draft with respect to its judgment on Roe v. Wade (1973).

You can read about the 1973 case in detail in this explainer.

Casey, in the aforementioned passage, refers to Planned Parenthood v Casey (1992), the details of which are beyond the scope of this article.

The reader should know, however, that in Casey, like in Roe, the Supreme Court had reiterated that states could not snatch away the right of a woman to conduct abortions before what is known as the foetal viability period – the point at which a foetus can survive outside a woman's womb and is currently agreed to be at around 23 or 24 weeks.