Nancy Pelosi leads condemnation of SC draft overturning abortion rights in US

WASHINGTON: Following the reports of a draft Supreme Court decision overturning the landmark Roe v. Wade ruling, the US House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has said that the move will inflict the greatest restriction of rights on Americans in the past 50 years. Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, in a joint statement, have condemned the move by "Republican-appointed justices".

"If the report is accurate, the Supreme Court is poised to inflict the greatest restriction of rights in the past 50 years - not just on women but on all Americans. The Republican-appointed Justices' reported votes to overturn Roe v. Wade would go down as an abomination, one of the worst and most damaging decisions in modern history," said the statement. The statement further said that several of these conservative Justices, who are in no way accountable to the American people, have lied to the US Senate, ripped up the Constitution and defiled both precedent and the Supreme Court's reputation at the expense of tens of millions of women who could soon be stripped of their bodily autonomy and the constitutional rights they have relied on for half a century.

"The party of Lincoln and Eisenhower has now completely devolved into the party of Trump. Every Republican Senator who supported Senator McConnell and voted for Trump Justices pretending that this day would never come will now have to explain themselves to the American people," said the statement. Meanwhile, a protest was seen in front of the Supreme Court building in Washington DC late Monday night. Barricades were up around the building, just minutes after reports from Politico were leaked regarding the court overturning Roe v. Wade ruling.

Notably, the US Supreme Court voted to strike down the landmark Roe v. Wade verdict that guaranteed the right to abortion for nearly a half-century and allow each state to decide whether to restrict or ban abortion, reported New York Times, citing a leaked draft opinion from February, published online on Monday night by Politico, the US-based media publication. According to the draft opinion, written by Justice Samuel A Alito Jr, a majority of the court voted to overturn the landmark Roe v. Wade verdict. Further, Justice Alito called it had wrongly been decided and said the contentious issue, which has invoked political debates in the US for more than a generation, should be decided by politicians, not the courts.

"We hold that Roe and Casey must be overruled. It is time to heed the Constitution and return the issue of abortion to the people's elected representatives," Alito wrote in the document labelled as the "Opinion of the Court", according to the media outlet. Though the court's holding will not be final until it is published, likely in the next two months, the ruling according to the draft would be a seismic change in American law and politics, coming a few months ahead of the congressional midterm elections that will decide who controls power on Capitol Hill.