Over at USA Today there is a report on how the laws of the land are likely to stack up if Roe v. Wade were overturned by the Supreme Court:
USA TODAY used the Guttmacher data and other factors to calculate how states would be likely to respond if Roe were reversed. The 1973 decision recognized access to abortion as part of a constitutional right to privacy and limited states’ ability to restrict it.
The conclusions:
Twenty-two state legislatures are likely to impose significant new restrictions on abortion. They include nearly every state in the South and a swath of big states across the industrial Rust Belt, from Pennsylvania to Ohio and Michigan. These states have enacted most of the abortion restrictions now allowed.
Nine states are considering bans similar to the one passed in South Dakota ” it’s scheduled to go into effect July 1 ” and four states are debating restrictions that would be triggered if the Supreme Court overturned Roe.
Sixteen state legislatures are likely to continue current access to abortion. They include every state on the West Coast and almost every state in the Northeast. A half-dozen already have passed laws that specifically protect abortion rights. Most of the states in this group have enacted fewer than half of the abortion restrictions now available to states.
Twelve states fall into a middle ground between those two categories. About half are in the Midwest, the rest scattered from Arizona to Rhode Island.
The article also contains a sidebar table on the number of abortion clinics in each state, as well as the abortion rate in those states.
I’m not entirely sure that I buy those stats however. For example, 33% of all pregnancies in New York are terminated by abortion?! If that were true, while I wouldn’t revise my current opinion….but it’s even easier to understand how impassioned some of the anti-choice crowd are.