The end.

Late Monday night, we got news that the constitutional right to an abortion might soon come to an end.

According to a leaked draft opinion obtained by Politico, the Supreme Court has privately voted to strike down the landmark role versus way decision from 49 years ago.

Politico reports tonight, quote, the draft opinion is a full-throated, unflinching repudiation of the 1973 decision which guaranteed federal constitutional protections of abortion rights.

Politico published a leaked copy of a draft Supreme Court opinion written by Jeff the Samuel Alito calling Roe versus Wade a grigously wrong from the start.

Now this is only a draft and the justices could still change their vote before a final decision is announced this summer.

But legal experts are saying that seems unlikely and that soon federal constitutional protections for abortion will be gone.

This would be if true the most seismic court ruling in 50 years, most likely, a earthquake in the lives of America's women in our legal culture, in our political culture.

The Supreme Court case being heard, Dives versus Jackson Women's Health Organization centers around a Mississippi law that bans abortion after 15 weeks, and if Roe was overturned as a result of this case, decisions about whether and when people can legally obtain an abortion would fall to the states.

13 states already have so-called trigger laws that would ban most abortions as soon as Roe is overturned, and several other states are poised to move quickly in eliminating abortion as well.

If that happens, the people who will be most impacted are poor women and women of color, especially black women.

While white women are often the face of the abortion conversation, it's actually black women who seek abortions at higher rates than anyone else.

According to the Kaiser Family Foundation, in 2019, 38% of abortions in the United States were obtained by black women, compared to 33 and 21% of white and Hispanic women respectively.

And given that black people have less access to health care and maternal and infant mortality rates are higher for black people, forcing women to carry unwanted pregnancies could have deadly consequences.

According to the Center for Disease Control, black women are two and a half times more likely to die in childbirth than white women.

There is a playbook that runs thickly between racial oppression in the United States and that baked into law.

This is UC Irvine Law Professor Michelle Goodwin, appearing on MSNBC's The Last Word with Lawrence O'Donnell on Monday night.

Let's remember that states rights laws, that's the Jim Crow playbook, and what we're about to see is the Jane Crow playbook, which is going to be the companion to the Jim Crow.

We see that revisited through voter suppression. And now what we see quite explicitly is how this court under its current formation is ready to yank the rug out underneath what as you've described as a 49 year protection that was not a close decision.

Goodwin is also the author of Policing the Wound, a book about reproductive justice.

We should remember that a person is 14 times more likely to die by carrying a pregnancy term than by terminating it.

And given that this has been part of Supreme Court jurisprudence and record just a few years ago in Whole Women's Health, then this is a deadly decision.

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