The supreme court is signalling that it’s ready to end Roe v Wade | Moira Donegan

Predictions that the court would keep abortion as a constitutional right are starting to look incredibly optimistic

It went worse than had been expected, and expectations were already low. As the supreme court prepared to hear oral arguments in Dobbs v Jackson Women's Health Organization, a lawsuit over a 15-week abortion ban in Mississippi that constitutes the most serious challenge to Roe v Wade in a generation, many court watchers predicted a massive rollback of abortion rights. But the line among reasonable pundits was that the court, fearing censure from a largely pro-choice American public, would attempt to have its cake and eat it too - allowing states to impose abortion bans earlier in pregnancy, but keeping abortion as a constitutional right intact.

The most convincing version of this argument came from Slate's Mark Joseph Stern, who predicted that the court, like it did in 1992's Planned Parenthood v Casey, might weaken the abortion right without abandoning it entirely. In Casey, the supreme court lessened the standard of scrutiny applied to state abortion restrictions - from a robust strict scrutiny" standard to a more malleable undue burden" standard - and affirmed that states could ban abortions outright after fetal viability, the point of gestation at which a fetus can survive outside the womb, usually at about 24 weeks.