‘It will be chaos’: 26 states in US will ban abortion if supreme court ruling stands

Regulation would be returned to states where lawmakers in south and midwest have enacted bans in anticipation of court's decision

More than half of US states will outlaw abortion immediately or as soon as practicable, if a leaked draft decision from five supreme court justices remains substantially unchanged.

The result would send hundreds of thousands of people in 26 states hostile to abortion elsewhere to terminate a pregnancy - either by traveling hundreds of miles to an abortion clinic or seeking to self-manage abortion through medication from grassroots or illicit groups.