Virginia Attorney General Tells Supreme Court: We Want Roe v. Wade Overturned

State   |   Steven Ertelt   |   Jan 21, 2022   |   8:15PM   |   Washington, DC

The state of Virginia filed a legal motion today asking the Supreme Court to overturn Roe v. Wade.

Last November, Virginia voters elected new pro-life officials — including a new pro-life Governor Glenn Young, Lt. Governor Winsome Sears and Attorney General Jason Miyares. That pro-life administration has already sprung into action — with Youngkin creating a position of pro-life ambassador.

Today, the state’s attorney general filed legal papers with the Supreme Court asking it to remove Virginia’s name from a pro-abortion legal brief filed in the Dobbs abortion case related to a Mississippi pro-life law that the Supreme Court could use this year to overturn Roe v. Wade. Miyares says the pro-abortion view is no longer the position of the state and that Virginia wants the poorly-decided case reversed.

National Review has more:

Virginia joined nearly two dozen progressive states in filing a Supreme Court brief in Dobbs, a case considering the constitutionality of a Mississippi law protecting unborn children after 15 weeks of pregnancy. The brief, led by California, argued that Mississippi’s law is unconstitutional and urged the Court not to overrule precedents such as Roe v. Wade and Planned Parenthood v. Casey, which created and upheld a supposed constitutional right to abortion. The brief also asserted that overturning the Court’s abortion jurisprudence would have a number of negative effects on the states and their citizens.

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Now, at the end of his first week in office, Miyares is seeking to remove Virginia as a signatory to this pro-abortion brief. In a copy of his motion obtained exclusively by National Review, Miyares writes “that Virginia no longer adheres to the arguments contained in its previously filed brief [and] is now of the view that the Constitution is silent on the question of abortion, and that it is therefore up to the people in the several States to determine the legal status and regulatory treatment of abortion.”

The motion goes on to ask the Court to uphold Mississippi’s law, arguing that Roe and Casey should be overturned. “It is Virginia’s position that the Court’s decisions in Roe and Casey were wrongly decided,” the motion concludes. “Unmoored from the Constitution’s text, the Court’s abortion jurisprudence has proven unworkable, and the Court’s effort to save it has distorted other areas of the law. This Court should restore judicial neutrality to the abortion debate by permitting the people of the several States to resolve these questions for themselves.”

During the high court’s consideration of Dobbs, Mississippi Solicitor General Scott Stewart told the justices on the nation’s highest court that it’s time to overturn Roe v. Wade so states that provide legal protections for unborn children.

“Roe versus Wade and Planned Parenthood versus Casey haunt our country,” Stewart told the Supreme Court as it opened hearings on the case of Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization.

“They have no basis in the Constitution. They have no home in our history or traditions. They’ve damaged the democratic process. They’ve poisoned the law. They’ve choked off compromise. For fifty years they’ve kept this Court at the center of a political battle that it can never resolve. And fifty years on, they stand alone: nowhere else does this Court recognize a right to end a human life,” he said.

For decades, under Roe v. Wade and Planned Parenthood v. Casey, states have been prohibited from banning abortions before viability. As a result, about 63 million unborn babies and hundreds, perhaps thousands, of mothers have died in supposedly “safe,” legal abortions. Now the Supreme Court has agreed to re-consider this precedent and decide “whether all pre-viability prohibitions on elective abortion are unconstitutional.”

The Mississippi law at the center of the case would ban abortions after 15 weeks of pregnancy, a point at which most Americans agree unborn babies should be protected under the law.