© Getty Images The US Supreme Court has agreed to hear a challenge to Mississippi's 15-week ban on abortion in a major case that will be closely watched across the US.
The verdict could upend the legal right to abortion laid out in the court's 1973 landmark Roe v Wade ruling.
It will be the first abortion case heard by Justice Amy Coney Barrett, an anti-abortion advocate who then President Trump nominated in fall 2020.
The court is ideologically split, with conservatives holding a 6-3 majority.
The case, Dobbs v Jackson Women's Health Organization, challenges the constitutionality of abortions performed after week 15 of pregnancy.
If Mississippi's ban is upheld by the Supreme Court, it could pave the way for further abortion restrictions that have been pushed for by conservatives.
'It could be the case that kills Roe'
© BBC Anti-abortion activists have been waiting, sometimes impatiently, for the increasingly conservative-dominated Supreme Court to take up a case that could allow it to drive a stake through the heart of Roe v Wade. On Monday morning, the court obliged.
Mississippi's 15-week abortion ban was written as direct challenge to existing Supreme Court guidelines governing the legality of abortion. If a majority of the nine-member court decides to uphold the law, it will pave the way for other states to impose their own stringent limitations on the procedure.
That the court decided to hear the case after lower courts struck down the law suggests that at least four justices are open to doing just that.
Abortion has been one of the most highly charged judicial topics in the last half-century. The 1973 Roe case legalising first-trimester abortion nationwide was sweeping in its scope and gave rise to the modern religious conservative movement. A slim majority of justices turned back a serious challenge to the precedent in 1992's Planned Parenthood v Casey.
This Mississippi challenge has the potential to rank alongside those landmark cases. It could be the case that kills Roe and hands the issue of abortion legality back to the states to decide.
What is Roe v Wade?
The 1973 Supreme Court ruling legalised abortion in the US.
By a vote of seven to two, the court justices ruled that governments lacked the power to prohibit abortions.
The court's judgement was based on the decision that a woman's right to terminate her pregnancy came under the freedom of personal choice in family matters as protected by the 14th Amendment of the US Constitution.
The case created the "trimester" system that:
- gives American women an absolute right to an abortion in the first three months of pregnancy
- allows some government regulation in the second trimester of pregnancy
- declares that states may restrict or ban abortions in the last trimester as the foetus nears the point where it could live outside the womb
Roe v Wade also established that in the final trimester a woman can obtain an abortion despite any legal ban only if doctors certify it is necessary to save her life or health.
Overturning Roe v Wade would not make abortion illegal, it would just allow each state to determine its own rules.
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