President Joe Biden called upon American voters on

President Joe Biden called upon American voters on Tuesday to defend the “fundamental” right to abortion after a leaked draft suggested that the Supreme Court is poised to strike down the long-standing decision in the 1973 Roe v Wade case protecting a woman’s right to terminate a pregnancy.

The United States Supreme Court has decided by an internal majority to overturn Roe v. Wade, the court’s landmark 1973 judgment  that made abortion a constitutional right.

In Roe v. Wade(1973) and Planned Parenthood v. Casey (1992).  In both judgments said that women have the right to terminate pregnancies up to the point of foetal viability.

Over the years, relying on these two rulings, American lower courts and even the Supreme Court have blocked several state laws that restricted abortions before foetal viability.

Foetal viability

Foetal viability, that is, the time after which a foetus can survive outside the womb,isused as a criteria for allowing abortions— a woman’s right

To abort is restricted  after foetal  viability  is determined.

Foetal viability was around 28 weeks (7 months) at the time of the Roe judgment; experts now agree that advances in medicine have brought the threshold down to 23 or 24 weeks (6 months or a little less), and newer studies show this could be further pegged at   22 weeks. An average pregnancy lasts about        40 weeks.

Foetal viability is often seen as the point at which the rights of the woman can be separated from the rights of the unborn foetus. The length of a pregnancy is commonly calculated from the start of a person’s most re- cent menstrual period. Since many people identify pregnancy only after the sixth week, pre-viability timelines leave women with very little time and opportunity to make a decision to abort.

Abortion laws across the world rely on this metric but those opposing abortions argue that this is an arbitrary time frame that legislation and the court in Roe adopted.

In India, elsewhere

India’s Medical Termination of Pregnancy Act, 1971 allows abortion until 20 weeks of pregnancy. Through an amendment in 2021, the ceiling for abortions was raised to 24 weeks, but only for special categories of pregnant women such as rape or incest survivors, that too, with the approval of two registered doctors. In case of foetal disability, there is no limit to the timeline for abortion, but that is allowed by a medical board of specialist doctors set up by the governments of states and union territories. In approximately 16 countries around the world, abortion is entirely prohibited and even criminalized. But several Catholic majority nations such as Ireland and Mexico have decriminalize abortion in the last decade.