“Many recent bills ban abortion after 6 weeks - before most women are even aware they are pregnant  — and Alabama’s law constitutes an outright ban at any stage. But women will always seek out a way to end an unwanted pregnancy  — the question is whether they can do so safely. In countries with extreme laws like those passed in Georgia, Ohio and now Alabama, women suffer and die. Georgia, for example, has the highest maternal mortality rate in the nation and you can expect those numbers to increase under a law that creates criminal suspicion around every miscarriage.”
Jon O’Brien, The Hill

One Alabama Doctor reflects on a recent case: “She was 22 weeks pregnant and had a condition called preeclampsia, which is when high blood pressure puts the health of the mother and baby at risk and can result in death. The only option in that situation was to immediately deliver. The patient understood the high stakes and instead decided to end her pregnancy. But it took time (which we did not have) to convince the hospital and other physicians that this was the correct course of action because of the already hostile climate for abortion…

“I fear what could happen to women in this situation if the [new] law and its criminal penalties go into effect.Physicians will hesitate in how to care for complex health situations… doctors like me will leave Alabama rather than stay and practice substandard medicine… Alabamans deserve better. We all do.”
Yashica Robinson, CNN

“Across the nation as a whole, just 17 percent of Americans say [Roe v. Wade] should be overturned entirely, and this reality is reflected at the state level: In 2008, voters in the solidly-Republican state of South Dakota overwhelmingly rejected a statewide ban on abortion — and repeated the feat two years later, even after exceptions for incest and rape were added to the proposed law. In 2011, Mississippi voters rejected a similar referendum by an even larger margin. Back in my home state of Kansas, the state Supreme Court last month ruled — shockingly — that the state constitution protects the right to an abortion.”
Joel Mathis, The Week

Counterpoint: “Depending on how you ask about abortion rights, Americans are either overwhelmingly in favor of them or they are split down the middle… A Pew Research Center poll from late last year found that 58% of Americans say abortion should be always or mostly legal, compared with 37% who say it should be always or mostly illegal. This mostly lines up with 2018 Gallup polling that discovered that 60% of Americans think first trimester abortions should generally be legal… [At the same time] when Gallup asked Americans about whether a first trimester abortion should be allowed for ‘any reason,’ support dropped from 60% to 45%…How the question is phrased definitely matters.”
Harry Enten, CNN

Some note that “both the Alabama and Georgia measures rely on the concept of ‘natural law’— unchanging moral principles that have supposedly existed since before the Constitution — to support the idea that a fetus is a person. But these kinds of arguments don’t have a record of judicial success. Natural law-based arguments for fetal personhood were pursued by anti-abortion scholars and jurists for much of the 1960s and 1970s to little avail… neither judges nor many other conservative lawyers, it seems, felt fully comfortable with recognizing rights not detailed in the text or history of the Constitution… Roe is likely to be reversed. But asking the court for too much too soon has backfired before, and it could well again.”
Mary Ziegler, New York Times

Others point out that “the supreme court has taken a relatively lax attitude toward respecting long-standing precedents, including overturning a 40-year-old precedent just this week. And if anti-abortion activists fail this time, they can always try again. If Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who is 86, decides to step down or if Trump wins a second term, all bets are off. The only thing that’s certain is that the future of Roe is uncertain at best.”
B Jessie Hill, The Guardian