Less than a week after the United States Supreme Court heard challenges to Mississippi’s Gestational Age Act, a controversial ban on abortions after 15 weeks of pregnancy, Republican Gov. Tate Reeves said that his state is ready to enforce the law and possibly make further moves to prohibit the procedure entirely if the Court’s 6-3 conservative majority upholds the ban, which it appeared willing to do.
Similar laws in at least 20 other states would also take effect if the Court rules in Mississippi’s favor.
The case at hand, Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, is widely viewed as the means through which the Court could strike down Roe v. Wade as well as Planned Parenthood v. Casey, which established access to abortion as a constitutional right and gave states the right to set “fetal viability” limits to when abortions could be performed.
Speaking with Jake Tapper on State of the Union, Reeves said that while the Court has a number of options on how it could decide the fate of the Gestational Stage Act, and therefore Roe, that he anticipates that women’s access to abortions will be significantly limited.
“If you read the Constitution, there is no guaranteed right to an abortion,” said Reeves, adding that “there’s nothing that prohibits individual states from enacting their own laws.”
He insisted that “if you believe, as I believe very strongly, that the innocent unborn child in the mother’s womb is, in fact, a child, the most important word when we talk about unborn children is not unborn, but it’s children, and so, yes, I will do everything I can to protect the lives of those children.”
Watch the full interview below:
