In an about-face under their new political regime, the state of Virginia has announced a reversal in their support for the abortion status quo.
Jason Miyares, the state’s newly-elected Republican attorney general, made a statement signaling the potential overturn of Roe vs. Wade is in his sights in his first week in office.
"The [new] Attorney General has reconsidered Virginia’s position in this case,” Miyares wrote in a letter to the Supreme Court Friday. “Virginia 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.”
Under the previous Democrat administration, Virginia was one of 22 states to publicly urge the court to strike down Mississippi’s ban on abortions after 15 weeks of pregnancy and double down on a core tenet of Roe v. Wade. That tenet bans states from prohibiting abortions that occur before fetal viability, which happens at around 24 weeks of the pregnancy.
The decision over whether the Mississippi abortion regulation can stand is expected by June, and it could come down to simply a question of states’ rights vs. federal.
In his letter to the court, Miyares said Virginia’s official position is that abortion laws should be made at the state level and he called for the overturning of two separate Supreme Court precedents.
“It is Virginia’s position that the court’s decisions in Roe and Casey were wrongly decided,” he wrote. “This court should restore judicial neutrality to the abortion debate by permitting the people of the several states to resolve these questions for themselves.”
The 1992 decision in Planned Parenthood v. Casey banned states from placing an undue burden on abortion access before fetal viability at 24 weeks.
The letter from Miyares comes at a time when Virginia’s own state legislature is mulling a bill that would ban abortion after 20 weeks, a law that, if passed, would also be struck down should the Supreme Court hold fast to the Roe vs. Wade precedent.
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