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Posted: 2022-05-05T01:22:37Z | Updated: 2022-05-05T01:22:37Z

The leaked draft of a Supreme Court decision this week confirmed what many feared for months: the justices, dominated by conservatives, are gearing up to overturn Roe v. Wade and let tens of millions of women lose access to abortion overnight.

The 98-page draft , which Chief Justice John Roberts confirmed was legitimate but not final, was authored by Justice Samuel Alito, one of the panels most conservative jurists. Here are some of the most confounding passages in the leaked text.

Its obsessed with keeping women in the past.

Alito repeatedly argued throughout the draft that Roe v. Wade was a mistake because, up until the 1973 ruling, banning abortion was simply the American way.

Until the latter part of the 20th century, there was no support in American law for a constitutional right to obtain an abortion. Zero. None. No state constitutional provision had recognized such a right. Until a few years before Roe was handed down, no federal or state court had recognized such a right.

Alito is right: Abortion was widely banned throughout the centuries of U.S. history when women were legally regarded as second-class citizens, kept out of medical institutions and public office and banned from owning property. They didnt gain the right to vote until 1920, and Black women faced barriers to voting until Congress passed the Voting Rights Act in 1965 just eight years before the court decided Roe.