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... a law which outlaws abortion in that state, excepting to protect the health of the mother. Pro-life organizations are presumably drafting a legal challenge, which will be heard in federal court.
The federal district court is obliged to follow the guidelines set forth by the Supreme Court, and will strike down the law. The state will then, in all likelihood, appeal that decision to the appellate court, which will be obliged to uphold the lower court, and then the Supreme Court.
It isn't a sure thing that the Supreme Court will even agree to hear the case or, if it does, that Roe will be overturned.
Three of the high court's current nine members supported abortion rights during the 1992 case Planned Parenthood vs. Casey, which was viewed as a major threat to Roe vs. Wade. Two other members, Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Stephen G. Breyer, are Clinton administration appointees who also support keeping abortion legal.
There are two separate, though usually conflated, issues here. First, is abortion a matter to be settled by the state or federal government and, second, what should be our public policy regarding abortion?
Roe was decided on the strength of a supposed right of privacy in the Constitution, a dicey proposition. Privacy is everywhere implicit in the Constitution, but there's no reason to suppose that it extends, or that the Founders intended that it should extend, to matters of life and death, or that they believed anything one wishes to do is lawful so long as done outside public view. I don't think that abortion is protected by the Constitution; it is a public policy matter for the states.
Everybody else thought so, too, I should add, for more than 195-years.
Surveys suggest that what our policy ought to be is a tough question for everybody but conservative evangelicals, practically all of whom wish for all abortions to be illegal, and for doctors who perform abortions to be imprisoned. The rest of us have no difficulty thinking-up circumstances where an abortion is easily justified.
In the case of South Dakota, the law makes no exception for pregnancies arising from rape or incest. This is logical, I suppose; the life conceived in violence is as innocent as the life conceived in the back seat of the car. But who with a shred of human decency is willing to point a gun at the woman — or child, perhaps — carrying the unwelcome, non-sentient blastocyst arising from rape or incest and tell her that the police power of the state is prepared to compel her to carry it to term?
Nobody but genuinely deformed obsessives — that's who.
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