They warn of how far state leaders could push this newfound power.

The court on Friday overturned Roe on a 5-4 vote, paving a path for dozens of states to ban the procedure. | Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

In a scathing dissent of the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade on Friday, Justices Stephen Breyer, Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan accuse the Court of discarding the “balance” the court struck for half a century as it found a middle ground between “respecting a woman as an autonomous being” and protecting the life of a fetus.

“Roe and Casey well understood the difficulty and divisiveness of the abortion issue. The Court knew that Americans hold profoundly different views about the ‘moral[ity]’ of ‘terminating a pregnancy, even in its earliest stage.’ And the Court recognized that ‘the State has legitimate interests from the outset of the pregnancy in protecting’ the ‘life of the fetus that may become a child’ …So the Court struck a balance, as it often does when values and goals compete,” the justices wrote, citing Casey. “Today, the Court discards that balance.”

The court on Friday overturned Roe on a 5-4 vote, paving a path for dozens of states to ban the procedure. The decision will transform the reproductive health in the country, giving states the power to control who has the right to the procedure. More than half of U.S. states have already or will pass laws that ban abortion, while a multitude of others have strict regulations on the procedure.

The justices warned of how far state leaders could push this newfound power, even beyond imposing criminal penalties on abortion providers. States laws could prosecute a woman for having an abortion, they wrote.

The justices also addressed the disparities that will arise from the ruling, as Americans with low incomes won’t be able to afford to travel across state lines for the procedure. Other jurisdictions could block out-of-state travel for care or prohibit people from receiving abortion medications from other states.

The Supreme Court has voted to strike down Roe v. Wade, the landmark case that upheld abortion rights for the past 50 years.

“Most threatening of all, no language in today’s decision stops the Federal Government from prohibiting abortions nationwide, once again from the moment of conception and without exceptions for rape or incest. If that happens, ‘the views of [an individual State’s] citizens’ will not matter,” they wrote. “The challenge for a woman will be to finance a trip not to ‘New York [or] California’ but to Toronto.”

At the core of the dissent was the justices’ attack on the majority’s disregard for the precedent established in Roe and reaffirmed in Planned Parenthood v. Casey. The justices argue that the legal framework established by these two cases “proved workable in courts across the country,” and that nothing has muddied these standards. They repeatedly note that the Court in deciding Casey in 1992, found this to be true.

“Casey is a precedent about precedent. It reviewed the same arguments made here in support of overruling Roe, and it found that doing so was not warranted. The Court reverses course today for one reason and one reason only: because the composition of this Court has changed,” the dissent says.

The justices then dive into the Court’s precedents regarding both cases and how they believe both Roe and Casey “were from the beginning, and are even more now, embedded in core constitutional concepts of individual freedom, and of the equal rights of citizens to decide on the shape of their lives.”

“Those legal concepts, one might even say, have gone far toward defining what it means to be an American,” the justices wrote. “We believe in a Constitution that puts some issues off limits to majority rule. Even in the face of public opposition, we uphold the right of individuals—yes, including women—to make their own choices and chart their own futures. Or at least, we did once.”

In the dissent, the justices also tapped into a fear many court watchers and abortion rights activists have been sounding the alarm about since the draft opinion was published in May. While some justices in the majority noted that the ruling does not cast “doubt on precedents that do not concern abortion,” Breyer, Sotomayor and Kagan warned that the Court’s conservative wing would not stop with Roe.

“No one should be confident that this majority is done with its work. The right Roe and Casey recognized does not stand alone,” the justices wrote, outlining the connections to Griswold v. Connecticut, a case related to the right to purchase and use contraception. The dissent said those freedoms then led to the rights of same-sex intimacy and marriage.

“They are all part of the same constitutional fabric, protecting autonomous decisionmaking over the most personal of life decisions,” the justices warned.

While Justice Brett Kavanaugh joined the majority on Friday, he wrote his own concurring opinion, in which he appeared to push against the notion that the decision should be used to undermine other rights not explicitly mentioned in the Constitution.

“The text of the Constitution does not refer to or encompass abortion,” Kavanaugh wrote. “To be sure, this Court has held that the Constitution protects unenumerated rights that are deeply rooted in this Nation’s history and tradition, and implicit in the concept of ordered liberty. But a right to abortion is not deeply rooted in American history and tradition. ... On the issue of abortion, the Constitution is neither pro-life nor pro-choice.”

The justices concluded by quoting the words of late Justices Sandra Day O’Connor, Anthony Kennedy and David Souter, who in deciding Casey, wrote that the court would pay a “terrible price” for overruling Roe.

“The Justices who wrote those words — O’Connor, Kennedy, and Souter — they were judges of wisdom. They would not have won any contests for the kind of ideological purity some court watchers want Justices to deliver. But if there were awards for Justices who left this Court better than they found it? And who for that reason left this country better? And the rule of law stronger? Sign those Justices up,” the dissent said.

O’Connor, Kennedy and Souter also knew that the “legitimacy of the court” is formed over time, and that its reputation can be tarnished “much more quickly,” the justices said, adding that with Friday’s decision to overrule Roe and Casey, “the Court betrays its guiding principles.”

“With sorrow—for this Court, but more, for the many millions of American women who have today lost a fundamental constitutional protection—we dissent,” they wrote.