Washington, June 24 (IANS) Millions of women in the US are expected to lose the legal right to abortion as the country's Supreme Court overturned a 50-year-old ruling that legalised it nationwide.
The court struck down the landmark Roe vs Wade decision, weeks after an unprecedented leaked document suggested it favoured doing so, the BBC reported on Friday.
The judgement will transform abortion rights in the US, with individual states now able to ban the procedure.
Half of the US states are expected to introduce new restrictions or bans.
Thirteen have already passed so-called trigger laws that will automatically outlaw abortion following the Supreme Court's ruling.
A number of others are likely to pass new restrictions quickly.
In total, abortion access is expected to be cut off for about 36 million women of reproductive age, according to research from Planned Parenthood, a healthcare organisation that provides abortions.
The U.S. Centers for Disease Control last week warned the Delta variant of the virus is so contagious, vaccinated people who do get infected could be just as big a risk to others as people who aren't vaccinated.
The new requirement, which will be phased in over several weeks in August and September, is the most aggressive step the city has taken yet to curb a surge in cases caused by the delta variant.
The findings have the potential to upend past thinking about how the disease is spread. Previously, vaccinated people who got infected were thought to have low levels of virus and to be unlikely to pass it to others. But the new data shows that is not the case with the delta variant.
President Joe Biden is calling on states and local governments to join those that are already handing out dollars for shots. New York, the nation's biggest city, started doling out $100 awards on Friday.
The internal documents also cite studies from Canada, Singapore and Scotland showing that the delta variant may pose a greater risk for hospitalization, intensive care treatment and death than the alpha variant, first detected in the United Kingdom.
The dead included a 82-year-old man in Akseki’s Kepezbeleni neighborhood, where some 80% of the houses were incinerated, the district’s governor, Volkan Hulur, told the the state-run Anadolu Agency.
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