The US Supreme Court’s unexpected decision to let Texas end legal abortion after six weeks, at least for now, has thrust the issue into the campaign for control of the next Congress

For supporters and opponents of legal abortion in the United States, the case to watch in the Supreme Court’s new term was supposed to be Dobbs vs Jackson Women’s Health Organization, involving a Mississippi state law that bans most abortions after 15 weeks, well before the point of “foetal viability” (defined as the point at which the foetus might be able to live outside the mother’s womb). The law is a direct challenge to Roe vs Wade, the 1973 decision in which the Supreme Court held that before viability, a woman has a constitutional right to an abortion.

The Dobbs case, which has not yet been scheduled for oral argument, has attracted a flood of friend-of-the court briefs seeking to sway the justices, including one from the US conference of Catholic bishops and other ­religious organisations, asserting that the US Constitution “does not create a right to an abortion of an unborn child before viability or at any other stage of pregnancy”.