There’s a lot of talk that the new Supreme Court, one with two Trump justices on it, might overturn Roe v. Wade. So the court can’t just wake up one morning and say, we’re overruling Roe v. Wade. I think supporters of abortion rights are right to be nervous, but they’re maybe not exactly right about how to be nervous, what to be nervous about. It’s a shorthand, sure, to say Roe v. Wade can be overruled, but that’s not the only, or even the most likely, outcome. Let me take you through the possible scenarios. Let’s call the first category the nuclear options. These are the most extreme and, therefore, least likely scenarios. The first one would flip Roe on its head. Roe says there’s a constitutional right to abortion. The court could say the Constitution prohibits abortion in the interest of protecting fetal life. That would suggest that fetal life is like any other life, so that taking it away would be murder. So if the court were to go in that very unlikely direction, abortion would be outlawed across the nation, and women could not get abortions in the United States legally. A second nuclear option would be for the court to do away with the right to privacy established in a case called Griswold in 1965. “The individual is entitled to some private sector.” That right to privacy is the foundation for Roe v. Wade. If the right to privacy goes, it would do away with the basis for Roe v. Wade and, therefore, Roe v. Wade itself and flip the issue back to the states and allow states to regulate abortion as they wish. The right to privacy has been, and could be, the foundation of many rights, so I don’t think it’s likely the court will go after the right to privacy. A second possibility, and the one everyone’s talking about, is the court could overrule Roe v. Wade. Protesters: “Ho, ho, Roe v. Wade has got to go. Hey, hey, ho, ho.” So in a post-Roe world, you still have a right to privacy. But that right to privacy does not include a constitutional right to abortion. States would be free to do what they wanted. And some advocacy groups say perhaps 22 states could make abortion illegal entirely. That’s probably not going to happen anytime soon. Protesters: “Hey, hey, Roe v. Wade is here to stay.” Chief Justice John Roberts is an incrementalist. He takes things step by step, and I don’t think his first impulse is going to be, let’s overrule Roe v. Wade when there are other ways to get from here to most of the way there. The last scenario, and the most likely one, is for the court to chip away at Roe v. Wade. The court has already upheld some restrictions on abortion. “The 5 to 4 majority upheld a ban on performing abortions in public facilities.” “The U.S. Supreme Court today upheld the nationwide ban on partial-birth abortion.” “Medication abortion is now effectively blocked in Arkansas.” Much more severe restrictions on abortion rights are a perfectly imaginable scenario when we have a new Supreme Court. Here’s how that could happen. States cannot impose an undue burden on women’s right to abortion. That’s a fairly malleable standard, and it wouldn’t be hard for the Supreme Court to keep it in place, but interpret it slightly differently and say states can impose such restrictions. A couple of years ago, the court heard a case from Texas. And had the court sustained the Texas law, the number of clinics in Texas would have dropped from about 40 to about 10. And that could rapidly diminish the ability of women to get abortions because the nearest abortion clinic, at a minimum, could be hundreds of miles away. It’s a little hard to answer exactly what life will look like in a given state because we’ll have a patchwork of laws. But what’s for sure is that women in red states, and particularly poor women in red states, will have a much harder time getting abortions as each successive abortion restriction is sustained by a court that now has a solidly conservative majority.