Pro-choice demonstrators gather across the US over expected reversal of Roe v Wade – live | US news

As the US braces for the end of a federal right to abortion, a new six-week ban in Oklahoma offers a preview of what’s to come.

The day after the supreme court leak, Andrea Gallegos had already started to cancel patients’ appointments.

In the aftermath, Gallegos, the administrator for Tulsa Women’s Clinic, an Oklahoma-based abortion provider, wasn’t worried about Roe – at least, it wasn’t the first thing she was worried about.

To her, there was a bigger, more immediate threat: a six-week abortion ban the Republican governor was expected to sign any day now.

That same evening, to little fanfare, Governor Kevin Stitt signed into law the six-week abortion ban. The state supreme court declined to block the ban. If the clinic saw their patients on Wednesday, they risked civil lawsuits with a penalty of up to $10,000.

So Gallegos did what she had dreaded. She began calling back patients who were past six weeks pregnant. The scheduled appointments would have to be canceled. If they wanted to seek an abortion, she told them, they should look somewhere else – Kansas, New Mexico or, a bit further away, Colorado.

State judicial races become increasingly politicized over issues such as abortion, partisan gerrymandering and gun rights.

Spending and campaigning around the judicial races could intensify if the US supreme court overturns Roe v Wade, which a leaked draft opinion indicates justices are prepared to do.

“State courts are going to be front-and-center in the fight over abortion access,” said Doug Keith, an attorney in the Brennan Center’s Democracy Program. “These races in some states are likely going to take a prominence that they’ve never had before.”

Michigan is among the states where abortion could be a central factor in court races this fall. One Democratic and one Republican justice are up for reelection to a court where Democrats hold a 4-3 majority. The races are technically non-partisan, even though candidates are nominated by political parties.

Democratic Governor Gretchen Whitmer is asking the state’s high court to recognize a right to abortion in the state Constitution.

She also wants it to declare unconstitutional a 1931 near-total abortion ban that would go into effect if Roe is reversed.

Teisha Kimmons, who traveled 80 miles to attend the Chicago rally, said she fears for women in states that are ready to ban abortion. She said she might not be alive today if she had not had a legal abortion when she was 15.

“I was already starting to self harm and I would have rather died than have a baby,” Kimmons, a massage therapist from Rockford, Illinois, told the Associated Press.

The upcoming high court ruling in a case from Mississippi stands to energize voters, potentially shaping the upcoming midterm elections.

Kimmons, 46, said she believes the focus needs to be on those races. “We have to vote in pro-choice politicians because women’s lives depend on it,” she said.

There are lots of strong images and videos coming out from the protests, here’s a selection from Charlottesville, Virginia:

Conservative justice Clarence Thomas has called the leak of the supreme court abortion draft “tremendously bad.”

“What happened at the court was tremendously bad,” Thomas, 73, said in a dialog at a conference of conservative and libertarian thinkers in Dallas.

“I wonder how long we’re going to have these institutions at the rate we’re undermining them…And then I wonder when they’re gone or destabilized, what we’re going to have as a country,” he said.

The comments came one week after the justice said he feared that the judicial system will come under threat if people are unwilling to “live with outcomes we don’t agree with” and that recent events at the apex court might be “one symptom of that”.

Good morning and welcome to the Guardian’s coverage of Saturday’s abortion rallies that are set to take place across the nation.

We will be covering it all live and have reporters at some of the main protest sites, including Washington DC, New York City and Los Angeles.

With the US supreme court apparently poised to overturn the 1973 landmark decision which made abortion legal, hundreds of thousands of people across America are planning to take to the streets to protest the looming decision.

A coalition of groups such as Planned Parenthood, UltraViolet, MoveOn and the Women’s March are organizing Saturday’s demonstrations, whose rallying cry is “Bans Off Our Bodies”.

More than 380 events are set from Maine to Hawaii, with the largest gatherings expected in Los Angeles, Chicago, New York and other big cities, organizers said.

In the nation’s capital, activists planned to gather at the Washington Monument before marching to the Supreme Court, which is now surrounded by a security fence.

The demonstrations come after the leak on 2 May of a draft opinion showing five conservatives on the nine-justice supreme court had voted to reverse their predecessors’ ruling in Roe v Wade nearly 50 years ago.

Unless the provisional ruling is changed substantially before becoming final, abortion would be outlawed essentially immediately in more than half of US states.

“It’s no exaggeration to say that for the women of this country, this will be a summer of rage,” said Rachel Carmona, executive director of the Women’s March.