The US Supreme Court on Friday ended constitutional protections for abortion that had stood in America for nearly a half-century.

The decision by the court’s conservative majority overturned the landmark Roe v. Wade ruling and is expected to lead to abortion bans in roughly half the states.

US President Joe Biden called the Supreme Court ruling a "tragic error". "The court has done what it has never done before: expressly taken away a constitutional right that is so fundamental to so many Americans. It's a realisation of an extreme ideology and a tragic error by the Supreme Court in my view," Biden said, adding that the ruling was taking the country back 150 years.