Roe v. Wade

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(1973) Decision of the Supreme Court of the United States that established a woman's right to have an abortion without undue interference from the government. A Texas law prohibiting abortions was challenged by an unmarried pregnant woman (pseudonymously named Jane Roe), and the court ruled in her favour, finding that the state had violated her right to privacy (see rights of privacy). Harry Blackmun, writing for the seven-member majority, argued that the state's legitimate concern for the protection of prenatal life increased as a pregnancy advanced. While allowing that the state might forbid abortions during a pregnancy's third trimester, he held that a woman was entitled to obtain an abortion freely, after medical consultation, during the first trimester and in an authorized clinic during the second trimester. The Roe decision, perhaps the most controversial in the Supreme Court's history, remains at the centre of the issue of abortion rights. Repeated challenges since 1973, such as Planned Parenthood of Southeastern Pennsylvania v. Casey, have narrowed the scope of Roe but have not overturned it.

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410 U.S. 113 (1973), argued 13 Dec. 1971, reargued 11 Oct. 1972, decided 22 Jan. 1973 by vote of 7 to 2; Blackmun for the Court, Douglas, Stewart, and Burger concurring, White and Rehnquist in dissent. After the middle of the nineteenth century most states, under the prodding of physicians wishing to establish the scientific stature of their activities, adopted laws severely restricting the availability of abortion. The so‐called sexual revolution of the 1950s and 1960s, which fostered increased access to contraceptives and the development of contraceptive drugs, also resulted in an increasing number of situations in which women desired abortions. In the 1960s and early 1970s the discovery that thalidomide, a drug that many women had used in early stages of pregnancy to relieve morning sickness, occasionally caused birth defects, as well as the highly publicized case of Sherry Finkbine, an Arizona broadcasting figure who went to Sweden to obtain an abortion when she feared her baby would be severely handicapped, increased public pressure to relax the abortion laws. Illegal abortions were widespread, though their exact number is impossible to determine, and some women died because of the unsanitary conditions in which illegal abortions were sometimes performed. The revitalized women's movement made change in the abortion laws one of its priority goals.

Abortion reform took two forms. State legislatures began to make it easier to obtain abortions, usually by allowing abortion to protect a woman's health, broadly defined, but also requiring approval of the abortion by a committee of doctors in addition to the woman's own physician. Once some states had begun to relax abortion restrictions, any woman who could afford it found it relatively easy to travel to a state with an unrestrictive law or to find a doctor who would certify that the abortion was necessary to preserve her health.

Court attacks on restrictive abortion laws focused initially on the most restrictive of the traditional laws; challengers argued that such laws, which permitted abortions only to save a woman's life, were so vague that doctors could not know when they were committing an illegal act. The California Supreme Court agreed with such a challenge in People v. Belous (1969), and the United States Supreme Court in United States v. Vuitch (1971) avoided a decision on the constitutional question by construing a federal abortion law, applicable in the District of Columbia, to allow abortions when the woman's health, broadly defined, was in danger.

At the time these challenges were being brought, the Court was also developing a law of personal privacy in sexual matters, holding, for example, that a severe restriction on the availability of contraceptives was a violation of a constitutional right to privacy in Griswold v. Connecticut, 1965. Challenges to restrictive abortion laws relied on Griswold as the basis for arguing that such laws violated the right to privacy.

Roe v. Wade involved a challenge to a traditional, severely restrictive abortion law (from Texas) as well as a challenge to a more modern abortion law (from Georgia) that allowed abortions to be performed in hospitals, when approved by a hospital committee, to avoid danger to a woman's health. The action was brought in the name of Jane Roe, a procedure adopted to ensure that the plaintiff would not have to reveal the facts surrounding her pregnancy to the Court. Although those facts were irrelevant in light of the Court's analysis of the legal issues, shortly after the case was decided the plaintiff was identified as Norma McCorvey. At first McCorvey stated that her pregnancy had resulted from a gang rape; later she revealed that it resulted from a failed relationship.

Blackmun's Analysis

When the case was first argued, Justice Harry Blackmun, who had once served as counsel to the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota, drafted an opinion that would have held both statutes unconstitutionally vague. In part because his analysis was clearly unpersuasive and in part because some justices believed that the case had been improperly assigned to Blackmun to write, the case was set for reargument. During the summer preceding the reargument, Blackmun engaged in an extensive study of medical material relating to abortion.

After reargument, Blackmun circulated an opinion finding both statutes unconstitutional on the ground that they violated the woman's right to privacy, which the opinion located in the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. Justice Potter Stewart's concurring opinion properly pointed out that this invocation of substantive due process meant that the Court was enforcing a right not specifically spelled out in the Constitution.

After finding that the case was not moot despite the fact that there had been no time to secure a decision before the opportunity for obtaining an abortion had passed, Blackmun's opinion acknowledged that states had some valid interests in regulating abortion. The opinion divided pregnancy into three periods, or trimesters. During the first trimester the woman had an essentially unrestricted right to choose abortion in consultation with her physician; thus, Blackmun held, the hospitalization and committee requirements of the more “liberal” state laws were unconstitutional. During the second trimester, when according to medical experts abortion posed a greater threat to a woman's health, states could regulate abortion to protect her health. Only in the third trimester was the state's interest in protecting the potential life of the fetus great enough to warrant severe restrictions on abortion, and even then, the Court held, states must permit abortions to save a woman's life. In the course of this analysis, Blackmun's opinion stated that because of uncertainty about the medical and moral status of the fetus, the states could not adopt a particular theory of when life begins—they could not decide, for example, that because life begins at conception fetuses have the same rights as newborn infants.

Although Chief Justice Warren Burger's concurring opinion denied that Roe had established a right to abortion on demand, that was its practical effect. Justices Byron White and William Rehnquist, in separate dissents, criticized the Court for enforcing a right not specified in the Constitution to overturn statutes that were no more restrictive than those widely in force when the Fourteenth Amendment was adopted. In addition, they criticized the Court for the trimester framework, which, in their view, was arbitrary. If the state had an interest in protecting the potential life of the fetus, that interest existed, and was equally strong, through the entire pregnancy. Further, they said, the Court's balancing of competing interests and careful laying out of what doctors could do in various circumstances resembled a statute.

Three justices appointed by President Richard Nixon joined the majority in Roe, whose outcome appears to be inconsistent with the sort of “strict construction” of the Constitution that they were said to support. In political terms, Roe is probably best understood as part of the Court's attempt to respond to and develop support within an important emerging constituency, the organized women's movement. Although the opinion did not treat the issue as one of gender discrimination, there were plainly questions of gender at stake in the abortion controversy, for it was widely understood that the burdens of undesired pregnancy fell exclusively on women. Restrictive abortion laws have typically been enacted by legislatures dominated by men. This practice could have been treated as raising questions of gender discrimination. The Court's failure to present its opinion on these grounds may have been a serious tactical error, for the flaws of Blackmun's privacy analysis, employing a newly discovered constitutional “right,” were widely noted after Roe was decided.

Criticism and Aftermath of Roe

Academic critics of Roe argued that invalidating legislation where there was no constitutional text or history to indicate that the legislation contravened fundamental values protected by the Constitution was reminiscent of the Lochner v. New York era, when the Court invalidated many statutes aimed at improving the economic conditions of workers on the ground that the statutes violated a “liberty of contract” nowhere spelled out in the Constitution (see Contract, Freedom of). Critics also pointed out that, given the acknowledged impact of abortion on the fetus and the medical dimensions of the technique, it was silly to treat the case as one involving “privacy” in the way that Griswold, which was about the use of contraceptives, involved actions performed in the privacy of the home.

Academic defenders of Roe offered two lines of argument. Some suggested that the case should be reconceptualized as a case of gender discrimination, which, they argued, was indeed barred by the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. Others agreed that Roe resembled Lochner but argued that the vice of Lochner was not that it enforced values not found in the constitutional text but that it enforced values that were not fundamental according to any well‐developed theory of rights, whereas the right to privacy, or to personal autonomy in sexual matters, was fundamental under many uncontroversial versions of liberal political theory.

Roe was even more controversial among the public. It generated a substantial “right to life” movement that lobbied legislatures to adopt regulations that went as far as possible within the Roe framework to restrict the availability of abortions and was particularly influential in gaining power within the Republican party, whose presidential candidates in the 1980s agreed not to appoint judges who were sympathetic to the constitutional analysis adopted in Roe.

The Court adhered to the Roe analysis for the next decade, but in several important cases it upheld legislative attempts to restrict a woman's right to choose an abortion. Perhaps the most important early such decision was Harris v. McRae (1980), which held that Congress did not violate the Constitution when it prohibited the use of Medicaid funds to pay for nontherapeutic abortions. In an earlier decision, Maher v. Roe (1977), the Court had held, similarly, that the states were not required to fund abortions for indigent women. (Most states do not fund nontherapeutic abortions, but some do.)

A predicted likely effect of these decisions was the return to the situation that prevailed before Roe, in which women who could afford them secured abortions relatively easily, while women without means were forced to rely on illegal abortions or, like Jane Roe, left to carry their unwanted pregnancies to term. The actual impact of Harris, however, is uncertain, since despite the absence of public funding legal abortions rose steadily, reaching a high of about 1.6 million abortions annually in 1991. Private charitable sources now fund a majority of those abortions.

Other restrictions the Court upheld were requirements regarding record keeping about abortions and regulations requiring the notification of the parents of a minor woman seeking an abortion unless the woman could show a court that notifying the parents was inappropriate. The Court, however, did strike down requirements of parental and spousal consent as well as a variety of regulations designed to make the decision to have an abortion more difficult (e.g., Akron v. Akron Center for Reproductive Health, 1983; Thornburgh v. American College of Obstetricians & Gynecologists, 1986).

The retirements of Burger and Stewart, both of whom were in the majority in Roe, gave President Ronald Reagan the opportunity to begin to reshape the Court's position on the abortion issue, but it was the retirement of Justice Lewis Powell in 1987 that provided the greatest opportunity for change. Reagan nominated Judge Robert Bork to succeed Powell, in part because of Bork's vigorous and well‐known opposition to Roe. That opposition was a source of great concern to supporters of Roe, who formed an important part of the political coalition that defeated Bork's nomination.

In 1989 the Court, with Justice Anthony Kennedy sitting in an abortion case of the first time, came close to overruling Roe in Webster v. Reproductive Services, but in the end a majority of the justices held only that two additional restrictions on abortions were relatively minor extensions of what Roe itself allowed. Partisans on both sides of the abortion issue, however, took Webster as a signal that further political action was appropriate. Abortion‐rights activists, in particular, realized that the right to choose abortion might no longer be adequately protected in the courts, and they revived the sort of political lobbying in which they had engaged prior to Roe. Immediately after Webster two gubernatorial elections suggested that the threat to abortion rights was an important factor in the election of two Democratic governors, but as the Webster decision became part of the overall political landscape the implications for the long term were less clear.

The most significant threat to Rose emerged in the 1992 case of Planned Parenthood of Southeastern Pennsylvania v. Casey. A deeply and bitterly divided Court sustained the Pennsylvania law placing certain restrictions on access to abortions, but the justices refused to overturn the Roe precedent. Justice Sandra Day O'Connor's opinion reaffirmed that a woman has a constitutional right to an abortion before the fetus attains viability, at roughly six months of pregnancy. In the wake of Casey, anti‐abortion groups turned to new tactics designed to harass persons attempting to use abortion clinics and those who worked in them. The justices in National Organization of Women v. Scheidler (1994) held that abortion clinics could deal with these tactics by invoking the Federal Racketeering law to sue violent antiabortion protest groups for damages.

Bibliography

• Marian Faux, Roe v. Wade (1988).
• Laurence Tribe, Abortion: The Clash of Absolutes (1990)

— Mark V. Tushnet

• 410 U.S. 113 (1973)
• Vote: 7–2
• For the Court: Blackmun
• Concurring: Douglas, Stewart, and Burger
• Dissenting: White and Rehnquist

In August 1969 an unmarried pregnant woman living in Texas wanted to terminate her pregnancy by having an abortion. Her doctor refused this request because Texas law made it a crime to have an abortion unless the operation was necessary to save the mother's life. So the woman sought legal help and filed suit against Henry Wade, district attorney for Dallas County, Texas. Throughout the legal proceedings, the woman was identified as Jane Roe to protect her anonymity. The plaintiff later was identified by the media as Norma McCorvey.

Jane Roe argued that the Texas abortion laws were unconstitutional. So she requested an injunction to restrain Henry Wade from enforcing them.

The Issue

Roe's lawyers claimed that the Texas abortion laws violated her rights under the due process clause of the 14th Amendment, which prohibited states from depriving their citizens of life, liberty, or property without due process of law. Does the 14th Amendment protect the right of a woman to have an abortion? Are state laws prohibiting abortion unconstitutional?

Opinion of the Court

The Supreme Court ruled that the Texas statutes on abortion were unconstitutional and that a woman did have the right to terminate her pregnancy. Justice Harry Blackmun wrote, “The right of privacy…whether it is to be found in the Fourteenth Amendment's concept of personal liberty…or…in the Ninth Amendment's reservation of rights to the people, is broad enough to encompass a woman's decision whether or not to terminate her pregnancy.”

Justice Blackmun recognized that a woman's right to an abortion could be limited by “a compelling state interest” to protect her health and life. Based on medical evidence, Justice Blackmun concluded that during the “second trimester” of a woman's pregnancy (months 4 to 6), the state might intervene to regulate abortion to protect the mother's well-being. And the state could regulate or prohibit abortion during the third tri-mester (months 7 to 9). However, during the first trimester (months 1 to 3) of a pregnancy, it seemed unlikely that there would be “a compelling state interest” to restrict abortion rights to protect the health and life of the mother.

Dissent

Justice Byron White could not find in the Constitution the right to privacy upon which the Roe decision was based. He wrote, “I find nothing in the language or history of the Constitution to support the Court's judgment…This issue, for the most part, should be left with the people and the political processes the people have devised to govern their affairs.” Justices White and William Rehnquist both objected to the Court's involvement in a question they believed should be left to state governments to decide, without interference from the federal courts. They also believed that the Roe decision unjustly disregarded the protection due to the life of the fetus.

Significance

The Roe decision has generated continuing controversy. Women's rights advocates have hailed Roe as a landmark victory. Its critics can be roughly divided into two groups: those who oppose the decision because they believe abortion is murder and those who believe that the Court improperly substituted its policy preference for the will of the people as expressed through their elected representatives in state governments.

Justice Byron White accurately remarked in his dissent that the right to an abortion is an issue about which “reasonable men may easily and heatedly differ.” And so it has been since 1973, when the Roe case was decided.

Efforts to modify or overturn the Roe decision have continued. In Webster v. Reproductive Health Services (1989), for example, the Court upheld provisions of a Missouri law that restricted the right to an abortion, a retreat from the Roe decision that stopped short of overturning it. Rust v. Sullivan (1991) limited the access of poor women to abortions by forbidding federally funded clinics, such as those run by Planned Parenthood, to advise patients about abortion. In Steinberg v. Carhart (2000), the Court ruled against state laws banning a type of late-term abortion known as “partial-birth” abortion.

See also Abortion rights; Privacy, right to; Webster v. Reproductive Health Services

Sources

• Marian Faux, Roe v. Wade (New York: Macmillan, 1988).
• David J. Garrow, Liberty and Sexuality: The Right to Privacy and the Making of Roe v. Wade, 1923–1973 (New York: Macmillan, 1993).
• Rosalind Rosenberg, “The Abortion Case”,” in Quarrels That Have Shaped the Constitution, edited by John A. Garraty (New York: Harper & Row, 1987).
• Laurence H. Tribe, Abortion: The Clash of Absolutes (New York: Norton, 1990).
• Sarah Weddington, A Question of Choice (New York: Putnam, 1992)

Roe v. Wade, 410 U.S. 113 (1973), the landmark case establishing a woman's constitutional right to an abortion, was initiated by attorneys Sarah Weddington and Linda Coffee with Norma McCorvey as one of the plaintiffs. A single pregnant woman known as "Jane Roe" to protect her privacy, McCorvey had been denied an abortion under a Texas law. The 7 to 3 decision, which also covered Doe v. Bolton, a Georgia case, upheld federal appeals court's decisions striking down provisions of both the Texas and Georgia laws. Effectively rendered unconstitutional were all statutes that either prohibited abortion (Texas) or encumbered legal abortions in such excessive regulation as to make then virtually unattainable (Georgia).

The decision was the culmination of ongoing efforts of several groups seeking decriminalization and reflected changing public opinion about abortion. Support for legal reform had grown stronger when the news broke that the drug thalidomide, extensively prescribed to alleviate morning sickness in the early stages of pregnancy, produced severe physical defects in children. In a much publicized incident, Sherry Finkbine, an Arizona woman who had taken thalidomide, requested an abortion with the support of her doctors. Because of the threat of prosecution by local authorities, the Finkbines, seeking a more favorable legal climate, fled to Sweden where abortion was legal. Her plight dramatized to both the medical profession and ordinary citizens the need for legal change, as did figures on illegal abortions, which ranged from 200,000 to 1,200,000 annually. Fatalities for the women undergoing the procedure, always estimates, were high. In 1955, the annual American loss of women's lives was put at from three thousand to eight thousand.

The justices, no longer able to avoid the issue, agonized over the decision—none more than Justice Harry Blackmun, who wrote the majority opinion resting the right to an abortion on the right to privacy. The right to privacy in sexual and reproductive matters, while not specified in the Bill of Rights, had recently evolved. Building on Griswold v. Connecticut (1965), a case involving the use of birth control by a married couple, abortion rights lawyers had persuaded the lower courts to extend the right of privacy implied in the Fourth Amendment's guarantee against unreasonable searches to other reproductive decisions, notably whether to carry a fetus to term. That right, however, was never intended by the Court to be absolute. After much internal debate concerning the cutoff point at which the state's interest in protecting potential life should take precedence over a woman's right to terminate a pregnancy, the majority reached a compromise that Blackmun tied to the trimester system. During the first three months of pregnancy, a woman was to be free to make the decision in consultation with her doctor. In the second trimester, the states could regulate abortion in order to protect maternal health, but could not prohibit the procedure. While rejecting the notion that the fetus from the moment of conception was a constitutionally protected "person" under the Fourteenth Amendment, the Court used the stage in fetal development when survival was possible outside the woman's body as the point at which state interest in protecting potential life took precedence. Since viability occurred at approximately the end of six months, Roe stipulated that states could prohibit abortions in the third trimester.

The decision, which imposed the Court's regulatory formula upon the states, evoked intense resentment and high praise. Irate legislators charged that their law-making function had been usurped. Abortion rights supporters, dismayed that only three states had legalized abortion by 1970, rejoiced. Catholic clergy attacked the decision as sanctioning the taking of a human life, while mainline Protestant clergy appreciated the option it offered the anguished women they counseled. Legal critics found the fragile textual backing for privacy to be weak constitutional grounding for abortion rights and the trimester formula to be problematic. Others argued that the Court had moved too far too fast. Its mistake, they argued, was abandoning an incremental approach to the abortion issue that would have produced smaller changes over time, allowing the public time to adjust. Pro-choice attorneys, while elated by the scope of the decision, also had legal concerns. Fearful that relying on privacy instead of equal protection made the decision constitutionally vulnerable, they further criticized Roe as too medicalized, privileging physicians' autonomy over women's. Concerned that state regulation in later trimesters would not take into account the needs of pregnant woman, feminists warned that the Court's compromise could lead to government coercion and involuntary motherhood.

What was indisputable was the immediate formation of a grassroots movement by opponents eager to erode the abortion rights conferred in Roe. Although the Court initially rejected state restrictions, in 1980 it upheld the "Hyde Amendment" by which Congress refused to fund even medically necessary abortions of indigent women (Harris v. Mc Rae, 488 U.S. 297), a practice that many states followed. And in Webster v. Reproductive Health Services (1989), the Court, by a 5 to 3 vote, upheld the right of Missouri legislators to deny the use of public employees and facilities to perform or assist abortions. In Planned Parenthood of Southeastern Pennsylvania v. Casey (1992), the Court finally reaffirmed Roe in a 5 to 3 vote. But though the formal right to an abortion had survived, other tactics of the antiabortion movement had reduced it as a practical option, especially for poor and rural women.

Bibliography

Garrow, David J. Liberty and Sexuality: The Right to Privacy and the Making of Roe v. Wade. Updated and with a new preface and epilogue. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1998.

Petchesky, Rosalind P. Abortion and Woman's Choice: The State, Sexuality, and Reproductive Freedom. Rev. ed. Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1990.

Siegel, Reva. "Reasoning from the Body: A Historical Perspective on Abortion Regulation and Questions of Equal Protection," 44 (Jan. 1992): 261–381.

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Roe v. Wade was a landmark decision by the U.S. Supreme Court, 410 U.S. 113, 93 S. Ct. 705, 35 L. Ed. 2d 147 (1973), that declared a pregnant woman is entitled to have an abortion until the end of the first trimester of pregnancy without any interference by the state.

In a 7-2 decision on January 22, 1973, the Supreme Court struck down an 1857 Texas statute that made abortion illegal except where the life of the mother was in danger. The Court's opinion, as written by Justice Harry A. Blackmun, set forth guidelines for the drafting of future state legislation on the issue. In a long and detailed opinion, the Court specified the points during a woman's pregnancy when the interests of the state in the health of the mother and of the fetus emerge. Roe established the parameters of the abortion debate for decades to come.

The case involved an unmarried pregnant woman who was at the time identified only as Jane Roe in order to maintain her anonymity but who has since publicly identified herself as Norma McCorvey. McCorvey, a resident of Texas, wanted to have an abortion, but the existing state law prevented her from doing so. She filed a lawsuit in federal district court on behalf of herself and all other pregnant women. The suit sought to have the Texas abortion law declared unconstitutional as an invasion of her right to privacy as guaranteed by the First, Fourth, Fifth, Ninth, and Fourteenth Amendments. She also sought to have an injunction, or court order, issued against the statute's enforcement so that she might go forward with the abortion. A physician, James Hubert Hallford, who was being prosecuted under the statute for two abortions he had performed, also filed suit against the law, as did a childless couple, the Does (Mary Doe and John Doe). A three-judge district court combined the cases of McCorvey and Hallford, and dismissed the suit brought by the Does on the grounds that neither of them had violated the law and Mary Doe was not pregnant.

The district court agreed with McCorvey that the law was unconstitutionally vague and violated her right to privacy under the Ninth Amendment—which allows for the existence of rights, like that of privacy, not explicitly named in the Constitution's Bill of Rights—and the Fourteenth Amendment. It refused, however to grant the injunction allowing her to go ahead with the abortion. McCorvey appealed the denial of the injunction to the U.S. Supreme Court. The Supreme Court agreed to hear the case along with another, Doe v. Bolton, 410 U.S. 179, 93 S. Ct. 739, 35 L. Ed. 2d 201 (1973), relating to a 1968 Georgia abortion statute. The Court dismissed Hallford's case because of the pending prosecutions against him. Hallford made no allegation of any substantial and immediate threat to any federal protected right that could not be asserted in his defense against the state prosecution. Nor did he allege harassment or bad-faith prosecution by the state. Hallford's case fell clearly within the ambit of the rule announced in prior Supreme Court cases that a defendant in a pending state criminal case cannot affirmatively challenge in federal court the statutes under which the state is prosecuting him or her (Samuels v. Mackell, 401 U.S. 66, 91 S. Ct. 764, 27 L. Ed. 2d 688 [1971]; Younger v. Harris, 401 U.S. 37, 91 S. Ct. 746, 27 L. Ed. 2d 669 [1971]; Boyle v. Landry, 401 U.S. 77, 91 S. Ct. 758, 27 L. Ed. 2d 696 [1971]).

After hearing many months of expert testimony, the Court found the Texas abortion law to be unconstitutional. It declared that such laws "violate the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, which protects against state action the right to privacy, including [a] woman's qualified right to terminate her pregnancy." Chief Justice Warren E. Burger chose Justice Blackmun—who had served for many years as legal counsel to the Mayo Clinic, in Rochester, Minnesota—to write the Court's opinion. Justice William H. Rehnquist wrote a dissenting opinion.

In its opinion, the Court ruled that the right to terminate a pregnancy is part of a woman's right to privacy. At the same time, however, it declared that "[t]his right is not unqualified and must be considered against important state interests in regulation." The state, the Court argued, "has legitimate interests in protecting both the pregnant woman's health and the potentiality of human life," interests that change in importance as the pregnancy progresses. In the first trimester, the Court said, the state has no interest in regulating the right of a woman to obtain an abortion. In making this decision, the Court pointed to evidence showing that the health of the mother is not endangered by an abortion during the first twelve weeks of pregnancy. According to that evidence, women are less likely to die from complications of an abortion conducted in the first trimester than from carrying their pregnancy to term. The Court also found that the state may require that all abortions be performed only by licensed physicians under medically safe conditions.

The Court found that the state's interest in regulating abortion and protecting a pregnant woman's health emerges in the second trimester. "[I]n promoting its interest in the health of the mother," the Court declared, "the state may regulate the abortion procedure in ways that are reasonably related to maternal health." It may, for example, impose requirements regarding the qualifications and licensing of those performing abortions; it may also regulate where abortions can be performed. Beyond these rules, the woman, in consultation with her physician, is free to decide whether to end her pregnancy.

In the third trimester, the interest of the state in "the potentiality of human life"—that is, the life of the fetus before birth—makes it possible to regulate and even prohibit abortions except when necessary to save the life or health of the mother. By this period, the fetus is determined to be viable—that is, capable of living outside the womb—and therefore entitled to protection by the state.

The Court did not accept arguments that the fetus be regarded as a person within the meaning of the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, which declares that no state shall "deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law" (§ 1). "There is no medical or scientific proof that life is present from conception," wrote the Court.

[W]e need not resolve the difficult question of when life begins, when those trained in the respective fields of medicine, philosophy and theology are unable to arrive at any consensus. The judiciary at this point in the development of man's knowledge is not in a position to speculate as to the answer.

As author of the Court's opinion, Justice Blackmun made it clear that abortion was an extraordinarily difficult issue:

We forthwith acknowledge our awareness of the sensitive and emotional nature of the abortion controversy, of the vigorous opposing views, even among physicians, and of the deep and seemingly absolute convictions that the subject inspires. One's philosophy, one's experiences, one's exposure to the raw edges of human existence, one's religious training, one's attitudes toward life and family and their values, and the moral standards one establishes and seeks to observe, are all likely to influence and to color one's thinking and conclusions about abortion.

In addition, population growth, pollution, poverty, and racial overtones tend to complicate and not to simplify the problem.

Our task, of course, is to resolve the issue by constitutional measurement free of emotion and predilection.

Although the opinion went into the "medical and medical-legal" history of the issue and quoted medical authorities frequently, the Court chose to decide the case on constitutional rather than medical or philosophical grounds. In this case, the crucial constitutional consideration was the right to privacy, which some would argue is as old as the Constitution. The most important precedent for the Roe decision on this issue was the 1965 Supreme Court case Griswold v. Connecticut, 381 U.S. 479, 85 S. Ct. 1678, 14 L. Ed. 2d 510, which clearly set forth a constitutional right to privacy—in this instance, a married couple's right to privacy when deciding whether or not to use contraceptives. Roe was in fact part of a gradual expansion of the right to privacy during the 1960s and 1970s, to include not only a right to freedom from physical searches and seizures, for example, but also a right to make individual decisions free of coercion, whether physical or psychological, especially in matters regarding the family and reproduction.

In his dissent in Roe, Justice Rehnquist differed with the majority on a number of points. For one thing, McCorvey had given birth in 1970 and had given her child up for adoption. He argued that because McCorvey was no longer in the first term of her pregnancy, indeed was no longer pregnant, when her case came before the Supreme Court, the case had become hypothetical rather than actual and therefore outside the jurisdiction of the Court. Rehnquist also argued that the regulation of abortion should be left to the states and that the right of privacy had nothing to do with the case. "I have difficulty in concluding, as the Court does, that the right of ‘privacy' is involved in this case," he wrote. "The decision here to break pregnancy into three distinct terms and to outline the permissible restrictions the State may impose in each one, for example, partakes more of judicial legislation than it does of a determination of the intent of the drafters of the Fourteenth Amendment." Moreover, in Rehnquist's view, the Texas abortion law met the test of having "a rational relation to a valid state objective." Rehnquist's fellow dissenter in Roe, Justice Byron R. White, called the decisions in Doe and Roe "an example of raw judicial power" and "an improvident and extravagant exercise of the power of judicial review" (Doe, 410 U.S. 179 at 221, 93 S. Ct. 762).

The Roe decision has largely been perceived as a victory for the abortion reform and women's rights movements and a defeat for antiabortion forces, but in many ways it was a compromise between the two sides. While antiabortion forces were unhappy with the establishment of a right to abortion for women in the first trimester of pregnancy, pro-abortion groups were displeased with the limits on abortion allowed in the last two trimesters of pregnancy. The Court also compromised in its decision as to when life begins and who is to be defined as a person with full rights under the Constitution. It did not agree with the pro-abortion movement, which declared that life does not begin until birth, or with the antiabortion movement, which maintained that life begins at conception. Instead, it chose to define the rights of the fetus as emerging when it reaches the stage of viability, when it can survive independently outside of the womb. In making this decision, some have argued, the Court made personhood subject to change, particularly as science has moved the time of viability further back.

Feminists and women's rights advocates saw Roe as a vindication of women's reproductive rights and a step toward greater equality between the sexes. Such equality, they argued, can happen only when women have the ability to control reproduction. Others, opposed to the decision in Roe, believed that the Supreme Court had overstepped its bounds by effectively making new social policy, a task they felt was better left to elected members of state legislatures. Still others felt that the Court had violated the sanctity of human life by permitting abortion. In any case, Roe has been a far-reaching decision, affecting many spheres of U.S. life, including medicine, religion, and the family.

In the decades following Roe, antiabortion groups have mounted continual campaigns to repeal the decision. Despite these challenges, the Supreme Court has repeatedly supported the essential elements of that decision, particularly as regards the right to privacy.

See: Due Process of Law; Fetal Rights; Fetal Tissue Research; Griswold v. Connecticut; Penumbra.

An extremely controversial Supreme Court decision in 1973 that, on the basis of the right to privacy, gave women an unrestricted right to abortion during the first three months of pregnancy. Pro-choice forces have hailed the decision, whereas those associated with the “right-to-life” (pro-life) movement have opposed it.

Roe v. Wade
Supreme Court of the United States
Argued December 13, 1971 Reargued October 11, 1972 Decided January 22, 1973
Full case name	Jane Roe, et al. v. Henry Wade, District Attorney of Dallas County
Citations	410 U.S. 113 (more) 93 S. Ct. 705; 35 L. Ed. 2d 147; 1973 U.S. LEXIS 159
Prior history	Judgment for plaintiffs, injunction denied, 314 F. Supp. 1217 (N.D. Tex. 1970); probable jurisdiction noted, 402 U.S. 941 (1971); set for reargument, 408 U.S. 919 (1972)
Subsequent history	Rehearing denied, 410 U.S. 959 (1973)
Argument	Oral argument
Reargument	Reargument
Holding
Texas law making it a crime to assist a woman to get an abortion violated her due process rights. U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Texas affirmed in part, reversed in part.
Court membership
Chief Justice Warren E. Burger Associate Justices William O. Douglas · William J. Brennan, Jr. Potter Stewart · Byron White Thurgood Marshall · Harry Blackmun Lewis F. Powell, Jr. · William Rehnquist
Case opinions
Majority	Blackmun, joined by Burger, Douglas, Brennan, Stewart, Marshall, Powell
Concurrence	Burger
Concurrence	Douglas
Concurrence	Stewart
Dissent	White, joined by Rehnquist
Dissent	Rehnquist
Laws applied
U.S. Const. Amend. XIV; Tex. Code Crim. Proc. arts. 1191–94, 1196

Roe v. Wade, 410 U.S. 113 (1973), is a landmark decision by the United States Supreme Court on the issue of abortion. Decided simultaneously with companion case Doe v. Bolton, the Court ruled that a right to privacy under the due process clause in the Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution extends to a woman's decision to have an abortion, but that right must be balanced against the state's two legitimate interests for regulating abortions: protecting prenatal life and protecting the woman's health. Saying that these state interests become stronger over the course of a pregnancy, the Court resolved this balancing test by tying state regulation of abortion to the woman's current trimester of pregnancy.

The Court later rejected Roe's trimester framework, while affirming Roe's central holding that a person has a right to abortion until viability.^[1] The Roe decision defined "viable" as being "potentially able to live outside the mother's womb, albeit with artificial aid," adding that viability "is usually placed at about seven months (28 weeks) but may occur earlier, even at 24 weeks."^[2]

In disallowing many state and federal restrictions on abortion in the United States,^[3][4] Roe v. Wade prompted a national debate that continues today, about issues including whether and to what extent abortion should be legal, who should decide the legality of abortion, what methods the Supreme Court should use in constitutional adjudication, and what the role should be of religious and moral views in the political sphere. Roe v. Wade reshaped national politics, dividing much of the United States into pro-choice and pro-life camps, while activating grassroots movements on both sides.

Contents 1 Background 1.1 History of abortion laws in the United States 1.2 Prior history of the case 2 Before the Supreme Court 3 Supreme Court decision 3.1 Right to privacy 3.2 Justiciability 4 Dissents 5 Reception 5.1 Political 5.2 Legal 5.3 Public opinion 6 Role in subsequent decisions and politics 6.1 Webster v. Reproductive Health Services 6.2 Planned Parenthood v. Casey 6.3 Stenberg v. Carhart 6.4 Gonzales v. Carhart 6.5 Activities of Norma McCorvey 6.6 Presidential positions 6.7 State laws regarding Roe 7 See also 8 Footnotes 9 References 10 Further reading 11 External links

Background

History of abortion laws in the United States

According to the Court, "the restrictive criminal abortion laws in effect in a majority of States today are of relatively recent vintage." In 1821, Connecticut passed the first state statute criminalizing abortion. Every state had abortion legislation by 1900.^[5] Abortion in the United States was sometimes considered a common law crime,^[6] though Justice Blackmun would conclude that the criminalization of abortion did not have "roots in the English common-law tradition."^[7]

Prior history of the case

In June 1969, Norma L. McCorvey discovered she was pregnant with her third child. She returned to Dallas, where friends advised her to assert falsely that she had been raped, as she could then obtain a legal abortion (with the understanding that Texas' anti-abortion laws allowed abortion in the cases of rape and incest). However, this scheme failed, as there was no police report documenting the alleged rape. She attempted to obtain an illegal abortion, but found the unauthorized site shuttered, closed down by the police. Eventually, she was referred to attorneys Linda Coffee and Sarah Weddington.^[8] (McCorvey would give birth before the case was decided.)

In 1970, attorneys Linda Coffee and Sarah Weddington filed suit in a U.S. District Court in Texas on behalf of Norma L. McCorvey (under the alias Jane Roe). The defendant in the case was Dallas County District Attorney Henry Wade, representing the State of Texas. At the time, McCorvey was no longer claiming her pregnancy was the result of rape, and later acknowledged she had lied earlier about having been raped.^[9][10] "Rape" is not mentioned in the judicial opinions in this case.^[11]

The district court ruled in McCorvey's favor on the merits, and declined to grant an injunction against the enforcement of the laws barring abortion.^[11] The district court's decision was based upon the Ninth Amendment, and the court relied upon a concurring opinion by Justice Arthur Goldberg in the 1965 Supreme Court case of Griswold v. Connecticut,^[12] finding in the decision for a right to privacy.^[13]

Before the Supreme Court

Roe v. Wade reached the Supreme Court on appeal in 1970. The Justices delayed taking action on Roe and a closely related case, Doe v. Bolton, until they decided Younger v. Harris, as they felt that the appeals raised difficult questions on judicial jurisdiction, and United States v. Vuitch, where they considered the constitutionality of a District of Columbia statute that criminalized abortion except where the mother's life or health was endangered. In Vuitch, the Court narrowly upheld the statute, though in doing so, it treated abortion as a medical procedure and stated that the physician must be given room to determine what suffices as a danger to (physical or mental) health. The day after they announced their decision in Vuitch, they voted to hear both Roe and Doe.^[14]

Arguments were scheduled by the full Court for December 13, 1971. Before the Court could hear the oral arguments, Justices Black and Harlan retired. Chief Justice Burger asked Justices Stewart and Blackmun to determine whether Roe and Doe, among others, should be heard as scheduled. According to Blackmun, Stewart felt that the cases were a straightforward application of Younger v. Harris and recommended that the Court move forward as scheduled.^[15]

Following a first round of arguments, all seven Justices tentatively agreed that the law should be struck down, but for varying reasons.^[16] Burger assigned the role of writing the Court's opinion in Roe (as well as Doe) to Blackmun, who began drafting a preliminary opinion that emphasized what he saw as the Texas law's vagueness.^[17] Justices Rehnquist and Powell joined the Supreme Court too late to hear the first round of arguments. Additionally, Blackmun felt that his opinion was an inadequate reflection of his liberal colleagues' opinions.^[18] In May 1972, Blackmun proposed that the case be reargued. Justice Douglas threatened to write a dissent from the reargument order (he and the other liberal Justices were suspicious that Rhenquist and Powell would vote to uphold the statute), but was coaxed out of the action by his colleagues, and his dissent was merely mentioned in the reargument order without further statement or opinion.^[19][20] The case was reargued on October 11, 1972. Weddington continued to represent Roe, and Texas Assistant Attorney General Robert C. Flowers stepped in to replace Wade.^{[citation needed]}

Blackmun continued work on his opinions in both cases over the summer recess, despite the fact that there was no guarantee that he would be assigned to write the opinions again. Over the recess, Blackmun spent a week researching the history of abortion at the Mayo Clinic in Minnesota, where he had worked in the 1950s. After the Court heard the second round of arguments, Powell stated that he would agree with Blackmun's conclusion but pushed for Roe to be the lead of the two abortions cases being considered. Powell also suggested that the Court strike down the Texas law on privacy grounds. White was unwilling to sign on to Blackmun's opinion, and Rehnquist had already decided to dissent.^[21]

Supreme Court decision

Harry Blackmun wrote the Court’s opinion.

The Court issued its decision on January 22, 1973, with a 7-to-2 majority vote in favor of Roe. Burger and Douglas' concurring opinions and White's dissenting opinion were issued with along with the Court's opinion in Doe v. Bolton (announced on the same day as Roe v. Wade). The Court deemed abortion a fundamental right under the United States Constitution, thereby subjecting all laws attempting to restrict it to the standard of strict scrutiny.^[22]

Right to privacy

The Court declined to adopt the district court's Ninth Amendment rationale, and instead asserted that the "right of privacy, whether it be founded in the Fourteenth Amendment's concept of personal liberty and restrictions upon state action, as we feel it is, or, as the district court determined, in the Ninth Amendment's reservation of rights to the people, is broad enough to encompass a woman's decision whether or not to terminate her pregnancy."^[23] Douglas in his concurring opinion in the companion case Doe v. Bolton, stated more emphatically that, "The Ninth Amendment obviously does not create federally enforceable rights."^[24]

The Court asserted that that the government had two competing interests – protecting the mother's health and protecting the "potentiality of human life". Following its earlier logic, the Court stated that during the first trimester, when the procedure is more safe than childbirth, the decision to abort must be left to the mother and her physician. The State has the right to intervene prior to fetal viability only to protect the health of the mother, and may regulate the procedure after viability so long as there is always an exception for preserving maternal health. The Court additionally added that the primary right being preserved in the Roe decision was that of the physician's right to practice medicine freely absent a compelling state interest – not women's rights in general.^[25] The Court explicitly rejected a fetal "right to life" argument.^[26]

The Justices had discussed the trimester framework extensively. Powell had suggested that the point where the state could intervene be placed at viability, which Marshall supported as well.^[27] Blackmun wrote of the majority decision he authored: "You will observe that I have concluded that the end of the first trimester is critical. This is arbitrary, but perhaps any other selected point, such as quickening or viability, is equally arbitrary."^[28] Douglas preferred the first trimester line,^[29] while Stewart said the lines were "legislative" and wanted more flexibility and consideration paid to the state legislatures, though he joined Blackmun's decision.^[30] Brennan proposed abandoning frameworks based on the age of the fetus and instead allowing states to regulate the procedure based on its safety for the mother.^[29]

Justiciability

An aspect of the decision that attracted comparatively little attention was the Court's disposition of the issues of standing and mootness. Under the traditional interpretation of these rules, Jane Roe's appeal was "moot" because she had already given birth to her child and thus would not be affected by the ruling; she also lacked "standing" to assert the rights of other pregnant women.^[31] As she did not present an "actual case or controversy" (a grievance and a demand for relief), any opinion issued by the Supreme Court would constitute an advisory opinion, a practice in which the Court traditionally did not engage.

The Court concluded that the case came within an established exception to the rule; one that allowed consideration of an issue that was "capable of repetition, yet evading review".^[32] This phrase had been coined in 1911 by Justice Joseph McKenna.^[33] Blackmun's opinion quoted McKenna, and noted that pregnancy would normally conclude more quickly than an appellate process: "If that termination makes a case moot, pregnancy litigation seldom will survive much beyond the trial stage, and appellate review will be effectively denied."^{[citation needed]}

Dissents

Byron White was the senior dissenting justice.

Justices Byron R. White and William H. Rehnquist wrote emphatic dissenting opinions in this case. White wrote:

I find nothing in the language or history of the Constitution to support the Court's judgment. The Court simply fashions and announces a new constitutional right for pregnant women and, with scarcely any reason or authority for its action, invests that right with sufficient substance to override most existing state abortion statutes. The upshot is that the people and the legislatures of the 50 States are constitutionally disentitled to weigh the relative importance of the continued existence and development of the fetus, on the one hand, against a spectrum of possible impacts on the woman, on the other hand. As an exercise of raw judicial power, the Court perhaps has authority to do what it does today; but, in my view, its judgment is an improvident and extravagant exercise of the power of judicial review that the Constitution extends to this Court.^[34][35]

White asserted that the Court "values the convenience of the pregnant mother more than the continued existence and development of the life or potential life that she carries." Despite White suggesting he "might agree" with the Court's values and priorities, he wrote that he saw "no constitutional warrant for imposing such an order of priorities on the people and legislatures of the States." White criticized the Court for involving itself in this issue by creating "a constitutional barrier to state efforts to protect human life and by investing mothers and doctors with the constitutionally protected right to exterminate it." He would have left this issue, for the most part, "with the people and to the political processes the people have devised to govern their affairs."

Rehnquist elaborated upon several of White's points, by asserting that the Court's historical analysis was flawed:

To reach its result, the Court necessarily has had to find within the scope of the Fourteenth Amendment a right that was apparently completely unknown to the drafters of the Amendment. As early as 1821, the first state law dealing directly with abortion was enacted by the Connecticut Legislature. By the time of the adoption of the Fourteenth Amendment in 1868, there were at least 36 laws enacted by state or territorial legislatures limiting abortion. While many States have amended or updated their laws, 21 of the laws on the books in 1868 remain in effect today.^[36][37][38]

From this historical record, Rehnquist concluded that, "There apparently was no question concerning the validity of this provision or of any of the other state statutes when the Fourteenth Amendment was adopted." Therefore, in his view, "the drafters did not intend to have the Fourteenth Amendment withdraw from the States the power to legislate with respect to this matter."

Reception

Political

Some pro-life supporters maintain that personhood begins at fertilization (also referred to as conception), and should therefore be protected by the Constitution;^[39] the dissenting justices in Roe instead wrote that decisions about abortion "should be left with the people and to the political processes the people have devised to govern their affairs."^[34] The majority opinion allowed states to protect "fetal life after viability" even though a fetus is not "a person within the meaning of the Fourteenth Amendment". A prominent argument against the Roe decision is that, in the absence of consensus about when meaningful life begins, it is best to avoid the risk of doing harm.^[40]

Protestors at the 2009 March for Life rally against Roe v. Wade

Albert Wynn and Gloria Feldt at a 2003 rally for Roe v. Wade

Every year on the anniversary of the decision, pro-life supporters march up Constitution Avenue to the Supreme Court Building in Washington, D.C. in the March for Life.^[41] Around 250,000 people attend the march each year.^[42][43]

Advocates of Roe describe it as vital to the preservation of women's rights, personal freedom, and privacy. Denying the abortion right has been equated to compulsory motherhood, and some scholars (not including any member of the Supreme Court) have argued that abortion bans therefore violate the Thirteenth Amendment:

When women are compelled to carry and bear children, they are subjected to 'involuntary servitude' in violation of the Thirteenth Amendment….[E]ven if the woman has stipulated to have consented to the risk of pregnancy, that does not permit the state to force her to remain pregnant.^[44]

Opponents of Roe have objected that the decision lacks a valid constitutional foundation. Like the dissenters in Roe, they have maintained that the Constitution is silent on the issue, and that proper solutions to the question would best be found via state legislatures and the democratic process, rather than through an all-encompassing ruling from the Supreme Court.

Supporters of Roe contend that the decision has a valid constitutional foundation, or contend that justification for the result in Roe could be found in the Constitution but not in the articles referenced in the decision.^[39][44]

In response to Roe v. Wade, most states enacted or attempted to enact laws limiting or regulating abortion, such as laws requiring parental consent for minors to obtain abortions, parental notification laws, spousal mutual consent laws, spousal notification laws, laws requiring abortions to be performed in hospitals but not clinics, laws barring state funding for abortions, laws banning intact dilation and extraction (also known as partial-birth abortion), laws requiring waiting periods before abortion, or laws mandating women read certain types of literature and watch a fetal ultrasound before undergoing an abortion.^[45] Congress in 1976 passed the Hyde Amendment, barring federal funding of abortions (except in the case of rape, incest, or life of the woman) for poor women through the Medicaid program. The Supreme Court struck down several state restrictions on abortions in a long series of cases stretching from the mid-1970s to the late 1980s, but upheld restrictions on funding, including the Hyde Amendment, in the case of Harris v. McRae (1980).^[46]

The most prominent organized groups that mobilized in response to Roe are the National Abortion Rights Action League on the pro-choice side, and the National Right to Life Committee on the pro-life side. Harry Blackmun, who authored the decision, became inexorably attached to the decision. Despite his initial reluctance, he eventually became the decision's chief champion and protector during his later years on the Court.^[47] Others have joined him in support of Roe, including Judith Jarvis Thomson, who before the decision had offered an influential defense of abortion.^[48] Perhaps the most notable opposition to Roe comes from Roe herself; in 1995, Norma L. McCorvey revealed that she became pro-life and is now a vocal opponent to abortion.

Roe remains controversial. Polls show continued division about its landmark rulings, and about the decision as a whole.

Legal

Liberal and feminist legal scholars have had various reactions to Roe, not always giving the decision unqualified support. One reaction has been to argue that Justice Blackmun reached the correct result but went about it the wrong way.^[49] Another reaction has been to argue that the end achieved by Roe does not justify the means.^[50]

Justice John Paul Stevens, in a 2007 interview, averred that Roe "create[d] a new doctrine that really didn’t make sense," and lamented that if Justice Blackmun "could have written a better opinion[, that] ... might have avoided some of the criticism."^[51] His colleague Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg had, before joining the Court, criticized the decision for terminating a nascent democratic movement to liberalize abortion law.^[52] Watergate prosecutor Archibald Cox wrote: "[Roe’s] failure to confront the issue in principled terms leaves the opinion to read like a set of hospital rules and regulations.... Neither historian, nor layman, nor lawyer will be persuaded that all the prescriptions of Justice Blackmun are part of the Constitution."^[53]

In a highly-cited 1973 article in the Yale Law Journal,^[54] Professor John Hart Ely criticized Roe as a decision which "is not constitutional law and gives almost no sense of an obligation to try to be."^[55] Ely added: "What is frightening about Roe is that this super-protected right is not inferable from the language of the Constitution, the framers’ thinking respecting the specific problem in issue, any general value derivable from the provisions they included, or the nation’s governmental structure." Professor Laurence Tribe had similar thoughts: "One of the most curious things about Roe is that, behind its own verbal smokescreen, the substantive judgment on which it rests is nowhere to be found."^[56] Liberal law professors Alan Dershowitz,^[57] Cass Sunstein,^[58] and Kermit Roosevelt^[59] have also expressed disappointment with Roe.

Jeffrey Rosen^[60] and Michael Kinsley^[61] echo Ginsburg, arguing that a democratic movement would have been the correct way to build a more durable consensus in support of abortion rights. William Saletan wrote that "Blackmun’s [Supreme Court] papers vindicate every indictment of Roe: invention, overreach, arbitrariness, textual indifference."^[62] Benjamin Wittes has written that Roe "disenfranchised millions of conservatives on an issue about which they care deeply".^[63] And Edward Lazarus, a former Blackmun clerk who "loved Roe’s author like a grandfather" wrote: "As a matter of constitutional interpretation and judicial method, Roe borders on the indefensible....Justice Blackmun’s opinion provides essentially no reasoning in support of its holding. And in the almost 30 years since Roe’s announcement, no one has produced a convincing defense of Roe on its own terms."^[64]

The assertion that the Supreme Court was making a legislative decision is often repeated by opponents of the Court's decision.^[65] The "viability" criterion, which Blackmun acknowledged was arbitrary, is still in effect, although the point of viability has changed as medical science has found ways to help premature babies survive.^[66]

Public opinion

See also: Abortion in the United States: Public opinion

A Gallup poll conducted in May 2009 indicates that a minority of Americans, 37%, believe that abortion should be legal in any or most circumstances, compared to 41% in May 2008.^[67] Similarly, an April 2009 Pew Research Center poll showed a softening of support for legal abortion compared to the previous years of polling. People who said they support abortion in all or most cases dropped from 54% in 2008 to 46% in 2009.^[68]

In contrast, an October 2007 Harris poll on Roe v. Wade asked the following question:

In 1973, the U.S. Supreme Court decided that states laws which made it illegal for a woman to have an abortion up to three months of pregnancy were unconstitutional, and that the decision on whether a woman should have an abortion up to three months of pregnancy should be left to the woman and her doctor to decide. In general, do you favor or oppose this part of the U.S. Supreme Court decision making abortions up to three months of pregnancy legal?^[69]

In reply, 56 percent of respondents indicated favour while 40 percent indicated opposition. The Harris organization concluded from this poll that "56 percent now favours the U.S. Supreme Court decision." Pro-life activists have disputed whether the Harris poll question is a valid measure of public opinion about Roe's overall decision, because the question focuses only on the first three months of pregnancy.^[70][71] The Harris poll has tracked public opinion about Roe since 1973:^[69][72]

Regarding the Roe decision as a whole, more Americans support it than support overturning it.^[73] When pollsters describe various regulations that Roe prevents legislatures from enacting, support for Roe drops.^[73][74]

Role in subsequent decisions and politics

Opposition to Roe on the bench grew when President Reagan—who supported legislative restrictions on abortion—began making federal judicial appointments in 1981. Reagan denied that there was any litmus test: "I have never given a litmus test to anyone that I have appointed to the bench…. I feel very strongly about those social issues, but I also place my confidence in the fact that the one thing that I do seek are judges that will interpret the law and not write the law. We've had too many examples in recent years of courts and judges legislating."^[75]

In addition to White and Rehnquist, Reagan appointee Sandra Day O'Connor began dissenting from the Court's abortion cases, arguing in 1983 that the trimester-based analysis devised by the Roe Court was "unworkable."^[76] Shortly before his retirement from the bench, Chief Justice Warren Burger suggested in 1986 that Roe be "reexamined";^[77] the associate justice who filled Burger's place on the Court—Justice Antonin Scalia—vigorously opposed Roe. Concern about overturning Roe played a major role in the defeat of Robert Bork's nomination to the Court in 1987; the man eventually appointed to replace Roe-supporter Lewis Powell was Anthony M. Kennedy.

The Supreme Court of Canada used the rulings in both Roe and Doe v. Bolton as grounds to find Canada's federal law restricting access to abortions unconstitutional. That Canadian case, R. v. Morgentaler, was decided in 1988.^[78]

Webster v. Reproductive Health Services

Main article: Webster v. Reproductive Health Services

In a 5-4 decision in 1989's Webster v. Reproductive Health Services, Chief Justice Rehnquist, writing for the Court, declined to explicitly overrule Roe, because "none of the challenged provisions of the Missouri Act properly before us conflict with the Constitution."^[79] In this case, the Court upheld several abortion restrictions, and modified the Roe trimester framework.^[79]

In concurring opinions, O'Connor refused to reconsider Roe, and Justice Antonin Scalia criticized the Court and O'Connor for not overruling Roe.^[79] Blackmun – author of the Roe opinion – stated in his dissent that White, Kennedy and Rehnquist were "callous" and "deceptive," that they deserved to be charged with "cowardice and illegitimacy," and that their plurality opinion "foments disregard for the law."^[79] White had recently opined that the majority reasoning in Roe v. Wade was "warped."^[77]

Planned Parenthood v. Casey

Main article: Planned Parenthood v. Casey

During initial deliberations for Planned Parenthood v. Casey (1992), an initial majority of five Justices (Rehnquist, White, Scalia, Kennedy, and Thomas) were willing to effectively overturn Roe. Kennedy changed his mind after the initial conference,^[80] and O'Connor, Kennedy, and Souter joined Blackmun and Stevens to reaffirm the central holding of Roe,^[81] saying, "At the heart of liberty is the right to define one's own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life."^[82] Only Justice Blackmun would have retained Roe entirely and struck down all aspects of the statute at issue in Casey.

Scalia's dissent acknowledged that abortion rights are of "great importance to many women", but asserted that it is not a liberty protected by the Constitution, because the Constitution does not mention it, and because longstanding traditions have permitted it to be legally proscribed. Scalia concluded: "[B]y foreclosing all democratic outlet for the deep passions this issue arouses, by banishing the issue from the political forum that gives all participants, even the losers, the satisfaction of a fair hearing and an honest fight, by continuing the imposition of a rigid national rule instead of allowing for regional differences, the Court merely prolongs and intensifies the anguish."^[82]

Stenberg v. Carhart

Main article: Stenberg v. Carhart

During the 1990s, Nebraska attempted to ban a certain second-trimester abortion procedure known as intact dilation and extraction (sometimes called partial birth abortion). The Nebraska ban allowed other second-trimester abortion procedures called dilation and evacuation abortions. Ginsburg (who replaced White) stated, "this law does not save any fetus from destruction, for it targets only 'a method of performing abortion'."^[83] The Supreme Court struck down the Nebraska ban by a 5-4 vote in Stenberg v. Carhart (2000), citing a right to use the safest method of second trimester abortion.

Kennedy, who had co-authored the 5-4 Casey decision upholding Roe, was among the dissenters in Stenberg, writing that Nebraska had done nothing unconstitutional.^[83] Kennedy described the second trimester abortion procedure that Nebraska was not seeking to prohibit: "The fetus, in many cases, dies just as a human adult or child would: It bleeds to death as it is torn from limb from limb. The fetus can be alive at the beginning of the dismemberment process and can survive for a time while its limbs are being torn off." Kennedy wrote that since this dilation and evacuation procedure remained available in Nebraska, the state was free to ban the other procedure sometimes called "partial birth abortion."^[83]

The remaining three dissenters in Stenberg – Thomas, Scalia, and Rehnquist – disagreed again with Roe: "Although a State may permit abortion, nothing in the Constitution dictates that a State must do so."

Gonzales v. Carhart

Main article: Gonzales v. Carhart

In 2003, Congress passed the Partial-Birth Abortion Ban Act, which led to a lawsuit in the case of Gonzales v. Carhart. The Court had previously ruled in Stenberg v. Carhart that a state's ban on "partial birth abortion" was unconstitutional because such a ban would not allow for the health of the woman. The membership of the Court changed after Stenberg, with John Roberts and Samuel Alito replacing Rehnquist and O'Connor, respectively. Further, the ban at issue in Gonzales v. Carhart was a clear federal statute, rather than a relatively vague state statute as in the Stenberg case.

On April 18, 2007, the Supreme Court handed down a 5 to 4 decision upholding the constitutionality of the Partial-Birth Abortion Ban Act. Kennedy wrote the majority opinion, asserting that Congress was within its power to generally ban the procedure, although the Court left the door open for as-applied challenges. Kennedy's opinion did not reach the question whether the Court's prior decisions in Roe v. Wade, Planned Parenthood v. Casey, and Stenberg v. Carhart were valid, and instead the Court said that the challenged statute is consistent with those prior decisions whether or not those prior decisions were valid.

Joining the majority were Chief Justice John Roberts, Scalia, Thomas, and Alito. Ginsburg and the other three justices dissented, contending that the ruling ignored Supreme Court abortion precedent, and also offering an equality-based justification for that abortion precedent. Thomas filed a concurring opinion, joined by Scalia, contending that the Court's prior decisions in Roe v. Wade and Planned Parenthood v. Casey should be reversed, and also noting that the Partial-Birth Abortion Ban Act may exceed the powers of Congress under the Commerce Clause.

Activities of Norma McCorvey

Norma McCorvey became a member of the pro-life movement in 1995; she now supports making abortion illegal. In 1998, she testified to Congress:

It was my pseudonym, Jane Roe, which had been used to create the "right" to abortion out of legal thin air. But Sarah Weddington and Linda Coffee never told me that what I was signing would allow women to come up to me 15, 20 years later and say, "Thank you for allowing me to have my five or six abortions. Without you, it wouldn't have been possible." Sarah never mentioned women using abortions as a form of birth control. We talked about truly desperate and needy women, not women already wearing maternity clothes.^[10]

As a party to the original litigation, she sought to reopen the case in U.S. District Court in Texas to have Roe v. Wade overturned. However, the Fifth Circuit decided that her case was moot, in McCorvey v. Hill.^[84] In a concurring opinion, Judge Edith Jones agreed that McCorvey was raising legitimate questions about emotional and other harm suffered by women who have had abortions, about increased resources available for the care of unwanted children, and about new scientific understanding of fetal development, but Jones said she was compelled to agree that the case was moot. On February 22, 2005, the Supreme Court refused to grant a writ of certiorari, and McCorvey's appeal ended.

Presidential positions

The New York Times cover page from January 23, 1973. President Lyndon B. Johnson died the same day the Roe decision was announced. The news from the decision can be seen in the lower left corner of the facsimile.

President Richard Nixon did not publicly comment about the decision.^[85] In private conversation later revealed as part of the Nixon tapes, Nixon said "There are times when an abortion is necessary, I know that. When you have a black and a white" (a reference to interracial pregnancies) "or a rape."^[86][87] However, Nixon was also concerned that greater access to abortions would foster "permissiveness," and said that "it breaks the family."^[86]

Generally, presidential opinion has been split between major party lines. The Roe decision was opposed by Presidents Gerald Ford,^[88] Ronald Reagan,^[89] and George W. Bush.^[90] President George H.W. Bush also opposed Roe, though he had supported abortion rights earlier in his career.^[91][92]

President Jimmy Carter supported legal abortion from an early point in his political career, in order to prevent birth defects and in other extreme cases; he encouraged the outcome in Roe and generally supported abortion rights.^[93] Roe was also supported by President Bill Clinton.^[94] President Barack Obama has taken the position that "Abortions should be legally available in accordance with Roe v. Wade."^[95]

State laws regarding Roe

Several states have enacted so-called trigger laws which would take effect in the event that Roe v. Wade is overturned. Those states include Arkansas, Illinois, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Dakota and South Dakota.^[96] Additionally, many states did not repeal pre-1973 statutes that criminalized abortion, and some of those statutes could again be in force if Roe was reversed.^[97]

Other states have passed laws to maintain the legality of abortion if Roe v. Wade is overturned. Those states include California, Connecticut, Hawaii, Maine, Maryland, Nevada and Washington.^[96]

See also

• Birth control movement in the United States
• Doe v. Bolton
• List of United States Supreme Court cases, volume 410
• Roe effect
• A, B and C v Ireland [2010], the leading decision on abortion in the European Court of Human Rights

Footnotes

1. ^ "Roe v. Wade and Beyond", Frontline, PBS (2006-01-19): "while reaffirming the central holding of Roe v. Wade, the court rejected 'Roe's rigid trimester framework'...."
2. ^ Wood, Mary and Hawkins, Lisa. "State Regulation of Late Abortion and the Physician's Duty of Care to the Viable Fetus", 45 Mo. L. Rev. 394 (1980).
3. ^ Mears, William; Franken, Bob (2003-01-22). "30 years after ruling, ambiguity, anxiety surround abortion debate". CNN. http://www.cnn.com/2003/LAW/01/21/roevwade.overview/. "In all, the Roe and Doe rulings impacted laws in 46 states." 
4. ^ Greenhouse 2005, p. 72
5. ^ Cole, George; Frankowski, Stanislaw. Abortion and protection of the human fetus : legal problems in a cross-cultural perspective, page 20 (1987): "By 1900 every state in the Union had an anti-abortion prohibition." Via Google Books. Retrieved (2008-04-08).
6. ^ Wilson, James, "Of the Natural Rights of Individuals" (1790-1792): "In the contemplation of law, life begins when the infant is first able to stir in the womb." Also see Blackstone, William. Commentaries (1765): "Life ... begins in contemplation of law as soon as an infant is able to stir in the mother's womb."
7. ^ Greenhouse 2005, p. 92
8. ^ McCorvey, Norma and Meisler, Andy. I Am Roe: My Life, Roe V. Wade, and Freedom of Choice (Harper Collins 1994).
9. ^ Richard Ostling. "A second religious conversion for 'Jane Roe' of Roe vs. Wade", Associated Press (1998-10-19): "She confessed that her tale of rape a decade before had been a lie; she was simply an unwed mother who later gave the child up for adoption.".
10. ^ ^{a b} McCorvey, Norma. Testimony to the Senate Subcommittee on the Constitution, Federalism and Property Rights (1998-01-21), also quoted in the parliament of Western Australia (PDF) (1998-05-20): "The affidavit submitted to the Supreme Court didn’t happen the way I said it did, pure and simple." Retrieved 2007-01-27
11. ^ ^{a b} Roe v. Wade, 314 F. Supp. 1217 (1970): "On the merits, plaintiffs argue as their principal contention that the Texas Abortion Laws must be declared unconstitutional because they deprive single women and married couple of their rights secured by the Ninth Amendment to choose whether to have children. We agree." Retrieved 2008-09-04.
12. ^ O'Connor, Karen. Testimony before U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee, "The Consequences of Roe v. Wade and Doe v. Bolton", via archive.org (2005-06-23). Retrieved 2007-01-30
13. ^ Greenhouse 2005, pp. 78–79
14. ^ Greenhouse 2005, pp. 77–79
15. ^ Greenhouse 2005, p. 80
16. ^ Greenhouse 2005, p. 81
17. ^ Schwartz 1988, p. 103
18. ^ Greenhouse 2005, pp. 81–88
19. ^ Garrow 1994, p. 556
20. ^ Greenhouse 2005, p. 89
21. ^ Greenhouse 2005, pp. 93–95
22. ^ Although abortion is still considered a fundamental right under current jurisprudence, subsequent cases, notably Planned Parenthood v. Casey, Stenberg v. Carhart, and Gonzales v. Carhart have affected the legal standard.
23. ^ Chase, H. et al. Supplement to Edward S. Corwin's The constitution and what it means today: Supreme Court decisions of 1973, 1974, and 1975, page 36 (Princeton University Press 1975): "The abortion cases afforded the Supreme Court another opportunity to caress the Ninth Amendment without embracing it."
24. ^ Devins, Neal and Watson, Wendy. Judicial Nominations, page 225 (1995).
25. ^ Greenhouse 2005, pp. 98–99
26. ^ Roe v. Wade, 410 U.S. 113, Section IX (S. Ct. 1973).
27. ^ Greenhouse 2005, pp. 96–97
28. ^ Woodward, Bob. "The Abortion Papers", Washington Post (1989-01-22). Retrieved 2007-02-03.
29. ^ ^{a b} Greenhouse 2005, p. 97
30. ^ Kmiec, Douglas. "Testimony Before Subcommittee on the Constitution, Judiciary Committee, U.S. House of Representatives" (1996-04-22), via the "Abortion Law Homepage." Retrieved 2007-01-23.
31. ^ Abernathy, M. et al., Civil Liberties Under the Constitution (U. South Carolina 1993), page 4. Retrieved 2007-02-04.
32. ^ Chemerinsky, Erwin (2003). Federal Jurisdiction. Introduction to Law (4th ed.). Aspen Publishers. p. 132. ISBN 9780735527188. http://books.google.com/books?id=wgpGAQAAIAAJ. 
33. ^ Southern Pacific v. Interstate Commerce Commission, 219 U.S. 498 (1911). Findlaw.com. Retrieved 2007-01-26
34. ^ ^{a b} Doe v. Bolton, 410 U.S. 179 (1973). Findlaw.com. Retrieved 2007-01-26.
35. ^ Potts, Malcolm et al. Abortion, page 347 (1977).
36. ^ Roe v. Wade, 410 U.S. 113 (1972). Findlaw.com. Retrieved 2007-01-26
37. ^ Currie, David (1994). The Constitution in the Supreme Court: The Second Century, 1888-1986. University of Chicago Press. p. 470. 
38. ^ "Rehnquist's legacy", The Economist (2005-06-30).
39. ^ ^{a b} What Roe v. Wade Should Have Said; The Nation’s Top Legal Experts Rewrite America’s Most Controversial decision, Jack Balkin Ed. (NYU Press 2005). Retrieved 2007-01-26
40. ^ Reagan, Ronald. Abortion and the Conscience of the Nation, (Nelson 1984): "If you don't know whether a body is alive or dead, you would never bury it. I think this consideration itself should be enough for all of us to insist on protecting the unborn." Retrieved 2007-01-26
41. ^ Shimron, Yonat. “Democratic Gains Spur Abortion Foes into Action,” The News & Observer (2009-01-18): “The annual March for Life procession is already among Washington's largest rallies, drawing an estimated 200,000 people.”
42. ^ Harper, Jennifer. “Pro-life marchers lose attention,” Washington Times (2009-01-22): “the event has consistently drawn about 250,000 participants since 2003.”
43. ^ Johnston, Laura. “Cleveland's first March for Life anti-abortion event draws 200,” The Plain Dealer (2009-01-18): “the Washington March for Life…draws 200,000 annually on the anniversary of the Roe v. Wade decision.”
44. ^ ^{a b} Koppelman, Andrew. “Forced Labor: A Thirteenth Amendment Defense of Abortion”, Northwestern Law Review, Volume 84, page 480 (1990).
45. ^ Guttmacher Institute, "State Policies in Brief, An Overview of Abortion Laws (PDF)", published 2007-01-01. Retrieved 2007-01-26.
46. ^ Harris v. McRae, 448 U.S. 297 (1980). Findlaw.com. Retrieved 2007-01-26.
47. ^ Greenhouse 2005, pp. 183–206; 250
48. ^ Thomson, Judith. "A Defense of Abortion", in Philosophy and Public Affairs, vol. 1, no. 1 (1971), pp. 47–66.
49. ^ Balkin, Jack. Bush v. "Gore and the Boundary Between Law and Politics", 110 Yale Law Journal 1407 (2001): "Liberal and feminist legal scholars have spent decades showing that the result was correct even if Justice Blackmun’s opinion seems to have been taken from the Court’s Cubist period."
50. ^ Cohen, Richard. "Support Choice, Not Roe", Washington Post, (2005-10-19): "If the best we can say for it is that the end justifies the means, then we have not only lost the argument — but a bit of our soul as well." Retrieved 2007-01-23.
51. ^ Rosen, Jeffrey. "The Dissenter", The New York Times Magazine (2007-09-23). Rosen notes that Stevens is "the oldest and arguably most liberal justice."
52. ^ Ginsburg, Ruth. "Some Thoughts on Autonomy and Equality in Relation to Roe v. Wade", 63 North Carolina Law Review 375 (1985): "The political process was moving in the early 1970s, not swiftly enough for advocates of quick, complete change, but majoritarian institutions were listening and acting. Heavy-handed judicial intervention was difficult to justify and appears to have provoked, not resolved, conflict." Retrieved 2007-01-23.
53. ^ Cox, Archibald. The Role of the Supreme Court in American Government, 113–114 (Oxford U. Press 1976), via Google Books. Retrieved 2007-01-26. Stuart Taylor has argued that "Roe v. Wade was sort of conjured up out of very general phrases and was recorded, even by most liberal scholars like Archibald Cox at the time, John Harvey Link - just to name two Harvard scholars - as kind of made-up constitutional law.” See Stuart Taylor Jr., Online News Hour, PBS 2000-07-13.
54. ^ Greenhouse 2005, pp. 135–136
55. ^ Ely, John Hart. "The Wages of Crying Wolf", 82 Yale Law Journal 920 (1973). Retrieved 2007-01-23. Professor Ely "supported the availability of abortion as a matter of policy." See Liptak, Adam. "John Hart Ely, a Constitutional Scholar, Is Dead at 64", New York Times (2003-10-27). Ely is generally regarded as having been a “liberal constitutional scholar.” Perry, Michael (1999). We the People: The Fourteenth Amendment and the Supreme Court at Google Books Archived June 25, 2007 at the Wayback Machine
56. ^ Tribe, Laurence (1973). "The Supreme Court, 1972 Term—Foreword: Toward a Model of Roles in the Due Process of Life and Law". Harvard Law Review 87: 1 [p. 7].  Quoted in Morgan, Richard Gregory (1979). "Roe v. Wade and the Lesson of the Pre-Roe Case Law". Michigan Law Review (The Michigan Law Review Association) 77 (7): 1724–1748. doi:10.2307/1288040. JSTOR 1288040. 
57. ^ Dershowitz, Alan. Supreme Injustice: How the High Court Hijacked Election 2000 (Oxford U. Press 2001): “Judges have no special competence, qualifications, or mandate to decide between equally compelling moral claims (as in the abortion controversy)....” quoted by Green, "Bushed and Gored: A Brief Review of Initial Literature", in The Final Arbiter: The Consequences of Bush V. Gore for Law And Politics, ed. Banks C, Cohen D & Green J., editors, page 14 (SUNY Press 2005), via Google Books. Retrieved 2007-01-26.
58. ^ Sunstein, Cass. Quoted by McGuire, New York Sun (2005-11-15): "What I think is that it just doesn't have the stable status of Brown or Miranda because it's been under internal and external assault pretty much from the beginning....As a constitutional matter, I think Roe was way overreached.” Retrieved 2007-01-23. Sunstein is a "liberal constitutional scholar." See Herman, Eric. "Former U of C law prof on everyone's short court list", Chicago Sun-Times (2005-07-11). Archived December 23, 2007 at the Wayback Machine
59. ^ Roosevelt, Kermit. "Shaky Basis for a Constitutional ‘Right’", Washington Post, (2003-01-22): "[I]t is time to admit in public that, as an example of the practice of constitutional opinion writing, Roe is a serious disappointment. You will be hard-pressed to find a constitutional law professor, even among those who support the idea of constitutional protection for the right to choose, who will embrace the opinion itself rather than the result….This is not surprising. As constitutional argument, Roe is barely coherent. The court pulled its fundamental right to choose more or less from the constitutional ether. It supported that right via a lengthy, but purposeless, cross-cultural historical review of abortion restrictions and a tidy but irrelevant refutation of the straw-man argument that a fetus is a constitutional ‘person’ entitled to the protection of the 14th Amendment....By declaring an inviolable fundamental right to abortion, Roe short-circuited the democratic deliberation that is the most reliable method of deciding questions of competing values." Retrieved 2007-01-23. Archived March 19, 2007 at the Wayback Machine
60. ^ Rosen, Jeffrey. "Why We’d Be Better off Without Roe: Worst Choice", The New Republic via Archive.org (2003-02-24): "In short, 30 years later, it seems increasingly clear that this pro-choice magazine was correct in 1973 when it criticized Roe on constitutional grounds. Its overturning would be the best thing that could happen to the federal judiciary, the pro-choice movement, and the moderate majority of the American people." Retrieved 2007-01-23.
61. ^ Kinsley, Michael. "Bad choice", The New Republic (2004-06-13): "Against all odds (and, I'm afraid, against all logic), the basic holding of Roe v. Wade is secure in the Supreme Court....[A] freedom of choice law would guarantee abortion rights the correct way, democratically, rather than by constitutional origami." Retrieved 2007-01-23.
62. ^ Saletan, William. "Unbecoming Justice Blackmun", Legal Affairs, May/June 2005. Retrieved 2007-01-23. Saletan is a self-described liberal. See Saletan, William. "Rights and Wrongs: Liberals, progressives, and biotechnology", Slate (2007-07-13).
63. ^ Wittes, Benjamin. "Letting Go of Roe", The Atlantic Monthly, Jan/Feb 2005. Retrieved 2007-01-23. Wittes also said, "I generally favor permissive abortion laws." Wittes has elsewhere noted that, "In their quieter moments many liberal scholars recognize that the decision is a mess." See Wittes, Benjamin. "A Little Less Conversation", The New Republic 2007-11-29
64. ^ Lazarus, Edward. "The Lingering Problems with Roe v. Wade, and Why the Recent Senate Hearings on Michael McConnell’s Nomination Only Underlined Them", Findlaw's Writ (2002-10-03). Retrieved 2007-01-23.
65. ^ Bush, George W. Quoted in Boston Globe, p. A12 (2000-01-22). "Roe v. Wade was wrong because it 'usurped the power of the legislatures,' Bush said. 'I felt like it was a case where the court took the place of what legislatures should do in America,' he said. But Bush refused to say how he felt each state should act. Instead, he said that when it comes to legalizing abortion, 'it should be up to each legislature.'" Retrieved 2007-02-02.
66. ^ Stith, Irene. Abortion Procedures, CRS Report for Congress (PDF) (1997-11-17). Retrieved 2007-02-02.
67. ^ Saad, Lydia. More Americans “Pro-Life” Than “Pro-Choice” for First Time, Gallup (2009-05-15).
68. ^ "Public Takes Conservative Turn on Gun Control, Abortion Americans Now Divided Over Both Issues", Pew Research Center (2009-04-30).
69. ^ ^{a b} Harris Interactive, (2007-11-09). "Support for Roe v. Wade Increases Significantly, Reaches Highest Level in Nine Years." Retrieved 2007-12-14.
70. ^ Franz, Wanda. "The Continuing Confusion About Roe v. Wade", NRL News (June 2007).
71. ^ Adamek, Raymond. "Abortion Polls", Public Opinion Quarterly, Vol. 42, No. 3 (Autumn, 1978), pp. 411-413. Dr. Adamek is pro-life. Dr Raymond J Adamek, PhD Pro-Life Science and Technology Symposium.
72. ^ Harris Interactive. 'U.S. Attitudes Toward Roe v. Wade". The Wall Street Journal Online, (2006-05-04). Retrieved 2007-02-03.
73. ^ ^{a b} Ayres McHenry Poll Results on Roe v. Wade via Angus Reid Global Monitor (2007).
74. ^ Gallagher, Maggie. “Pro-Life Voters are Crucial Component of Electability”, Realclearpolitics.com (2007-05-23).
75. ^ Reagan, Ronald. Interview With Eleanor Clift, Jack Nelson, and Joel Havemann of the Los Angeles Times (1986-06-23). Retrieved 2007-01-23.
76. ^ Akron v. Akron Center for Reproductive Health Inc., 462 U.S. 416 (1983). Findlaw.com. Retrieved 2007-01-26.
77. ^ ^{a b} Thornburgh v. American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, 476 U.S. 747 (1986). Findlaw.com. Retrieved 2007-02-02.
78. ^ R. v. Morgentaler 1 S.C.R. 30 (1988).
79. ^ ^{a b c d} Webster v. Reproductive Health Services, 492 U.S. 490 (1989). Findlaw.com. Retrieved 2007-02-02.
80. ^ Totenberg, Nina (2004-03-04). "Documents Reveal Battle to Preserve 'Roe'; Court Nearly Reversed Abortion Ruling, Blackmun Papers Show". Morning Edition (NPR). http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=1745254. Retrieved 2007-01-30. 
81. ^ Greenhouse 2005, pp. 203–206
82. ^ ^{a b} Planned Parenthood of Southeastern Pa. v. Casey, 505 U.S. 833 (1992). Retrieved 2007-02-03.
83. ^ ^{a b c} Stenberg v. Carhart, 530 U.S. 914 (2000). Retrieved 2007-02-02.
84. ^ McCorvey v. Hill, 385 F3d 846 (PDF) (5th Cir 2004). Findlaw.com. Retrieved 2007-01-26
85. ^ Reeves, Richard (2001). President Nixon: Alone in the White House (1st ed.). Simon & Schuster. p. 563. ISBN 0684802317. http://books.google.com/?id=AdBdPvGxdaIC&pg=PA563. "The President did not comment directly on the decision." 
86. ^ ^{a b} Savage, Charlie (June 23, 2009). "On Nixon Tapes, Ambivalence Over Abortion, Not Watergate". The New York Times. http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/24/us/politics/24nixon.html. Retrieved 2009-07-18. 
87. ^ Harnden, Toby. "President Richard Nixon Said it Was 'Necessary' to Abort Mixed-Race Babies, Tapes Reveal," The Daily Telegraph (2009-06-24).
88. ^ Ford, Gerald. Letter to the Archbishop of Cincinnati, published online by The American Presidency Project. Santa Barbara, CA: University of California (1976-09-10).
89. ^ Reagan, Ronald. Abortion and the Conscience of the Nation (Nelson 1984).
90. ^ Kornblut, Anne E. (January 22, 2000). "Bush Tells Addicts He Can Identify". Boston Globe: p. A12. http://graphics.boston.com/news/politics/campaign2000/news/Bush_tells_addicts_he_can_identify+.shtml. 
91. ^ Fritz, Sara (August 18, 1992). "'92 REPUBLICAN CONVENTION: Rigid Anti-Abortion Platform Plank OKd Policy". Los Angeles Times. http://articles.latimes.com/1992-08-18/news/mn-5874_1_abortion-rights-advocates/3. "President George Bush supported abortion rights until 1980, when he switched sides after Ronald Reagan picked Bush as his running mate." 
92. ^ Bush, George Herbert Walker.Remarks to Participants in the March for Life Rally (1989-01-23): "I think the Supreme Court's decision in Roe versus Wade was wrong and should be overturned."
93. ^ Carter, James Earl. Larry King Live, CNN, Interview With Jimmy Carter (2006-02-01). Also see Bourne, Peter, Jimmy Carter: A Comprehensive Biography from Plains to Postpresidency: "Early in his term as governor, Carter had strongly supported family planning programs including abortion in order to save the life of a woman, birth defects, or in other extreme circumstances. Years later, he had written the foreword to a book, Women in Need, that favored a woman's right to abortion. He had given private encouragement to the plaintiffs in a lawsuit, Doe v. Bolton, filed against the state of Georgia to overturn its archaic abortion laws."
94. ^ Clinton, Bill. My Life, page 229 (Knopf 2004).
95. ^ Obama, Barack. "1998 Illinois State Legislative National Political Awareness Test", Project Vote Smart, via archive.org. Retrieved on 2007-01-21.
96. ^ ^{a b} Vestal, Christine. "States probe limits of abortion policy", Stateline.org (2007-06-11).
97. ^ Marcus, Frances Frank. “Louisiana Moves Against Abortion”, New York Times (1989-07-08).

References

• Garrow, David J. (1994). Liberty and Sexuality: The Right to Privacy and the Making of Roe v. Wade. New York: Macmillan. ISBN 0025427555. 
• Greenhouse, Linda (2005). Becoming Justice Blackmun: Harry Blackmun's Supreme Court Journey. New York: Times Books. ISBN 0-8050-7791-X. 
• Schwartz, Bernard (1988). The Unpublished Opinions of the Burger Court. Oxford University Press. ISBN 9780195053173. http://books.google.com/?id=gUMrsFFZtrQC&pg=PA103. 

Further reading

• Critchlow, Donald T. (1996). The Politics of Abortion and Birth Control in Historical Perspective. University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press. ISBN 0271015705. 
• Critchlow, Donald T. (1999). Intended Consequences: Birth Control, Abortion, and the Federal Government in Modern America. New York: Oxford University Press. ISBN 0195046579. 
• Hull, N.E.H. (2004). The Abortion Rights Controversy in America: A Legal Reader. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. ISBN 0807828734. 
• Hull, N.E.H.; Peter Charles Hoffer (2001). Roe v. Wade: The Abortion Rights Controversy in American History. Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas. ISBN 0700611436. 
• Mohr, James C. (1979). Abortion in America: The Origins and Evolution of National Policy, 1800–1900. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ISBN 0195026160. 
• Rubin, Eva R. [ed.] (1994). The Abortion Controversy: A Documentary History. Westport, CT: Greenwood. ISBN 0313284768. 
• Staggenborg, Suzanne (1994). The Pro-Choice Movement: Organization and Activism in the Abortion Conflict. New York: Oxford University Press. ISBN 0195065964. 

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• Full text of opinion in Roe v. Wade:
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