Significance: This ruling established that state criminal abortion laws violated the right to privacy, which included a woman’s right to terminate her pregnancy.
Background: Norma McCorve, a pregnant single woman who went by the pseudonym of Jane Roe, found that she was unable to get a legal abortion in Texas because, according to the state laws, a woman could not terminate a pregnancy unless it endangered her life. Roe challenged the Texas laws’ constitutionality saying that it violated her rights to personal privacy as protected by the First, Fourth, Fifth, Ninth, and Fourteenth Amendments. She sued Henry Wade, district attorney of Dallas County. Roe was joined in her action by John and Mary Doe, who had been advised by their physician against having a child until Mary’s health improved, though a chemical disorder prevented her from being able to use birth control pills. The state law would not allow Mary to have an abortion if she became pregnant, because only her health—and not her life—would actually be threatened by the pregnancy.
Decision: This case was argued on December 13, 1971; reargued on October 11, 1972; and decided on January 22, 1973, by a vote of 7 to 2. Justice Harry Blackmun spoke for the Court. The Court found that the Does’ case represented a situation so unlikely to occur that it did not require judicial review. However, it did rule in favor of Roe, saying that pregnancy was a commonplace enough situation that a decision on this case must be considered for future reference. The Court decided that the right to privacy did indeed include a woman’s right to choose whether to continue her pregnancy during the first trimester, or three months, of pregnancy. Justices Byron White and William Rehnquist dissented, arguing that the decision to break pregnancy into three different terms, with different state restrictions allowed for each term, asked far more of the Fourteenth Amendment than its authors had intended.
Excerpt from the Opinion of the Court: “Although the results are divided, most of these courts have agreed that the right of privacy, however based, is broad enough to cover the abortion decision; that the right, nonetheless, is not absolute and is subject to some limitations; and that at some point the state interests as to protection of health, medical standards, and prenatal life, become dominant. We agree with this approach.”
