Roe v. Wade
410 U.S. 113 Supreme Court 1973
Texas law only allowed for abortion “for the purpose of saving the life of the mother.”
Roe argued that the law was unconstitutional because it violated the guarantee of personal liberty and right to privacy guaranteed in the First, Fourth, Fifth, Ninth, and Fourteenth Amendments. The Court concluded that during the first trimester, the government could place no restriction on a woman’s ability to abort a pregnancy. In the years following the Roe decision, states passed over 1,193 abortion restrictions.
On June 24, 2022, the Supreme Court overturned Roe. v. Wade in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, ending 50 years of precedent constitutionally protecting the right to an abortion. The reversal will likely result in at least 26 states in the U.S. imposing significant restrictions or outright banning abortion, denying the fundamental right to healthcare and bodily autonomy of millions of women in the U.S.
Back to tophow is it
that at the time of the adoption of our Constitution,
a woman enjoyed a substantially broader right
to terminate a pregnancy
than she does in most States today.
The anti-abortion mood prevalent in this country
played a significant role in the enactment of stringent
criminal abortion legislation
that regards a child before birth, as a living being With inherent rights
while it fails to recognize and denies all protection
to the human life
that the child may be born to
“It is thus apparent that at common law, at the time of the adoption of our Constitution, and throughout the major portion of the 19th century, abortion was viewed with less disfavor than under most American statutes currently in effect.”