Roe v. Wade: At a Glance
Roe v. Wade (1973) is a legal case in which the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that unduly restrictive state regulation of abortion is unconstitutional. The Court held that Texas statutes criminalizing abortion violated a constitutional right to privacy, which it found to be implicit in the due process clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. The Court did not regard the right to abortion as absolute but instead sought to balance it against the state’s interests in protecting the health of pregnant persons and the “potentiality of human life.” To that end, it formulated a timetable for determining the relative priority of the right to abortion and the interests of the state: states could not intervene in a person’s decision to have an abortion during the first trimester of pregnancy; states could regulate but not prohibit abortions during the second trimester; and states could regulate or prohibit abortions from the end of the second trimester, which the Court understood as the starting point of fetal viability.
Roe was essentially upheld by the Court’s decision in Planned Parenthood v. Casey (1992), under which abortion restrictions were unconstitutional if they placed an “undue burden” on a person seeking an abortion before fetal viability.
In Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization (2022), the Court overturned both Roe and Casey, holding that the Roe Court was mistaken in its finding of a constitutional right to privacy. Soon after the Dobbs decision was handed down, several states adopted drastic restrictions on the availability of abortion.