Roe v. Wade
Citation: 410 U.S. 113 (U.S. Supreme Court, 1973); overruled by Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, 597 U.S. 215 (2022)
Facts
Norma McCorvey (“Jane Roe”) sought an abortion in Texas, which prohibited abortion except to save the mother’s life. She challenged the statute as unconstitutional. The case reached the Supreme Court alongside Doe v. Bolton, a companion case challenging a Georgia statute.
Issue
Does the Constitution protect a woman’s decision to terminate her pregnancy?
Holding
The Court (7–2, Blackmun, J.) held that the right to privacy implicit in the Fourteenth Amendment’s liberty clause encompasses a woman’s decision to terminate a pregnancy. Texas’s near-total ban was struck down.
Rule
The right to abortion is a fundamental right under substantive due process, subject to regulation only by a compelling state interest. The Court adopted a trimester framework: (1st trimester) the decision is left to the woman and her physician; (2nd trimester) the state may regulate only to protect maternal health; (3rd trimester / post-viability) the state may prohibit abortion to protect potential life, subject to a health exception.
Significance
Roe was the central abortion-rights precedent for nearly fifty years. It grounded abortion in substantive due process (privacy) rather than equal protection, a choice that shaped subsequent litigation and scholarly criticism. The trimester framework was modified in Planned Parenthood v. Casey (1992) and the case was ultimately overruled in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization (2022). It is still heavily taught as the paradigmatic substantive due process case and as an example of judicial line-drawing.