ritten decision. Roe v. Wade did impose some restrictions on the abortion "right," which is thus not a full right at all.
By the 1970s, each state had its own law on the subject of abortion, and this patchwork of state regulations was eliminated with the Roe v. Wade decision. The legal argument in Roe v. Wade came to center on the question of privacy, a difficult concept because it does not appear directly in the Constitution but has instead been inferred from other provisions and ideas. The issue of privacy was raised in 1965 in Griswold v. Connecticut in which Connecticut's anticontraceptive statute, though it did not violate any express guarantees of the Bill of Rights, was found to violate the penumbral right of privacy, a right not expressly stated in the Constitution but found in the shadow, or penumbra, of other rights that are enumerated in the Constitution. Justice Douglas wrote in that case that elements of the Bill of rights have penumbras that are formed by "emanations" from the provisions of the constitution (Mason and Stephenson 442). In the years after Griswold the Supreme Court expanded the concept of the right of privacy as a constitutional right.
Blackmun drew upon this idea of penumbras for his view that the woman's right to decide to terminate her pregnancy is a fundamental right found under the heading of the "right of privacy" from earlier cases. The opinion written by Blackmun spelled out the fact that the government could only interfere when it had a compelling interest in doing so, and such an interest was detailed by Blackmun in his decision. He found that during the first trimester of a pregnancy, the government could not interfere with the right of the woman to choose an abortion if she saw fit, except to insist that the abortion be performed by a licensed physician. In the second trimester of the pregnancy, the government did have the power to regulate abortion in a manner intended to prese...