Roe v. Wade & The Constitution

Roe v. Wade was a landmark decision in which the United States Supreme Court ruled that many state laws banning abortions were unconstitutional and therefore unenforceable. As a part of this 7-2 decision, the court set up the "trimester system" which says that a state cannot interfere with abortions in the first trimester of pregnancy, that it can interfere in some abortions in the second trimester, and that it can interfere in most abortions in the third trimester. This system is based on the concept of vested interest: the court ruled that the state has no vested interest in early pregnancy, that it has an interes

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ourteenth Amendment. Because it involves the abridgement of the fundamental right of liberty (to have an abortion), the case was subject to an analysis in terms of "compelling ends" and "least restrictive means." The decision here was that the state had no legitimately compelling end which was fulfilled by restricting women's (reproductive) liberty in at least the early part of pregnancy. The trimester system was clearly a way of defining the least restrictive means of placing constraints on this fundamental right to liberty and the judicially created right to privacy. It is interesting to note that the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment has been unsuccessfully used to try to justify banning abortions. Thus, one might say that Roe V. Wade hinged on a legal technicality: a judgement that the due process clause took precedence over the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment in this context. Plainly, the Framers had no intention of giving women the right to reproductive freedom when they wrote the Constitution. Women (as well as Blacks, for whom, incidentally, the Fourteenth Amendment was actually created) had shockingly few civil rights in 1784, and women's right to vote was not even a serious to
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Approximate Word count = 1244
Approximate Pages = 5 (250 words per page)