Law and Social Change: Roe v. Wade

In Roe v. Wade (1973) the U.S Supreme Court extended the right of privacy to the choice of abortion. It ruled via a seven vote majority that the right of privacy was broad enough to encompass a woman's decision whether or not to terminate her pregnancy and held that should the state make it illegal for a woman to do so, this would impose upon the pregnant woman and all concerned the burden of an unwanted child (Hall 740). Moving forward from an earlier decision in Griswold v. Connecticut (1965), the Justices essentially held that abortion should therefore be legal under the penumbra of privacy rights established in the Ninth and Fourteenth Amendments to the Constitution (Hall 740). However, the Justices, with Justice Harry Blackmun writing the majority decision, did note that the state did have an interest in potential human life (contained in the fetus, which was not accorded the status of a "person" in this decision) and could restrict abortion under certain conditions - to protect the health of the mother, as well as the potential life of a fetus at the end of the sixth month after conception (Hall 740).

Thus, using this reasoning, the Court held that the Constitution does in effect require that legal abortion services be available to women choosing not to continue a pregnancy. This essentially legalized abortion rights and did so in the context of a Constitutional guarantee of privacy and a woman's "right to choose" (Hall 740). At issue herein i

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essary, in appropriate medical judgment, for the preservation of the life or health of the mother" (Supreme Court of the United States 2). Justices Byron White and William Rehnquist, in separate dissents, criticized the Court for enforcing a right that they said was not specified in the Constitution "to overturn statutes that were no more restrictive than those widely enforced when the Fourteenth Amendment was adopted" (Hall 741). They also criticized the Court for the trimester framework which they saw as arbitrary and argued that if the state had an interest in protecting the potential life of the fetus, that interest existed and was equally strong through the entire pregnancy (Hall 741). Response to the Case James Taranto (13) stated that "Roe v. Wade is a study in unanticipated consequences. By establishing a constitutional right to an abortion, the justices of the U.S. Supreme Court no doubt thought they were settling the issue for good... But instead of consensus, the result was polarization." By 1980, the two major political parties had adopted extreme positions on the issue with Republicans favoring a pro-life constitutional amendment to ban abortion and Democrats opposing any and all regulation on abortio

Category: History - L