that, "state legislatures began to make it easier to obtain abortions, usually by allowing abortion to protect a woman's health, broadly defined, but also requiring approval of the abortion by a committee of doctors in addition to the woman's own physician." With some states providing relaxed abortion restrictions, women who could afford it found it easy to travel to a state that had an unrestrictive abortion law or to find a doctor who would agree that an abortion was necessary for her health.
The Court attacks on restrictive abortion laws focused initially on the most restrictive of the traditional laws. Challengers argued that such laws, which permitted abortions only to save a woman's life, were so vague that doctors could not know when they were committing an illegal act (Hall 740). In the case of U.S. v. Vuitch (1971), the Supreme Court avoided a decision on the constitutionality of abortion by construing a federal abortion law in the District of Columbia as permitting abortions to preserve the health of a woman. At the same time, the Supreme Court was developing a law of personal privacy in sexual matters as was the case in Griswold v. Connecticut (1965) (Hansen 21-22).
The case of Roe v. Wade was brought on behalf of a woman given the pseudonym of Jane Roe and later identified as Norma McCorvey. Roe/McCorvey had sought an abortion in Texas and in Georgia. She was denied the opportunity to abort her fetus, she then joined forces with other groups and brought suit against the state of Texas based on Article 1196 of the Texas Penal Code, charging that this law was in violation of the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, "protecting the right of privacy from state action" (Brady and Kemp 535). The case was referred to the U.S. Supreme Court on appeal from the United States District Court for the Northern District of Texas as a class action (Supreme Court of the United States 1).
When the case was...