Roe vs. Wade

Roe v. Wade was a 1973 U.S. Supreme Court case brought by Norma McCorvey, known as “Jane Roe,” who challenged Texas laws that allowed abortion only when necessary to save a pregnant woman’s life. The Court ruled 7-2 that the Fourteenth Amendment’s protection of liberty included a qualified right to abortion. It held that states could not prohibit abortion outright, but could regulate it to protect pregnant women’s health and potential human life. To balance those interests, the Court established a trimester framework: state authority to regulate increased as pregnancy progressed, with broader restrictions permitted later in pregnancy. The decision invalidated many existing state abortion laws and treated the right as fundamental, requiring strict scrutiny of challenged restrictions.

The ruling became one of the most contested decisions in U.S. history, drawing criticism over both its constitutional reasoning and its limits, while reshaping party politics and fueling decades of efforts to restrict or overturn it. In Planned Parenthood v. Casey (1992), the Court reaffirmed Roe’s central protection but discarded the trimester scheme and strict-scrutiny standard, replacing them with an “undue burden” test. In 2022, Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization overruled Roe entirely, ending the federal constitutional right to abortion recognized in the decision and returning authority over abortion regulation largely to elected governments. The case remains central to debates over abortion, constitutional interpretation, judicial power, and the proper role of moral and religious beliefs in public policy.