Legal Definitions - Roe v. Wade (1973)

Roe v. Wade (1973) was a landmark decision by the United States Supreme Court that established a constitutional right to abortion. Decided in 1973, the Court ruled that the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment protected a woman's right to choose to have an abortion, based on an implied constitutional right to privacy. This right, however, was not absolute and had to be balanced against the state's interests in protecting women's health and the potentiality of human life.

The Court's decision in Roe v. Wade created a framework that largely prohibited states from banning abortions before fetal viability (the point at which a fetus can survive outside the womb, generally around 24 weeks of pregnancy). It divided pregnancy into trimesters, granting individuals increasing autonomy in the first trimester, allowing states to regulate for health in the second, and permitting states to restrict or even ban abortions post-viability, with exceptions for the life or health of the pregnant person.

This ruling significantly shaped abortion law in the United States for nearly five decades. However, in 2022, the Supreme Court explicitly overturned Roe v. Wade (and a subsequent case, Planned Parenthood v. Casey) in the decision of Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization. The Dobbs ruling eliminated the federal constitutional right to abortion, returning the authority to regulate or prohibit abortion entirely to individual states.

Here are some examples illustrating the impact and principles of Roe v. Wade:

• Example 1 (Pre-Dobbs Individual Autonomy): Imagine a young professional in the year 2005 who discovers she is pregnant during her first trimester. After careful consideration, she decides that she is not ready to start a family and seeks an abortion. Under the protections established by Roe v. Wade, she had a constitutionally protected right to make this decision without the state prohibiting her access to abortion during this early stage of pregnancy. This illustrates how Roe affirmed an individual's autonomy over their reproductive choices in early pregnancy.
• Example 2 (Pre-Dobbs Limits on State Regulation): Consider a state legislature in 2010 that attempted to pass a law requiring all abortion clinics to be located within a hospital and to have a full surgical suite, even for non-surgical, early-term abortions. Under the framework of Roe v. Wade (and subsequent rulings like Planned Parenthood v. Casey), such a law would likely have been challenged and potentially struck down by courts. While states could regulate abortion for health and safety, Roe's principles meant that regulations could not impose an "undue burden" or create substantial obstacles to accessing abortion, especially if they were not medically necessary and effectively aimed at shutting down clinics.
• Example 3 (Post-Dobbs Shift in Authority): Following the Supreme Court's decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization in 2022, a state that had a "trigger law" on its books immediately implemented a near-total ban on abortions, with only narrow exceptions for the life of the pregnant person. This scenario directly demonstrates the reversal of Roe v. Wade. Before 2022, such a comprehensive ban would have been unconstitutional under Roe's federal protection of abortion rights. After Roe was overturned, the authority to regulate or prohibit abortion returned to individual states, allowing them to enact laws that would have been impermissible under the Roe framework.