COURT CASE: Roe v. Wade

background

• Jane Roe (actually named Norma McCorvey, who used a pseudonym to protect her identity during the case) got an abortion in Texas and argued that the Texas law that made it illegal to get an abortion unless a doctor ruled it as live saving to the woman was unconstitutional because it violated her Constitutional right to privacy (as outlined in the 1st, 4th, 5th, 9th and 14th amendments). 

jurisdictions

original jurisdiction

• Ms. Roe sued Mr. Henry Wade, her district attorney, after which her case was taken to the US District Court for the Northern District of Texas. This court ruled in her favor, in response to which the state of Texas appealed directly to the US Supreme Court.

appellate jurisdiction

• The case went directly from its original jurisdiction in the US District Court for the Northern District of Texas to the US Supreme Court.

Supreme Court ruling

• Holding: 7-2 in favor of Roe

• Opinion of the Court

  • 14th Amendment’s Due Process clause protected a woman’s right to privacy and, therefore, her right to choose to have an abortion. The Court ruled that this principle had to be balanced with women’s health and prenatal wellbeing, and divided abortion rights by trimesters: the government could not intervene at all in the first trimester, could require “reasonable health regulations” in the second, and could intervene in the third unless the mother’s life was threatened. It also ruled that abortion was a fundamental right, meaning that courts deciding cases regarding it would be required to use the strict scrutiny standard.

• Dissenting Opinion

  • “While a party may vindicate his own constitutional rights, he may not seek vindication for the rights of others” 

  “I have difficulty in concluding, as the court does, that the right of ‘privacy’ is involved in this case. Texas, by the statute here challenged, bars the performance of a medical abortion by a licensed physician on a plaintiff such as Roe. A transaction resulting in the operation such as this is not ‘private’ in the ordinary usage of that word. Nor is the ‘privacy’ that the court finds here even a distant relative of the freedom from searches and seizures protected by the Fourth Amendment to the Constitution, which the Court has referred to as embodying a right to privacy.”

  “[The ‘liberty’ protected by the due process clause in the 14th Amendment] is not guaranteed absolutely against deprivation, only against deprivation without due process of the law.”

companion case

Planned Parenthood v. Casey (1992)

• Planned Parenthood v. Casey was a 1992 Supreme Court case in which the court reaffirmed its ruling in Roe, but got rid of the trimester system. Instead, the Court decided that a fetal viability (ability of a fetus to survive outside of the uterus) standard should be implemented, and removed the strict scrutiny standard outlined by Roe regarding governmental regulations on abortion.

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