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Roe v. Wade, 410 U.S. 113 (1973), was a landmark decision of the U.S. Supreme Court in which the Court ruled that the Constitution of the United States generally protected a right to have an abortion. The decision struck down many abortion laws, and caused an ongoing abortion debate in the United States about whether, or to what extent, abortion should be legal, who should decide the legality of abortion, and what the role of moral and religious views in the political sphere should be. The decision also shaped debate concerning which methods the Supreme Court should use in constitutional adjudication. The case was brought by Norma McCorvey—under the legal pseudonym "Jane Roe"—who, in 1969, became pregnant with her third child. McCorvey wanted an abortion but lived in Texas, where abortion was illegal except when necessary to save the mother's life. Her lawyers, Sarah Weddington and Linda Coffee, filed a lawsuit on her behalf in U.S. federal court against her local district attorney, Henry Wade, alleging that Texas's abortion laws were unconstitutional. A special three-judge court of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Texas heard the case and ruled in her favor. The parties appealed this ruling to the Supreme Court. In January 1973, the Supreme Court issued a 7–2 decision in McCorvey's favor holding that the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution provides a fundamental "right to privacy", which protects a pregnant woman's right to an abortion. It also held that the right to abortion is not absolute and must be balanced against the government's interests in protecting women's health and prenatal life. It resolved these competing interests by announcing a pregnancy trimester timetable to govern all abortion regulations in the United States. The Court also classified the right to abortion as "fundamental", which required courts to evaluate challenged abortion laws under the "strict scrutiny" standard, the most stringent level of judicial review in the United States. The Supreme Court's decision in Roe was among the most controversial in U.S. history. In addition to the dissent, Roe was criticized by some in the legal community, including some who thought that Roe reached the correct result but went about it the wrong way, and some called the decision a form of judicial activism. Others argued that Roe did not go far enough, as it was placed within the framework of civil rights rather than the broader human rights. The decision also radically reconfigured the voting coalitions of the Republican and Democratic parties in the following decades. Anti-abortion politicians and activists sought for decades to restrict abortion or overrule the decision; polls into the 21st century showed that a plurality and a majority, especially into the late 2010s to early 2020s, opposed overruling Roe. Despite criticism of the decision, the Supreme Court reaffirmed Roe's central holding in its 1992 decision, Planned Parenthood v. Casey. Casey overruled Roe's trimester framework and abandoned its "strict scrutiny" standard in favor of an "undue burden" test. In June 2022, the Supreme Court overruled Roe and Casey in Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization on the grounds that the substantive right to abortion was not "deeply rooted in this Nation's history or tradition", nor considered a right when the Due Process Clause was ratified in 1868, and was unknown in U.S. law until Roe. Background History of abortion laws in the United States Abortion was a fairly common practice in the history of the United States, and was not always a public controversy. At a time when society was more concerned with the serious consequences of women becoming pregnant out of wedlock, family affairs were handled out of public view. The criminality of abortion at common law is a matter of debate by historians and legal scholars. In 1821, Connecticut passed the first state statute legislating abortion in the United States; it forbade the use of poisons in abortion. After the 1840s, there was an upsurge in abortions. In the 19th century, the medical profession was generally opposed to abortion, which Mohr argues arose due to competition between men with medical degrees and women without one. The practice of abortion was one of the first medical specialties, and was practiced by unlicensed people; well-off people had abortions and paid well. The press played a key role in rallying support for anti-abortion laws. According to James S. Witherspoon, a former briefing attorney for the Court of Appeals for the Third Supreme Judicial District of Texas, abortion was not legal before quickening in 27 out of all 37 states in 1868; by the end of 1883, 30 of the 37 states, six of the ten U.S. territories, and the Kingdom of Hawaiʻi, where abortion had once been common, had codified laws that restricted abortion before quickening. More than 10 states allowed pre-quickening abortions, before the quickening distinction was eliminated, and every state had anti-abortion laws by 1900. In the United States, before specific statutes were made against it, abortion was sometimes considered a common law offense, such as by William Blackstone and James Wilson. In all states throughout the 19th and early 20th century, pre-quickening abortions were always considered to be actions without a lawful purpose. This meant that if the mother died, the individual performing the abortion was guilty of murder. This aspect of common law regarded pre-quickening abortions as a type of inchoate offense. Negative liberty rights from common law do not apply in situations caused by consensual or voluntary behavior, which allowed for abortions of fetuses conceived in a consensual manner to be common law offenses. The majority opinion for Roe v. Wade authored in Justice Harry Blackmun's name would later state that the criminalization of abortion did not have "roots in the English common-law tradition", and was thought to return to the more permissive state of pre-1820s abortion laws. One purpose for banning abortion was to preserve the life of the fetus, another was to protect the life of the mother, another was to create deterrence against future abortions, and another was to avoid injuring the mother's ability to have children. Judges did not always distinguish between which purpose was more important. Rather than arresting the women having the abortions, legal officials were more likely to interrogate them to obtain evidence against the individual doing the abortions. This law enforcement strategy was a response to juries which refused to convict women prosecuted for abortion in the 19th century. In 1973, Justice Blackmun's opinion stated that "the restrictive criminal abortion laws in effect in a majority of States today are of relatively recent vintage". During the 1960s and early 1970s, opposition to abortion was concentrated among members of the political left and the Democratic Party.... Discover the Wade Webb popular books. Find the top 100 most popular Wade Webb books.