Roe v Wade

 

In 1970, two recent graduates of The University of Texas Law School brought forward a lawsuit against Dallas County District Attorney Henry Wade on the behalf of a pregnant Dallas woman, dubbed Jane Roe, claiming that Texas’s laws on abortion were violating her constitutional rights. At the time, Texas banned all abortions except when necessary to save the pregnant woman’s life. Roe claimed that while her life was not in imminent danger, she could not afford to leave the state to get an abortion in a safe environment. The Texas Federal Court ruled in favor of Roe, leading to the case going to the US Supreme Court after appeal by Wade [1].

 

On January 22, 1973, the US Supreme Court ruled that Texas’s laws on abortion violated Jane Roe’s constitutional right to privacy, as protected by the 1st, 4th, 9th and 14th amendments [1]. Thus, this decision ruled that abortion is a fundamental right that is protected by the Constitution from state regulations. However, the Supreme Court ruled that some of the more specific laws on abortion, such as the legality of late-term abortions, could be constitutional. Effectively, Roe v Wade gave states no authority to outlaw abortion in the 1st trimester, while allowing some say on the legality in the 2nd and 3rd trimester, but always legal if to protect the health of the mother.

 

A common misconception of the well-known and polarizing Roe v Wade case is that it was the start of the debate on abortion. As seen by the Abortion in pre-Roe v Wade America piece, that is simply not true. Rather, the Roe v Wade case sparked the growth of the Pro-life movement and the subsequent anti-abortion violence associated with it, as stated in the Yale Law Journal by Ken Kirsch, a Boston College professor, saying “Politically, the Court’s Decision to declare abortion to be a national right served as the catalyst to the Right for Life movement” [2].