Title: Supreme Court Issues its Decision on Roe v Wade | World History Project
Headings: Supreme Court Issues its Decision on Roe v Wade
Supreme Court Issues its Decision on Roe v Wade
Content: Thus, "arguments that Texas either has no valid interest at all in regulating the abortion decision, or no interest strong enough to support any limitation upon the woman's sole determination, are unpersuasive". In Section VIII, the Court also identified a countervailing right that would have to be weighed against these state interests: namely, a Constitutional right to privacy: " We, therefore, conclude that the right of personal privacy includes the abortion decision, but that this right is not unqualified and must be considered against important state interests in regulation." The innovation of the Roe court was to locate this "right of privacy" in the due process clause of the Constitution. Although the Constitution does not explicitly mention any right of privacy, the Court had previously found support for various privacy rights—directly (in several provisions of the Bill of Rights and the Fourteenth Amendment) as well as indirectly (in the "penumbra" of the Bill of Rights) -- most recently in Griswold v. Connecticut. In Section IX, the Court added that there was no legal grounds for factoring into this balancing test any right to life of the unborn fetus. The fetus would have such a right if it were defined as a legal person for purposes of the Fourteenth Amendment, but the original intent of the Constitution (up to the enactment of the Fourteenth Amendment in 1868) did not include protection of the unborn. The Court emphasized that its determination of whether a fetus can enjoy constitutional protection neither meant to reference, nor intervene in, the question of when life begins: " We need not resolve the difficult question of when life begins.