Title: The Supreme Court . Law, Power & Personality . Famous Dissents . Roe v. Wade (1973) | PBS
Headings: 

Content: State antiabortion statutes had been common since the late 19th century, but in the wake of the women's rights movement and the so-called "sexual revolution" of the 1960s and 1970s, many women had begun fighting -- through political channels and legal challenges -- for increased access to abortion. Because the struggle for access to safe and legal abortion was increasingly being waged within the nation's legal system, in 1971 the Supreme Court agreed to hear the Roe case even though it could not do so in time for the pregnancy of plaintiff Norma McCorvey to be affected by its outcome. ( At the time of the case, McCorvey employed the pseudonym "Jane Roe" so as to keep the details of her pregnancy private.) The case was argued first in December 1971 and again nearly a year later, in October 1972. Justice Harry Blackmun delivered the opinion of the Court. Citing the precedent of Griswold v. Connecticut, the 1965 case that had overturned a Connecticut law banning the use of contraceptives among married people, Blackmun held that the "right to privacy" established in the earlier case was "broad enough to encompass a woman's decision whether or not to terminate her pregnancy." As in Griswold, the Court acknowledged that the Constitution does not explicitly name a right to privacy, but located that right within the meaning of the First, Fourth, Fifth, Ninth, and Fourteenth Amendments, as well as in the "penumbras" of the Bill of Rights. Although Blackmun declined to define a fetus as a "person" under the meaning of the Fourteenth Amendment, he did acknowledge that the right to access an abortion was "not unqualified" and had to be balanced against important, and valid, state interests in protecting the life of the fetus. Blackmun considered the prevailing medical opinions of the day regarding the "viability" (or ability to survive outside of the womb) of the fetus at different points in its development and held that as the pregnancy advanced, the state's interest in protecting the fetus grew inversely to that of a woman's right to terminate the pregnancy. For legal purposes, however, the Court declined to specify a point at which life begins.