Title: Roe v. Wade and the Right to Abortion | NWLC
Headings: Resource
Resource
The Constitutional Right to Privacy Predates Roe v. Wade
The Decision to Have an Abortion is Protected under the Constitutional Right to Privacy
The Evolution of the Constitutional Right to Abortion, Post-Roe v. Wade
The Current Landscape – Roe and the Right to Abortion is Under Constant Attack

Content: The Court identified those state interests as protecting women’s health and protecting the “potentiality” of life. The Court developed a way to balance the woman’s right to abortion against these governmental interests: prior to fetal viability, a state could only regulate abortion if necessary to protect a woman’s health, such as licensing doctors. After fetal viability, a government could regulate and even ban abortion to further its interest in the potentiality of life, but it must safeguard a woman’s life and a woman’s health. In the years after Roe, the Court struck down most attempts to restrict the right to decide whether to have an abortion, facilitating a woman’s ability to control her reproduction, her health, and indeed the course of her life itself. The Evolution of the Constitutional Right to Abortion, Post-Roe v. Wade
Even after sustained attacks on Roe v. Wade, in 1992, in Planned Parenthood v. Casey, the Court reaffirmed Roe’s essential holding: “Throughout this century, this Court also has held that the fundamental right of privacy protects citizens against governmental intrusion in such intimate family matters as procreation, childrearing, marriage, and contraceptive choice. . . . These cases embody the principle that personal decisions that profoundly affect bodily integrity, identity, and destiny should be largely beyond the reach of government. . . . In Roe v. Wade, this Court correctly applied these principles to a woman’s right to choose abortion.” The Court held that the Due Process Clause’s guarantee that no individual shall be deprived of “liberty” applies to this most personal decision.