Title: Roe v. Wade: A Simple Explanation Of the Most Important SCOTUS Decision in 40 Years
Headings: Roe v. Wade: A Simple Explanation Of the Most Important SCOTUS Decision in 40 Years
Roe v. Wade: A Simple Explanation Of the Most Important SCOTUS Decision in 40 Years
Abortion Before Roe
Laying the Foundation: A Right to Privacy
Roe v. Wade and the “Trimester Framework”
Justice Kennedy’s Switcheroo

Content: Although the trial court ruled in favor of Roe’s right to have an abortion, it declined to stop the Texas law being challenged from being enforced against others. The case was subsequently appealed to the United States Supreme Court. The Supreme Court issued its decision in Roe v. Wade on January 22, 1973 in which the justices ruled 7-2 that abortion was a fundamental right protected by the United States Constitution. Justice Harry Blackmun, writing for the majority, declared that the right of privacy protected by the Fourteenth Amendment and previously outlined in Griswold “is broad enough to encompass a woman’s decision whether or not to terminate her pregnancy.” While the Court recognized that a woman’s right to choose was protected by the Constitution, it also recognized the competing state interests of protecting a woman’s health and the “potentiality of human life.” The solution the Court settled on was the establishment of a legal balancing test that weighed the privacy interests of the mother against the interests of the state. The Court based its test on the trimester framework of pregnancy. During the first trimester of pregnancy, when an abortion was considered a safer procedure than childbirth, the Court reasoned that the decision on whether to abort must be left exclusively to the mother. Therefore, any state or federal regulation that interfered with the right to have an abortion would be presumptively unconstitutional. For the second trimester, the Court ruled that the state could regulate abortion only in order to protect the woman’s health.