Title: A History of Key Abortion Rulings of the U.S. Supreme Court | Pew Research Center
Headings: A History of Key Abortion Rulings of the U.S. Supreme Court
A History of Key Abortion Rulings of the U.S. Supreme Court
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In this research package
The Post-Roe Court
The Partial-Birth Abortion Decisions
“Fetal Pain” Laws

Content: Roe v. Wade
In the early 1970s, the Supreme Court agreed to hear two cases challenging laws that restricted abortion. In Roe v. Wade (1973), the high court considered a challenge to a Texas law outlawing abortion in all cases except those in which the life of the mother was at risk. The second case, Doe v. Bolton (1973), focused on a more lenient Georgia law that allowed a woman to terminate her pregnancy when either her life or her health was in danger. In both cases, lower federal courts had declared the statutes unconstitutional, ruling that denying a woman the right to decide whether to carry a pregnancy to term violated basic privacy and liberty interests contained in the Constitution. In two separate but related decisions, the Supreme Court affirmed the lower courts’ conclusions and struck down both statutes by a vote of 7-2. In Roe, the more significant of the two decisions, the court concluded that constitutional rights to privacy and liberty protected a woman’s right to terminate her pregnancy. Writing for the majority, Justice Harry Blackmun acknowledged that while “the Constitution does not explicitly mention any right to privacy,” a number of prior decisions had found “a guarantee of certain areas or zones of privacy.” This guarantee of privacy, Blackmun added, is grounded in several amendments within the Bill of Rights and in the 14th Amendment’s guarantee of liberty, which taken together create zones of privacy in areas of society such as marriage, contraception, family relationships and child-rearing. Justice Blackmun’s argument for the right to privacy in Roe grew out of earlier high court decisions, most notably Griswold v. Connecticut (1965). In Griswold, the court had struck down a Connecticut anti-contraception law on the ground that it intruded on the right to marital privacy.