Roe v. Wade

The Court held that the constitutional right to privacy encompasses a woman's decision whether to terminate a pregnancy.

Overview

Jane Roe challenged a Texas law criminalizing abortion except to save the mother's life. Justice Blackmun, for a 7-2 majority, held that the Fourteenth Amendment's liberty right, grounded in the privacy line beginning with Griswold, covered the abortion decision, balanced against state interests in maternal health and prenatal life through a trimester framework: broad autonomy in the first trimester, health regulation in the second, and potential prohibition in the third. Roe constitutionalized the nation's fiercest moral dispute and governed abortion law for forty-nine years until Dobbs returned the issue to the states in 2022.