Roe v Wade Overturned. Legal Take.

Roe v. Wade, a legal case in which the United States Supreme Court ruled (7-2) on January 22, 1973, that overly restrictive state regulation of abortion is unconstitutional. The Court held that a set of Texas statutes criminalizing abortion in most cases violated a woman's constitutional right to privacy, which it found to be implicit in the liberty guarantee of the Fourteenth Amendment's due process clause ("...nor shall any state deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law"). In 2022, the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade. Which leads us to think, how come in 2022 men still rule concerning women's health?

The case started in 1970, when "Jane Roe," a fictitious name used to protect the identity of the plaintiff, Norma McCorvey (1947-2017), filed a federal lawsuit against Henry Wade, the district attorney of Dallas County, Texas, where Roe lived. The Supreme Court rejected Roe's assertion of an absolute right to terminate a pregnancy in any way and at any time, instead attempting to balance a woman's right to privacy with the state's interest in regulating abortion. According to Blackmun, only a "compelling state interest" justifies regulations limiting "fundamental rights" such as privacy, and legislators must therefore draft statutes narrowly "to express only the legitimate state interests at stake."

The Court then attempted to balance the state's distinct compelling interests in pregnant women's health and fetuses' potential life. It set the point at which a state's compelling interest in the health of a pregnant woman would allow it to regulate abortion at "roughly the end of the first trimester" of pregnancy. In terms of the fetus, the Court determined that point to be "capability of meaningful life outside the mother's womb," or viability, which occurs around 24 weeks of pregnancy.

Repeated challenges since 1973 have narrowed the scope of Roe v. Wade but have not resulted in its overturn. The Supreme Court ruled in Planned Parenthood of Southeastern Pennsylvania v. Casey (1992) that abortion restrictions are unconstitutional if they impose a "undue burden" on a woman seeking an abortion before the fetus is viable. The Supreme Court upheld the federal Partial-Birth Abortion Ban Act (2003) in Gonzales v. Carhart (2007), which prohibited a rarely used abortion procedure known as intact dilation and evacuation. In Whole Woman's Health v. Hellerstedt (2016), the Court used its Casey decision to overturn two provisions of a Texas law that required abortion clinics to meet ambulatory surgical center standards and abortion doctors to have admitting privileges at a nearby hospital.

Four years later, in June Medical Services L.L.C. v. Russo (2020), the Court used Whole Woman's Health to declare unconstitutional a Louisiana statute that was nearly identical to Texas' admitting-privileges law, as the majority noted. In May 2021, the Supreme Court agreed to hear in its October 2021 term a lower court's decision to overturn a lower court's decision to overturn a Mississippi state law passed in 2018, which prohibited most abortions after the 15th week of pregnancy, well before the point of fetal viability. Despite the fact that the law was clearly unconstitutional under Roe v. Wade and Planned Parenthood v. Casey, Mississippi lawmakers passed it in the hope that a legal challenge would eventually reach the Supreme Court, where a conservative majority of justices would overturn it.

In May 2022, an apparent draft of a majority opinion in the case, written by Justice Samuel A. Alito, Jr., was leaked to a political news publication, in what would be an unprecedented breach of the Court's traditional secrecy. The February 2022 opinion stated that the Court voted to overturn both Roe v. Wade and Planned Parenthood v. Casey. Both Roe and Casey were overturned, as expected, in the Court's official decision in Dobbs, issued in June 2022, in which Alito stated that there is no constitutional right to abortion.

Texas Opponents Abortion Ban

In its case to defend the abortion statute, the state advanced three main arguments:

- States have an interest in protecting public health, upholding medical standards, and preserving prenatal life.

- The 14th Amendment protects a fetus as a "person."

- Preserving prenatal life from conception is a compelling state interest.

- Roe asserts that he has absolute privacy rights.

- Jane Roe and the other participants built their case on the following premises:

- The Texas law violated an individual's 14th Amendment right to "liberty."

- The Texas law violated the Bill of Rights' guarantees of marital, familial, and sexual privacy.

- The right to an abortion is absolute; a person has the right to terminate a pregnancy at any time and for any reason.

Roe asserts absolute privacy rights.Jane Roe and the others involved based their case on the following arguments:

- The Texas law infringed on an individual's 14th Amendment right to "liberty."

- The Texas law violated the Bill of Rights' guarantee of marital, familial, and sexual privacy.

- The right to an abortion is absolute; a person has the right to terminate a pregnancy at any time, for any reason, and in any way they choose.

With these facts in mind, which side are you on?