Roe v. Wade
The Supreme Court struck down Texas's criminal abortion law, ruling that the Constitution's guarantee of personal liberty protects a woman's right to decide whether to end her pregnancy.
The decision created a trimester framework: in the first three months, the choice belongs to the woman and her doctor; in the middle stage, states may regulate for the mother's safety; and after the point a fetus can survive outside the womb, states may ban abortion except to protect the mother's life or health.
“A state criminal abortion statute of the current Texas type, that excepts from criminality only a lifesaving procedure on behalf of the mother, without regard to pregnancy stage and without recognition of the other interests involved, is violative of the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.”
The majority's core holding declaring Texas's abortion ban unconstitutional.
Why this is a landmark case
Roe v. Wade held that the Constitution's protection of personal liberty and privacy includes a woman's decision whether to have an abortion. Building on the privacy right recognized in Griswold v. Connecticut, the Court established a trimester framework that balanced that right against the state's interests in protecting maternal health and potential life, sharply limiting how far states could restrict abortion early in pregnancy.
For nearly half a century Roe was among the most consequential—and most contested—decisions in American life, shaping politics, judicial confirmations, and the law of substantive due process. It was modified but reaffirmed in Planned Parenthood v. Casey (1992), which replaced the trimester framework with an 'undue burden' standard.
Roe's landmark status now includes the extraordinary fact of its reversal. In Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization (2022), a 6-3 Court (opinion by Justice Alito) overruled both Roe and Casey, holding that the Constitution confers no right to abortion and returning the question to the states. There is no longer a federal constitutional right to abortion. Roe remains essential to understanding American constitutional law—both for its 49-year influence and as a singular example of the Court overturning a long-settled, heavily relied-upon precedent.
The Case in Depth
What happened
A single pregnant woman in Texas challenged the state's criminal abortion law, which made performing an abortion a crime except when necessary to save the mother's life. She could not legally obtain an abortion in Texas because her life was not threatened, and she could not afford to travel to another state. A licensed physician facing pending state abortion prosecutions also joined the challenge, as did a married couple who feared a future unwanted pregnancy.
The question before the Court
Could Texas make it a crime for doctors to perform abortions except when necessary to save the mother's life, with no allowance for the stage of pregnancy?
The Court's answer
Yes — Texas's criminal abortion law violated the Constitution by treating abortion as a crime with no regard to how far along the pregnancy was or what the woman's circumstances were.
The Court ruled that the right to personal privacy, rooted in the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, is broad enough to cover a woman's decision whether to end her pregnancy. But this right is not absolute. The Court established a trimester framework tied to state interests: in the first three months, the decision belongs to the woman and her doctor, free from state interference; after that, states may regulate abortion in ways connected to maternal health; and after the point a fetus can survive outside the womb, states may ban abortion except when necessary to protect the mother's life or health. Texas's law — which allowed abortion only to save the mother's life and drew no distinction based on stage of pregnancy — swept too broadly and could not survive.
Curious how the Court got there? See the step-by-step legal reasoning →
How the Court got there
The legal reasoning, step by step
- The Court first addressed whether the case could be heard at all. Although Jane Roe's pregnancy had ended by the time the case reached the Court, the justices ruled it was not moot — pregnancy is 'capable of repetition, yet evading review,' because it ends too quickly to complete normal appellate review, and the same woman might become pregnant again.
- The physician intervenor, Dr. Hallford, was denied federal relief because he faced active state criminal charges for abortion. An established rule bars federal courts from interfering with pending state prosecutions absent harassment or bad faith, and Dr. Hallford's constitutional arguments had to be raised as defenses in those state cases instead.
- The Court recognized a right to personal privacy grounded in the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment — not expressly mentioned in the Constitution's text, but established in a line of earlier decisions covering marriage, procreation, contraception, and family relationships. This right covers 'fundamental' personal decisions that implicate liberty in the deepest sense.
- The Court held that this privacy right is broad enough to encompass a woman's decision about abortion, given the serious medical, psychological, and social harms that can follow from a forced pregnancy. The Court rejected the argument that the right is absolute: states have two legitimate and weighty interests — protecting maternal health and protecting potential human life — that grow more compelling as pregnancy advances.
- The Court concluded that an unborn fetus is not a 'person' within the meaning of the Fourteenth Amendment. The word 'person' appears throughout the Constitution only in contexts that apply after birth, and historical legal practice never treated the unborn as persons in the full legal sense. This meant the fetus did not have constitutional rights that automatically overrode the woman's.
- Because abortion implicates a fundamental right, any state restriction must serve a 'compelling state interest' — the most demanding standard in constitutional law. The Court held that the state's interest in maternal health becomes compelling at the end of the first trimester (when abortion mortality exceeds childbirth mortality), and its interest in potential fetal life becomes compelling at viability (roughly 28 weeks). Texas's law, which banned abortion across the board with only a life-saving exception, made no distinction by pregnancy stage and therefore failed this standard.
Doctrinal impact
Cases affected by this decision
Reaffirms Griswold v. Connecticut (381 U. S. 479)
Reaffirmed as the foundation establishing that the Due Process Clause protects personal decisions about contraception and family life.
Reaffirms Eisenstadt v. Baird (405 U. S. 438)
Reaffirmed as establishing the individual right to be free from government intrusion into decisions about bearing children.