Roe v. Wade Document: Text, Citation, and Legal Status

The Roe v. Wade document is the U.S. Supreme Court’s January 22, 1973 majority opinion, written by Justice Harry Blackmun, that recognized a constitutional right to abortion under the Fourteenth Amendment and struck down a Texas criminal abortion statute by a 7–2 vote.¹ Its formal citation is 410 U.S. 113 (1973). The full text, along with the concurring and dissenting opinions that are part of the same document, is freely available online from the Library of Congress, Justia, and Cornell’s Legal Information Institute. The opinion is no longer good law: the Supreme Court overruled it in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization on June 24, 2022.²

What the Document Says

The opinion rests on the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, which bars states from depriving any person of liberty without fair legal process. The Court held that this liberty guarantee includes a right to privacy broad enough to cover a woman’s decision whether to continue a pregnancy.³ The Constitution does not use the word “privacy,” but the majority pointed to earlier decisions that had already recognized protected zones of personal autonomy in marriage, contraception, and child-rearing.

The right was not absolute. The opinion states that the privacy interest had to be weighed against two government interests that grow stronger as pregnancy progresses: protecting the health of the pregnant person and protecting potential life.

One of the most consequential passages addresses whether a fetus is a “person” protected by the Fourteenth Amendment. After surveying the Constitution’s use of the word, the Court concluded that “the word ‘person,’ as used in the Fourteenth Amendment, does not include the unborn.”⁴ Had the Court ruled the other way, the state could have asserted the fetus’s own constitutional rights against the pregnant person’s liberty interest.

The Trimester Framework

The most distinctive part of the document is the trimester framework, which divided pregnancy into three stages and assigned a different level of state authority to each.

First trimester: the abortion decision rested with the pregnant person and her physician, because the medical risks of the procedure at this stage were lower than those of childbirth.¹
Second trimester: the state’s interest in maternal health became strong enough to justify regulation of provider qualifications and facility standards, but not an outright ban.
Third trimester, after viability: the state’s interest in protecting potential life became compelling, and states could regulate or prohibit abortion except where necessary to preserve the life or health of the mother.¹

The opinion placed viability at roughly twenty-eight weeks, noting it could occur as early as twenty-four. The framework was designed to give lower courts and legislatures clear rules rather than a vague balancing test.

Concurrences and Dissents

The Roe document contains more than the majority opinion. Three justices wrote separate concurrences and two wrote dissents, and all are part of the official record.

Justice Potter Stewart’s concurrence grounded the right specifically in the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment rather than the broader set of amendments the majority invoked. Justice William O. Douglas took a similar approach, treating the Fourteenth Amendment as a stronger source than the Ninth. Chief Justice Warren Burger joined the majority but suggested that two physicians, rather than one, should be required to agree to a patient’s request.¹

Justices Byron White and William Rehnquist dissented. White argued that the Court had overstepped its authority by imposing a framework with no grounding in constitutional text. Rehnquist surveyed nineteenth-century abortion laws and argued that because such restrictions were common when the Fourteenth Amendment was ratified, its drafters could not have intended it to protect abortion.¹ These arguments later became the foundation for overruling the case.

Citation and Docket Number

The formal citation is Roe v. Wade, 410 U.S. 113 (1973). The full text appears in volume 410 of the United States Reports, starting at page 113.⁵ United States Reports is the official publication series for Supreme Court opinions. The Supreme Court docket number is 70-18, assigned when the case was first placed on the Court’s calendar.⁶

Two related citations often turn up alongside Roe in legal databases. Planned Parenthood of Southeastern Pennsylvania v. Casey, 505 U.S. 833 (1992), replaced the trimester framework with the “undue burden” standard while keeping Roe’s core holding.⁷ Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, 597 U.S. ___ (2022), docket 19-1392, overruled both.⁸

Where to Read the Full Text

Several free sources host the complete opinion.

The Library of Congress offers a high-resolution PDF that preserves the original formatting and page numbers from the printed United States Reports.⁵ This is the closest digital equivalent to the physical volume held in federal repositories.

Justia’s Supreme Court Center provides the full text in a readable web format with section navigation and summaries of the majority, concurring, and dissenting opinions.¹ Cornell Law School’s Legal Information Institute also hosts the opinion, which is useful when searching for specific passages.⁴

Audio recordings of both the original oral argument on December 13, 1971 and the reargument on October 11, 1972 are available through Oyez, a free multimedia archive of Supreme Court proceedings.⁶ Federal depository libraries also hold physical copies of United States Reports for in-person access. For the underlying trial records and lower court filings, rather than the Supreme Court opinion itself, the National Archives maintains a separate portal covering U.S. District Court records.

Legal Status of the Document Today

Roe is a historical document, not current law. In 1992, Planned Parenthood v. Casey kept the core holding that the Constitution protects the right to abortion before viability but discarded the trimester framework, concluding it undervalued the state’s interest in potential life. In its place, Casey adopted the undue burden standard, under which states could regulate abortion at any stage of pregnancy as long as the regulation did not place a substantial obstacle in the path of someone seeking an abortion before viability.⁷ Casey, not Roe, was the operative legal standard for the next three decades.

On June 24, 2022, the Supreme Court overruled both Roe and Casey in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization. Writing for the majority, Justice Samuel Alito held that the Constitution does not confer a right to abortion and that the authority to regulate the procedure belongs to elected legislatures. The Dobbs majority reasoned that the right to abortion is “not deeply rooted in the Nation’s history and traditions,” and it described Roe’s trimester framework as an “elaborate set of rules” with no basis in the Constitution.² Reading Roe today means reading it as a superseded opinion whose reasoning has been rejected but whose text remains part of the official United States Reports.

1
Justia. Roe v. Wade
2
Supreme Court of the United States. Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization
3
Legal Information Institute. Abortion and Substantive Due Process
4
Legal Information Institute. Roe v. Wade, 410 U.S. 113
5
Library of Congress. Roe v. Wade
6
Oyez. Roe v. Wade
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Justia. Planned Parenthood of Southeastern Pa. v. Casey
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Justia. Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization