The Roe v. Wade ruling, decided by the Supreme Court on January 22, 1973, held that the Fourteenth Amendment’s protection of personal liberty includes a woman’s right to choose to end a pregnancy, and it struck down the criminal abortion laws then in force across most of the country. The 7-2 decision governed American abortion law for nearly fifty years. It no longer does. In June 2022, the Court overturned Roe in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, and the authority to regulate abortion now sits with each state legislature.
What Roe Decided
Justice Harry Blackmun, writing for the majority, located the abortion right in the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, concluding that its guarantee of personal liberty is broad enough to cover a woman’s decision whether to continue a pregnancy.1Constitution Annotated. Amdt5.7.6 Abortion and Substantive Due Process The Court had already recognized protected zones of privacy in earlier cases, most notably Griswold v. Connecticut in 1965, and Blackmun built on that line of reasoning.
Because the Court treated the abortion right as fundamental, government restrictions had to satisfy strict scrutiny: they had to be narrowly tailored to a compelling state interest.2Justia. Roe v. Wade That is the highest bar in constitutional review. A state could not simply prefer to restrict abortion; it needed a specific, weighty justification, and the weight of that justification grew with the pregnancy.
The majority also addressed a question that has never fully gone away: whether a fetus is a “person” protected by the Fourteenth Amendment. After surveying every use of “person” in the Constitution, the Court concluded that nearly all of those uses apply only after birth, noting that the amendment itself refers to “persons born or naturalized in the United States.” On that textual basis, the majority held that “the word ‘person,’ as used in the Fourteenth Amendment, does not include the unborn.”2Justia. Roe v. Wade
Justices Byron White and William Rehnquist dissented. White called the framework an improper exercise of judicial power with no grounding in the Constitution’s text. Rehnquist took an originalist approach, pointing out that most states had criminal abortion statutes when the Fourteenth Amendment was ratified in 1868, and argued that the drafters could not have intended it to protect a right to abortion.2Justia. Roe v. Wade His historical argument would resurface, almost line for line, in the Dobbs majority nearly fifty years later.
The Trimester Framework
To balance the woman’s right against the state’s interests in maternal health and what it called “the potentiality of human life,” the Court divided pregnancy into three stages and assigned different levels of state authority to each.2Justia. Roe v. Wade
- During the first trimester, the decision belonged to the woman and her physician, and the state could not interfere.
- During the second trimester, the state could regulate the procedure in ways reasonably related to protecting the woman’s health, such as facility standards or physician qualifications, but could not ban abortion.
- After viability, generally in the third trimester, the state could regulate or even prohibit abortion, provided any such law included an exception to preserve the life or health of the mother.
Viability, defined as the point at which the fetus can survive outside the womb with or without medical assistance, was the pivotal line. The Court placed that point at roughly 24 to 28 weeks based on the medicine of the time. A companion case decided the same day, Doe v. Bolton, defined “health” broadly to include physical, emotional, psychological, and familial factors along with the woman’s age, a definition that critics argued permitted post-viability abortion for a wide range of reasons.3Justia. Doe v. Bolton
How Casey Modified Roe
The trimester framework did not survive intact. In 1992, a three-justice plurality in Planned Parenthood of Southeastern Pennsylvania v. Casey kept Roe’s core holding that the Constitution protects pre-viability abortion but replaced the trimester system with the “undue burden” test.4Justia. Planned Parenthood of Southeastern Pa. v. Casey Under Casey, a state regulation was unconstitutional only if it placed a “substantial obstacle” in the path of a woman seeking a pre-viability abortion. That was a much lower bar than strict scrutiny, and it gave states considerably more room to regulate.
Applying that new test to a Pennsylvania law, the Court upheld a 24-hour waiting period, an informed-consent requirement, a parental-consent rule for minors, and clinic reporting requirements. It struck down only the spousal-notification provision, finding that requiring a married woman to tell her husband before obtaining an abortion would deter women in abusive relationships and functioned as a substantial obstacle. Casey also detached viability from any fixed trimester, acknowledging that improvements in neonatal care would keep shifting the point at which a fetus could survive outside the womb.
How Dobbs Overturned Roe
On June 24, 2022, the Supreme Court overturned both Roe and Casey. The case, Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, arose from a challenge to Mississippi’s Gestational Age Act, which banned abortion after 15 weeks except for medical emergencies or severe fetal abnormalities. That 15-week limit fell well before viability and was therefore unconstitutional under both Roe and Casey, but the majority used the case to dismantle the entire framework rather than carve a narrow exception.5Supreme Court of the United States. Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization
Justice Samuel Alito, writing for the majority, applied the test from Washington v. Glucksberg: whether the asserted right is “deeply rooted in this Nation’s history and tradition.” Surveying state law at the time the Fourteenth Amendment was ratified, the Court found that three-quarters of states had criminalized abortion at all stages of pregnancy, and concluded that no historical tradition supported treating abortion as constitutionally protected.
The holding was blunt: “The Constitution does not confer a right to abortion; Roe and Casey are overruled; and the authority to regulate abortion is returned to the people and their elected representatives.”5Supreme Court of the United States. Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization The trimester framework, the viability line, and the undue burden test all lost their status as constitutional requirements. State abortion laws now face only rational-basis review, the lowest tier of constitutional scrutiny.
Where Abortion Law Stands Now
The effect of Dobbs was immediate. Thirteen states had “trigger laws” already on the books, designed to ban abortion the moment Roe fell. Some took effect the day of the decision, others after a set waiting period such as 30 days. Enforcement mechanisms and exceptions varied, but most trigger bans included only narrow exceptions for threats to the pregnant person’s life.
As of early 2026, the map is a patchwork. Thirteen states ban abortion at all stages. Seven states enforce gestational limits between 6 and 12 weeks. Four states set limits between 15 and 22 weeks. Eighteen states allow abortion up to or near viability. Nine states and Washington, D.C. impose no gestational limit at all. Access now turns almost entirely on where a person lives.
That patchwork has already produced federal-state conflicts. In Moyle v. United States (2024), the Court took up a clash between Idaho’s near-total abortion ban and the federal Emergency Medical Treatment and Labor Act, which requires hospitals receiving Medicare funding to stabilize patients in medical emergencies.6Supreme Court of the United States. Moyle v. United States Idaho permitted abortion only to prevent the patient’s death, while the federal statute required stabilizing care for serious health threats short of fatal ones, such as loss of fertility. The Court dismissed the case on procedural grounds without resolving the conflict, leaving lower courts to work out when federal emergency-care law overrides state bans.
What the Reversal Means for Other Privacy Rights
Because Roe rested on substantive due process, its reversal raised questions about other rights built on the same doctrine. In a concurring opinion in Dobbs, Justice Clarence Thomas wrote that the Court should reconsider its substantive due process precedents and specifically named Griswold v. Connecticut (contraception), Lawrence v. Texas (private, consensual sexual activity), and Obergefell v. Hodges (same-sex marriage).5Supreme Court of the United States. Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization
The Dobbs majority opinion said it was not casting doubt on those other precedents, distinguishing abortion on the ground that it involves the destruction of potential life. Whether that distinction holds is an open question. In December 2022, Congress passed the Respect for Marriage Act, which requires the federal government and all states to recognize valid same-sex and interracial marriages, providing a statutory floor for existing marriages if Obergefell were ever revisited.
Roe shaped American constitutional law for half a century. Its central contribution, that certain intimate decisions are shielded from government interference, is no longer the rule for abortion, and how far that principle continues to reach in other areas is now the live question.