The original Roe v. Wade case was a 1973 Supreme Court decision that struck down Texas’s near-total ban on abortion by a vote of 7-2, holding that the Fourteenth Amendment’s guarantee of personal liberty was broad enough to protect a woman’s decision to end a pregnancy. Justice Harry Blackmun wrote the majority opinion, which built a trimester framework to balance that right against two state interests: protecting the pregnant woman’s health and protecting potential fetal life. The ruling controlled abortion law across the country for nearly fifty years before the Supreme Court overturned it in 2022.
Who Jane Roe and Henry Wade Actually Were
Norma McCorvey was twenty-one and pregnant with her third child in 1969 when she looked for a way to end the pregnancy in Texas. She was facing serious financial and personal difficulties, and Texas law made the procedure a crime in almost every circumstance. Two young attorneys, Sarah Weddington and Linda Coffee, were looking for a plaintiff to challenge those statutes, and McCorvey agreed to be that plaintiff. She filed under the pseudonym “Jane Roe” to protect her identity.1Justia. Roe v. Wade
The defendant, Henry Wade, was the District Attorney of Dallas County. He was named because he was the official responsible for enforcing the state’s criminal laws, including its abortion statutes. Weddington and Coffee filed the complaint on March 3, 1970, styling it as a class action on behalf of McCorvey and all similarly situated women.
That class-action framing turned out to matter. By the time the case reached the Supreme Court, McCorvey had already given birth. Normally that would have made her claim moot, but the Court held the case could proceed anyway, reasoning that pregnancy was inherently too short to survive a full appeal and the situation was “capable of repetition, yet evading review.”1Justia. Roe v. Wade
The Texas Laws Under Challenge
The lawsuit targeted Articles 1191 through 1194 and Article 1196 of the Texas Penal Code.1Justia. Roe v. Wade Article 1191 punished anyone who performed or helped procure an abortion with two to five years in prison.2Office of the Attorney General of Texas. Attorney General of Texas Opinion No. H-369 – Present Status of Texas Laws Concerning Abortion Article 1192 criminalized supplying the means for an abortion, Article 1193 covered unsuccessful attempts, and Article 1194 treated an abortion that killed the mother as murder.
The only exception sat in Article 1196: a physician could perform the procedure if it was necessary to save the mother’s life.2Office of the Attorney General of Texas. Attorney General of Texas Opinion No. H-369 – Present Status of Texas Laws Concerning Abortion Nothing else qualified. Rape, fetal abnormality, and threats to the mother’s broader physical or psychological health were all irrelevant under the statute. Texas was among the most restrictive states in the country, and it was this near-total prohibition that Roe attacked.
The Constitutional Arguments
Weddington and Coffee did not invent their theory from nothing. Eight years earlier, in Griswold v. Connecticut (1965), the Supreme Court had struck down a state ban on contraceptives and identified “zones of privacy” formed by “penumbras” and “emanations” from specific guarantees in the First, Third, Fourth, Fifth, and Ninth Amendments.3Justia. Griswold v. Connecticut Griswold applied that privacy right to intimate decisions inside marriage. The Roe attorneys argued the same privacy interest reached a woman’s decision about continuing a pregnancy.
They advanced two main constitutional hooks. The first was the Ninth Amendment, which provides that listing certain rights in the Constitution does not deny or disparage others retained by the people.4Congress.gov. U.S. Constitution – Ninth Amendment The second was the Fourteenth Amendment’s Due Process Clause, which forbids states from depriving anyone of “life, liberty, or property, without due process of law.”5Constitution Annotated. Amdt5.7.6 Abortion and Substantive Due Process The word “liberty,” they argued, covered a decision this fundamental to personal autonomy.
The Lower Court Ruling
Before the case reached Washington, a special three-judge panel of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Texas heard it. Federal law at the time required a three-judge panel for suits seeking to strike down a state statute on constitutional grounds.6United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit. Norma McCorvey v. Bill Hill The panel sided with Roe, declaring the Texas laws unconstitutional. It grounded the ruling in the Ninth Amendment, holding that “the fundamental right of single women and married persons to choose whether to have children is protected by the Ninth Amendment, through the Fourteenth Amendment.”7Justia Law. Roe v. Wade, 314 F. Supp. 1217 (N.D. Tex. 1970) The panel also called the statutes unconstitutionally vague and overbroad.
But it refused to enjoin Texas from actually enforcing the laws.7Justia Law. Roe v. Wade, 314 F. Supp. 1217 (N.D. Tex. 1970) That split, striking the laws down on paper but leaving the DA free to prosecute, qualified the case for direct appeal to the Supreme Court.
The 1973 Ruling and the Trimester Framework
The Supreme Court ruled 7-2 in Roe’s favor on January 22, 1973, with Justice Blackmun writing for the majority. The Court grounded the privacy right primarily in the Fourteenth Amendment’s concept of personal liberty rather than the Ninth Amendment the district court had emphasized.1Justia. Roe v. Wade That right was “broad enough to encompass a woman’s decision whether or not to terminate her pregnancy,” but it was not absolute. Two state interests could compete with it: protecting the pregnant woman’s health, and protecting potential life.8Oyez. Roe v. Wade
To sort out when each interest could prevail, the Court built a framework tied to the three trimesters of pregnancy:
- In the first trimester, the abortion decision had to be left to the pregnant woman and her attending physician. The state could not interfere, because the procedure at that stage carried lower mortality risk than childbirth itself.9Cornell Law Institute. Jane Roe, et al., Appellants, v. Henry Wade
- In the second trimester, the state’s interest in maternal health grew strong enough to justify regulations reasonably related to that health interest, such as rules about who could perform the procedure and where.1Justia. Roe v. Wade
- After viability, the point at which a fetus could survive outside the womb, the state’s interest in protecting potential life became compelling. States could then regulate or even ban abortion outright, except where the procedure was necessary to preserve the life or health of the mother.1Justia. Roe v. Wade
One feature of the first-trimester rule is easy to miss. The Court framed the decision around the physician’s medical judgment rather than the woman’s independent choice, a framing that reflected the medical culture of the era and would later draw criticism from more than one direction.
The Dissents
Justices Byron White and William Rehnquist dissented, and their objections would echo through decades of later litigation.
Justice White called the majority opinion “an exercise of raw judicial power.” He rejected the idea that the state’s interest in protecting fetal life grew over the course of a pregnancy, arguing instead that the interest was “equally strong, throughout the pregnancy.” In his view, the Court had elevated the pregnant woman’s interests over the life she carried and had no constitutional authority to impose that priority on the states.
Justice Rehnquist attacked the reasoning itself. He wrote that the trimester framework “partakes more of judicial legislation than it does of a determination of the intent of the drafters of the Fourteenth Amendment.” He pointed out that when the Fourteenth Amendment was ratified in 1868, most states already had criminal abortion statutes on their books, which cut against any suggestion that the amendment’s framers meant to protect an abortion right. He also predicted that applying a strict “compelling state interest” test to abortion laws would leave the field “more confused than it found it,” dragging the Court into repeated case-by-case review of legislative policy.1Justia. Roe v. Wade
What Happened to Roe After 1973
The original ruling did not stay intact. In Planned Parenthood of Southeastern Pennsylvania v. Casey (1992), the Supreme Court kept Roe’s core holding that the Constitution protects a pre-viability right to abortion, but discarded the trimester structure as “a rigid prohibition on all previability regulation aimed at the protection of fetal life.” Casey replaced it with an “undue burden” test: a regulation was unconstitutional only if it had “the purpose or effect of placing a substantial obstacle in the path of a woman seeking an abortion of a nonviable fetus.”10Justia. Planned Parenthood of Southeastern Pa. v. Casey That gave states more room to impose waiting periods and informed-consent requirements, but they still could not ban abortion before viability.
On June 24, 2022, the Court overruled both Roe and Casey in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization. Justice Samuel Alito’s majority opinion held that “the Constitution does not confer a right to abortion” and returned regulation of the procedure to state legislatures and voters.11Justia. Dobbs v. Jackson Womens Health Organization The majority concluded the right was “not deeply rooted in the Nation’s history and tradition,” using the same historical inquiry Rehnquist had urged in 1973, and criticized Roe’s trimester framework as resembling legislation and Casey’s undue-burden test as unworkable.12Supreme Court of the United States. Dobbs v. Jackson Womens Health Organization Opinion
The original Roe v. Wade case is still studied for its reasoning about privacy, liberty, and the limits of state power over personal medical decisions. As binding precedent on abortion, though, it no longer controls. Each state now sets its own rules.