Roe v. Wade, decided in 1973, held that the Fourteenth Amendment’s guarantee of personal liberty protects a woman’s decision to end a pregnancy, and the Supreme Court overturned it in 2022 after concluding that no such right is deeply rooted in the nation’s history and tradition. The 7–2 Roe ruling struck down a Texas criminal abortion law and set a nationwide constitutional floor that governed for nearly half a century. Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization removed that floor and handed abortion regulation back to the states.
What Roe v. Wade Decided in 1973
Norma McCorvey, suing under the name “Jane Roe,” challenged a Texas law that banned abortion except when necessary to save the mother’s life. The Supreme Court sided with her. Writing for the majority, Justice Harry Blackmun concluded that the Fourteenth Amendment’s protection of liberty is broad enough to cover the decision whether to continue a pregnancy.1Legal Information Institute. Roe v. Wade
The right was not absolute. The Court held that a woman’s interest in ending a pregnancy had to be weighed against two government interests: protecting maternal health, and protecting potential life. Each of those interests grew stronger as pregnancy advanced, and each became “compelling” at a specific point.
The Constitution never uses the word “privacy,” and the Court acknowledged that. Its holding rested on the idea that liberty under the Fourteenth Amendment reaches personal decisions of this kind. The lower court had grounded the right in the Ninth Amendment; the Supreme Court chose the Fourteenth instead.2Constitution Annotated. Ninth Amendment Doctrine
The Trimester Framework
Roe translated its holding into a three-stage structure that shifted power from the woman to the state as pregnancy progressed.
In the first trimester, roughly the first 12 weeks, the state had almost no authority to interfere. The decision belonged to the woman and her physician. Early abortion was statistically safer than childbirth, leaving the government with little medical justification to step in.3Justia U.S. Supreme Court Center. Roe v. Wade, 410 U.S. 113 (1973)
In the second trimester, the state could regulate abortion to protect the woman’s health, setting rules about medical qualifications and facility standards. It could not ban the procedure outright.
The third stage began at viability, the point when a fetus could survive outside the womb, which the Court placed at roughly 24 to 28 weeks. After viability, the state’s interest in protecting potential life was strong enough to justify a ban, provided the law included an exception when the procedure was necessary to preserve the life or health of the mother.1Legal Information Institute. Roe v. Wade
What Roe Changed on the Ground
The Texas statutes at issue carried prison sentences of two to five years for performing an unauthorized abortion and permitted the procedure only to save the mother’s life. The Court found the law unconstitutionally overbroad and struck it down.1Legal Information Institute. Roe v. Wade
The ruling reached well beyond Texas. Similar criminal abortion laws in dozens of other states became unenforceable overnight. States had to rewrite their statutes to fit the trimester framework, and physicians performing legal abortions within the permitted timeframe no longer faced prosecution. Abortion access was, for the first time, standardized nationwide by a federal constitutional rule.
How Casey Modified Roe in 1992
The trimester framework did not survive intact. In Planned Parenthood v. Casey (1992), the Supreme Court reaffirmed Roe’s core holding that the Constitution protects the right to abortion before viability, but replaced the trimester structure with the “undue burden” standard. A state restriction on pre-viability abortion is constitutional unless it places a substantial obstacle in the path of a woman seeking the procedure.4Justia U.S. Supreme Court Center. Planned Parenthood of Southeastern Pa. v. Casey, 505 U.S. 833 (1992)
This gave states more room to regulate. Under Casey, the Court upheld a Pennsylvania informed consent requirement, a 24-hour waiting period, and a parental consent provision for minors. It struck down only the spousal notification requirement, finding it would be a substantial obstacle for a large fraction of the women affected.4Justia U.S. Supreme Court Center. Planned Parenthood of Southeastern Pa. v. Casey, 505 U.S. 833 (1992)
Casey also made viability, rather than the trimester calendar, the sole dividing line between when a state’s power to ban abortion begins and when it does not. The plurality noted that medical advances had pushed viability earlier than in 1973.
Why the Supreme Court Overturned Roe in Dobbs
On June 24, 2022, the Supreme Court overruled Roe and Casey in a 6–3 decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization. Justice Samuel Alito, writing for the majority, held that “the Constitution does not confer a right to abortion” and that Roe and Casey “must be overruled.” Authority over abortion was “returned to the people and their elected representatives.”5Supreme Court of the United States. Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization
The majority applied a historical test: whether a claimed unenumerated right is “deeply rooted in the Nation’s history and tradition.” It concluded that abortion is not. When the Fourteenth Amendment was ratified in 1868, Alito wrote, three-quarters of states had already made abortion a crime at any stage of pregnancy, and “until the latter part of the 20th century, there was no support in American law for a constitutional right to obtain an abortion.”5Supreme Court of the United States. Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization
This reasoning tracked closely with Justice Rehnquist’s 1973 dissent, which had surveyed 19th-century abortion laws and argued that the Fourteenth Amendment’s drafters could not have intended to create a right that conflicted with restrictions nearly every state had on the books. Justice White’s dissent had made a separate argument that also resurfaced in the Dobbs majority: that abortion policy should be resolved through legislatures rather than courts.3Justia U.S. Supreme Court Center. Roe v. Wade, 410 U.S. 113 (1973)
Justices Breyer, Sotomayor, and Kagan dissented in Dobbs. They argued that the decision stripped women of a right they had relied on for half a century and that the majority’s historical analysis was selective.
Where Abortion Law Stands Now
With Roe and Casey overturned, abortion law is set state by state. As of early 2026, 13 states have enacted total bans on abortion, while nine states and the District of Columbia impose no gestational limit. The remaining states fall in between, with limits ranging from six weeks to 15 or 22 weeks.
Roe’s core contribution was a nationwide constitutional floor below which no state could go. That floor no longer exists. The same medical procedure can be a protected choice in one state and a serious felony in the next.