What Did Roe vs. Wade Do and Why Was It Overturned?

Roe v. Wade was the 1973 Supreme Court decision that recognized a constitutional right to abortion, holding by a 7–2 vote that the Fourteenth Amendment’s guarantee of liberty protects a person’s decision to end a pregnancy. It set the rules for abortion access across the United States for nearly half a century, until the Supreme Court overturned it in June 2022 in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization and returned the issue to the states.

What Roe v. Wade Actually Held

The case came out of Texas, where a plaintiff using the name “Jane Roe” (later identified as Norma McCorvey) challenged a state law that banned nearly all abortions. Texas allowed the procedure only when a doctor determined it was necessary to save the pregnant person’s life. Henry Wade, the Dallas County district attorney, was named as the defendant.

Justice Harry Blackmun wrote the majority opinion, joined by six other justices. Justices Byron White and William Rehnquist dissented. The Court struck down the Texas statute and, in doing so, invalidated similar bans in states across the country.¹ The ruling did not make abortion unregulated. It said that a state’s power to restrict it was limited, and that those limits depended on how far a pregnancy had progressed.

How the Court Got There

The legal foundation was the Fourteenth Amendment’s Due Process Clause, which bars states from depriving anyone of liberty without due process of law. The Court concluded that this clause protects an implied right to privacy wide enough to cover the decision whether to continue a pregnancy.¹ The opinion linked that reasoning to earlier decisions protecting personal choices about marriage, contraception, child-rearing, and family life.

Because abortion access was classified as a fundamental right, the Court applied strict scrutiny, the most demanding form of judicial review. A state could restrict abortion only by showing a compelling government interest and by tailoring the restriction narrowly to serve that interest.² Moral disapproval or administrative convenience was not enough.

The Trimester Framework

To turn the holding into workable law, the Court divided pregnancy into three stages and assigned each stage a different rule.

In the first trimester, the decision belonged to the patient and their doctor, and the state could not interfere.
In the second trimester, the state could impose regulations reasonably related to protecting the pregnant person’s health, such as facility or physician requirements, but could not ban the procedure.
In the third trimester, once the fetus reached viability, the state’s interest in protecting potential life became strong enough to justify banning abortion, provided the law contained exceptions for the life or health of the pregnant person.²

Viability was the legal hinge. The Court defined it as the point at which a fetus could sustain meaningful life outside the womb, even with artificial support, and placed that point at roughly 24 to 28 weeks based on the medical consensus of the time.² The framework identified two legitimate state interests: protecting the pregnant person’s health, which grew compelling at the end of the first trimester, and protecting “the potentiality of human life,” which grew compelling at viability.

Doe v. Bolton and the Health Exception

On the same day it decided Roe, the Court issued a companion ruling in Doe v. Bolton that shaped what a “health exception” had to include. The Court defined health broadly. A physician’s judgment about whether an abortion was medically necessary could take into account physical, emotional, psychological, and familial factors, as well as the patient’s age.³ That broad definition meant a post-viability ban could not be read to cover only life-threatening emergencies.

What Changed Under Casey in 1992

In Planned Parenthood v. Casey, the Court reaffirmed what it called Roe’s “central holding” — that the Constitution protects a right to abortion before viability — but scrapped the trimester framework. The majority found the framework too rigid and said it “misconceived the nature of the pregnant woman’s interest” while undervaluing the state’s interest in potential life earlier in pregnancy.⁴

In its place, the Court adopted the “undue burden” standard. A regulation was unconstitutional if its purpose or effect was to place a substantial obstacle in the path of someone seeking an abortion before viability.⁴ Viability stayed as the dividing line, but states gained more room to legislate before that point through waiting periods, informed consent rules, and parental involvement requirements. For the next thirty years, courts sorted through hundreds of state laws under this test, and the results were often inconsistent.

Why Roe Was Overturned in Dobbs

In June 2022, a 6–3 majority of the Supreme Court overturned both Roe and Casey in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization. The case involved a Mississippi law banning most abortions after 15 weeks of pregnancy, well before viability. The majority held that “the Constitution does not confer a right to abortion” and that “Roe and Casey must be overruled, and the authority to regulate abortion must be returned to the people and their elected representatives.”⁵

Justice Samuel Alito wrote the majority opinion. He reasoned that abortion was not mentioned in the Constitution and was not “deeply rooted in this Nation’s history and tradition,” which the Court treated as the test for recognizing an unenumerated right. The opinion rejected both the privacy framework of Roe and the undue burden test of Casey. Going forward, abortion regulations would be judged under rational-basis review, the lowest level of scrutiny, which asks only whether a law has some rational connection to a legitimate government purpose.⁶ Almost any abortion regulation can meet that bar.

Where Abortion Law Stands Now

With Roe and Casey gone, abortion policy is set entirely by the states. As of early 2026, 13 states ban abortion at all stages of pregnancy. Others impose gestational limits ranging from around six weeks to roughly 22 weeks. A number of states have moved the other direction, passing laws or constitutional amendments that affirmatively protect abortion access.

Some of the bans now in force were on the books long before Dobbs. A handful of states never repealed their pre-Roe criminal statutes, which sat dormant during the decades Roe was in effect and became enforceable again once the constitutional protection was removed. Other states had passed “trigger bans” designed to take effect automatically if Roe were overturned, and enforcement began within days or weeks of the June 2022 decision. Litigation continues in several states over which of their overlapping abortion laws controls, and cross-border questions about travel and out-of-state prosecutions remain unsettled. What Roe once made uniform is now defined state by state, and the answer to whether abortion is legal, and up to what point, depends on where a person is.

1
Constitution Annotated. Amdt14.S1.6.4.1 Abortion, Roe v. Wade, and Pre-Dobbs Doctrine
2
Justia. Roe v. Wade, 410 U.S. 113 (1973)
3
Justia. Doe v. Bolton, 410 U.S. 179 (1973)
4
Justia. Planned Parenthood of Southeastern Pa. v. Casey, 505 U.S. 833 (1992)
5
Justia. Dobbs v. Jackson Womens Health Organization, 597 U.S. ___ (2022)
6
Supreme Court of the United States. Dobbs v. Jackson Womens Health Organization, No. 19-1392