Roe v. Wade was decided on January 22, 1973, and it was overturned on June 24, 2022, when the U.S. Supreme Court issued its ruling in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization.1Justia. Roe v. Wade2Justia. Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization The decision stood for just over 49 years and set a nationwide constitutional floor for abortion access during that time.
The 1973 Decision
The Supreme Court announced Roe v. Wade on January 22, 1973, under the citation 410 U.S. 113. The vote was 7–2. Justice Harry Blackmun wrote the majority opinion, joined by six other justices, and Justices Byron White and William Rehnquist dissented.1Justia. Roe v. Wade
The ruling struck down the Texas criminal abortion statutes at issue in the case and, by extension, invalidated similar laws in states across the country. Before that day, whether abortion was legal depended on where a person lived, and the rules varied widely. Roe replaced that patchwork with a single constitutional standard.
White’s dissent called the majority’s reasoning “an improvident and extravagant exercise of the power of judicial review.” He argued that the Constitution supplied no basis for overriding state legislatures on a morally contested question and that the Court had created a new right rather than found one already there. That line of criticism ran through the next five decades of legal argument.
What Roe Actually Protected
The majority grounded the decision in the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, which prevents states from depriving any person of life, liberty, or property without due process of law.3Congress.gov. Abortion, Roe v. Wade, and Pre-Dobbs Doctrine The Court read that clause as protecting a right to privacy broad enough to include the decision whether to end a pregnancy. It drew on earlier privacy cases, including Griswold v. Connecticut (1965) and Eisenstadt v. Baird (1972), both involving access to contraception.
The right was not absolute. The Court recognized that states had legitimate interests in maternal health and in potential life, and that those interests grew stronger as pregnancy progressed. To manage the balance, the majority adopted a trimester framework.1Justia. Roe v. Wade During the first trimester, the decision belonged to the pregnant person and her physician, with no state interference. During the second trimester, states could regulate in ways reasonably related to maternal health. After viability, which the Court estimated at roughly 24 to 28 weeks, states could restrict or ban abortion outright, provided exceptions existed for the life or health of the pregnant person.
How the Rule Changed in 1992
Roe’s core survived for nearly 50 years, but its operating framework did not. In Planned Parenthood v. Casey (1992), the Supreme Court reaffirmed the constitutional right to abortion before viability while discarding the trimester structure, which the plurality described as a “rigid prohibition on all previability regulation.”4Justia. Planned Parenthood of Southeastern Pa. v. Casey
In place of trimesters, Casey introduced the “undue burden” standard. A state regulation was unconstitutional only if it had the purpose or effect of placing a substantial obstacle in the path of someone seeking a previability abortion. That test gave states more room to regulate than Roe originally allowed, while keeping the underlying right intact. It governed abortion law for the next thirty years.
The 2022 Reversal in Dobbs
On June 24, 2022, the Supreme Court decided Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization and overturned both Roe and Casey. The case began as a challenge to a Mississippi law banning most abortions after 15 weeks of pregnancy, but the Court did not stop at applying the undue burden test. Instead, it revisited the underlying question of whether the Constitution protects a right to abortion at all.2Justia. Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization
Justice Samuel Alito wrote the majority opinion, which concluded that the Constitution “does not confer a right to abortion” and that authority to regulate the procedure belongs to elected representatives in each state. The majority reasoned that no right to abortion appears in the constitutional text and that no such right was recognized in American legal tradition at the time the Fourteenth Amendment was ratified. Justices Stephen Breyer, Sonia Sotomayor, and Elena Kagan dissented, writing that the decision took away a right that millions had relied on for half a century.2Justia. Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization
The ruling took effect immediately. States that had prepared restrictive laws in anticipation of the outcome began enforcing them within hours.
What Changed After Dobbs
With Roe and Casey gone, abortion law reverted to state control. The result is a patchwork of rules that varies sharply by geography. As of early 2026, 13 states ban abortion entirely or in nearly all circumstances, including Texas, where Roe originally began. Roughly seven states restrict the procedure to the first six to twelve weeks of pregnancy. About nine states and the District of Columbia impose no gestational limits at all, and the rest fall somewhere in between, often near viability.
The situation resembles the pre-1973 landscape in one important sense: the legality of abortion again depends on which state a person is in. It differs in another. State legislatures and courts continue to move, so the map from one year to the next is not fixed. Between January 22, 1973, and June 24, 2022, the federal Constitution supplied a shared baseline. After Dobbs, that baseline is gone.