Categories: Government

Roe v. Wade Supreme Court Opinion Document, Decided January 22, 1973

Background

The following is from Wikipedia to help explain the background:

Roe v. Wade, 410 U.S. 113 (1973), was a landmark decision of the U.S. Supreme Court in which the Court ruled that the Constitution of the United States protects a pregnant woman’s liberty to choose to have an abortion without excessive government restriction. It struck down many U.S. state and federal abortion laws, and prompted an ongoing national debate in the United States about whether and to what extent abortion should be legal, who should decide the legality of abortion, what methods the Supreme Court should use in constitutional adjudication, and what the role of religious and moral views in the political sphere should be. Roe v. Wade reshaped American politics, dividing much of the United States into abortion rights and anti-abortion movements, while activating grassroots movements on both sides.

The decision involved the case of a woman named Norma McCorvey—known in her lawsuit under the pseudonym “Jane Roe”—who in 1969 became pregnant with her third child. McCorvey wanted an abortion, but she lived in Texas, where abortion was illegal except when necessary to save the mother’s life. She was referred to lawyers Sarah Weddington and Linda Coffee, who filed a lawsuit on her behalf in U.S. federal court against her local district attorney, Henry Wade, alleging that Texas’s abortion laws were unconstitutional. A three-judge panel of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Texas heard the case and ruled in her favor. Texas then appealed this ruling directly to the U.S. Supreme Court, which agreed to hear the case.

Continue scrolling for more...

In January 1973, the Supreme Court issued a 7–2 decision ruling that the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution provides a “right to privacy” that protects a pregnant woman’s right to choose whether or not to have an abortion. But it also ruled that this right is not absolute, and must be balanced against the government’s interests in protecting women’s health and protecting prenatal life. The Court resolved this balancing test by tying state regulation of abortion to the three trimesters of pregnancy: during the first trimester, governments could not prohibit abortions at all; during the second trimester, governments could require reasonable health regulations; during the third trimester, abortions could be prohibited entirely so long as the laws contained exceptions for cases when they were necessary to save the life or health of the mother. The Court classified the right to choose to have an abortion as “fundamental”, which required courts to evaluate challenged abortion laws under the “strict scrutiny” standard, the highest level of judicial review in the United States.

Document Archive

Roe v. Wade Supreme Court Opinion Document, Decided January 22, 1973 [66 Pages, 2MB]

Follow The Black Vault on Social Media:

This post was published on October 15, 2020 12:40 pm

John Greenewald

Recent Posts

FBI Files: Journalists and their Periodicals

Background Welcome to the FBI Files on Journalists and their Periodicals archive on The Black…

May 14, 2024

New FOIA Release Highlights Redactions in Key AATIP Correspondence: What is the Pentagon Hiding?

Through a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) originally filed in June 2021, The Black Vault…

May 13, 2024

SpaceX’s “False Alarm” Encounter with an Unknown Object: An Analysis of the Latest FOIA Release from SPACECOM

In April 2021, during the Crew-2 mission's historic journey to the International Space Station (ISS),…

May 10, 2024

The October 6, 2002, Attack on the French Oil Tanker Limburg

The attack on the French oil tanker Limburg occurred on October 6, 2002, off the…

May 10, 2024

FBI Files: Historical Figures & Groups

Background Welcome to the FBI Files on Historical Figures & Groups archive at The Black…

May 10, 2024

FBI File: Bacteriological Warfare

This FBI file relates to bacteriological warfare. It contains investigative information gathered over several decades.…

May 9, 2024