Roe v. Wade

Majority reasoning

The majority, through Justice Blackmun, reasoned that a line of prior cases recognizes a constitutional right of personal privacy rooted in the Fourteenth Amendment's concept of liberty, and that this right is broad enough to cover a woman's decision to end a pregnancy given the physical, psychological, and social burdens of unwanted childbirth. The Court rejected the argument that a fetus is a "person" under the Fourteenth Amendment, noting that the word "person" as used throughout the Constitution applies only postnatally and that abortion law throughout the 19th century was far more permissive than the Court found the challenged statute to be. However, the majority also held the privacy right is not absolute: the state has legitimate interests in protecting maternal health and in protecting potential life, and these interests become "compelling" at different points—maternal health at approximately the end of the first trimester (when abortion becomes statistically riskier than the procedure itself), and potential life at viability (when the fetus could survive outside the womb). Because the Texas law banned abortion at every stage except to save the mother's life, without distinguishing between these interests, the Court found it swept too broadly to survive constitutional scrutiny. The Court also declined to resolve the philosophical or theological question of when life begins, stating that judges are not equipped to answer a question on which doctors, philosophers, and theologians themselves disagree.

Dissent reasoning

Justice Rehnquist dissented, arguing first that the record does not show Roe was in her first trimester when she filed suit, so the Court had no proper factual basis to decide how far a state may regulate early-stage abortions—calling this a violation of the rule against deciding constitutional questions broader than the facts require. He also disputed that a "privacy" right was truly at stake, since an abortion performed by a licensed physician is not "private" in the ordinary sense, and argued that if any right exists here it is better understood as a "liberty" interest under the Due Process Clause, which should be evaluated under the traditional rational-basis test rather than the stricter "compelling state interest" standard the majority borrowed from equal protection cases. Rehnquist contended that the compelling-interest test converts the Court into a legislature by requiring judges to weigh policy considerations, comparing the majority's approach to the discredited economic substantive due process of Lochner v. New York. He pointed to the fact that a majority of states had restricted abortion for roughly a century, including 21 pre-Fourteenth Amendment laws still on the books, as strong evidence that the asserted right to abortion is not "deeply rooted in the traditions and conscience of our people." Finally, he argued that even accepting the majority's substantive framework, the Court should not have struck down the Texas statute in its entirety, since it was invalid only as applied to certain fact patterns, not unconstitutional on its face for all circumstances.