Combating Roe v. Wade: The Legal Background; Thirty-two Years of Supreme Court Abortion Decisions.

Editor's note. No look ahead to possible future developments can be very meaningful without a thorough understanding of what the Supreme Court said in 1973 and since. The following overview examines what the justices have said, not just in well-known cases such as Roe, Casey, and Carhart, but the less familiar cases that have also had a significant impact on abortion in America.

In the 1973 case of Roe v. Wade, the United States Supreme Court decided 7-2 that there was a right to abortion in the U.S. Constitution, found within the recently discovered right to "privacy."…