Roe v. Wade

Roe v. Wade (USA) The case that federalized the right of a woman to seek and obtain an abortion. Jane Roe (a pseudonym for Norma McCorvey, representing all pregnant women in a class action) had lost her job after becoming pregnant in 1969. She wished to end her pregnancy, but abortion was illegal in Texas except in cases of extreme danger to the mother. Two female attorneys were at that time seeking to overturn restrictions on the abortion laws, and recruited McCorvey to be a plaintiff. They attacked the abortion restrictions of Texas in the federal courts on the grounds that they undermined rights under the Fourteenth and Ninth amendments to the US Constitution (the due process and specific enumeration of powers clauses, the latter of which was taken to uphold a right to privacy). By 1971 the case had reached the Supreme Court, after a circuit court decision declared the Texas law unconstitutional without overturning it. After two new justices filled the vacant positions on the court, the case was reheard in 1972. Forty-two supplementary organizations filed briefs in support of a woman's right to abortion. The decision overturned all state laws restricting a woman's right to an abortion in the first three months of pregnancy and eased restrictions on abortions performed within six months of conception.

The judgment caused a storm of controversy which continued to divide US society for more than 30 years, with religious and conservative groups condemning both abortion and the court's decision, and liberal and feminist groups upholding both. In practice, the principle of the ‘right to choose’ established by Roe has been undermined by a series of political and legal decisions. Among the obstacles thus established are the Hyde Amendment banning federal Medicaid funds from funding abortions for women on low incomes (in 2002, only nineteen states assisted low-income women with the costs for abortions). In 1992 the Casey v. Planned Parenthood ruling by the Supreme Court qualified the ‘right to choose’ by ruling that individual state restrictions on abortion were legal as long as they did not impose an ‘undue’ burden on women. The issue of abortion became one of the most acrimonious political and cultural issue of the 1980s and 1990s. It caused a fundamental and seemingly irreconcilable split in the Republican Party while contributing to the hostility between conservatives and liberals, especially during the second half of the 1980s and the 1990s.