Roe v. Wade | Civil liberties and civil rights | US government and civics | Khan Academy

Hi, this is Kim from Khan Academy. Today we're learning more about Roe vs. Wade—the 1973 Supreme Court case that ruled that the right of privacy extends to a woman's decision to have an abortion. To learn more about Roe vs. Wade, I spoke to two experts on the case. Clark Forsythe is senior counsel for Americans United for Life and the author of "Abuse of Discretion: The Inside Story of Roe vs. Wade." Melissa Murray is the Alexander F. and May T. Morrison Professor of Law at Berkeley Law School, where she also serves as the faculty director for the Center on Reproductive Rights and Justice.

Mr. Forsythe, could you set the stage for us a little bit? What was going on at this time period?

Well, there were efforts in the 1960s to repeal abortion laws in the states. When abortion activists were dissatisfied with those efforts, they decided to go into the courts. Around 1969, they took some cases into the courts, and ultimately there were 20 or more cases challenging state laws in the courts between 1969 and 1973. Roe vs. Wade was a case from Texas. Roe was litigated in the early 1970s; it was a period of enormous change in the United States. We were beginning to see the beginnings of the women's rights movements, the beginnings of the gay rights movement, and of course, the civil rights movement of the 1960s was moving in a lot of different directions. At the time, the question of abortion was very much on the minds of lots of different state legislatures because there had been moves to liberalize much of the criminal law that dealt with matters of sex and sexuality, including abortion.

At the time, four states—New York, Alaska, Hawaii, and I believe Washington—had actually taken steps to repeal their laws criminalizing abortion. About 13 other states had taken efforts to liberalize their laws criminalizing abortions, but in a number of other states, around at least 20 or more, there remained on the books laws that absolutely criminalized abortion except in situations where it would be necessary to preserve the woman's health or life, or in cases of rape, incest, or fetal anomaly. Abortion rights attorneys sought plaintiffs who could challenge the Texas law and the Georgia law. There were two attorneys from Texas who found Norma McCorvey, who they named Jane Roe for purposes of protecting her privacy, and she became the nominal plaintiff.

So, Norma McCorvey brought this case. She was a 22-year-old woman living in Dallas County, Texas, who found herself pregnant for the third time. She was unmarried; her first child had been born a daughter, and she had ultimately signed over custody of her daughter to her mother to raise because she was having a bit of an itinerant life and was unable to take care of her child. The second child that she bore, she gave up for adoption. So when she found herself pregnant for a third time, she wasn't willing to do either of these things again and wanted to safely and legally terminate her pregnancy, but this was impossible under Texas law. Texas had since the 19th century absolutely criminalized abortion except in cases where it was necessary for the health and safety of the mother.

She then was faced with the question of what she was going to do, and the only thing she could think to do then was to actually challenge the law. So she was put in contact with Sarah Weddington and Linda Coffey, two young women who had recently graduated from law school. Sarah Weddington was only 26 years old at the time that she helped Norma McCorvey bring this case, but they decided to sue the state of Texas to challenge the constitutionality of Texas's criminal abortion ban. But as the history shows, there was no trial, there was no evidence, there were no expert witnesses. Jane Roe never testified; as you know, she never got an abortion—she gave birth and placed her child for adoption.

Okay, so Roe was Norma McCorvey. Who was Wade?

Henry Wade was the district attorney for Dallas, Texas, where the case was filed in federal district court. So this case, I assume, kind of winds its way through the courts. How did the Supreme Court rule?

The justices declared the Texas and Georgia laws unconstitutional and then rewrote a national law—a national abortion law—in which they said that the states could not regulate or limit abortion in the first trimester. They could regulate more in the second trimester, the second three months of pregnancy, to protect maternal health, and they could regulate in the last three months of pregnancy, the last trimester, to protect maternal health or fetal life. The attorneys for the plaintiffs claimed that abortion fell within the right to privacy, even though privacy is not in the text of the Constitution; they said it was derived or based in the language of the 14th Amendment to the Constitution. Even though the 14th Amendment doesn't say anything about abortion or the unborn child, it just uses the term "liberty." Ultimately, the court said that the right to abortion was part of the right to privacy based on the 14th Amendment.

That's very interesting. I've learned through many of these interviews that this right to privacy is something that is never actually explicitly stated throughout the Bill of Rights, but there's a penumbra of privacy that you see in a few ways. What was the court's reasoning that it was abortion that could fall under this zone of privacy?

If you read the real opinion, on page 152 of the Roe opinion, Justice Blackmun starts out by citing a string of cases since about 1910—a string of Supreme Court cases—and says that these lead to the right of privacy. We think abortion, or that the right of privacy, is broad enough to encompass abortion. But then four pages later, on page 156, Blackmun turns around and says that abortion, because it involves the taking of a life, is inherently different from all those other cases that make up the right of privacy.

So the right of privacy doesn't actually come from Roe vs. Wade; it comes from a case decided about nine or eight years earlier, in 1965, called Griswold vs. Connecticut. In Griswold, at issue was a Connecticut state statute that made it a crime to use contraception or even to counsel patients about contraception. Planned Parenthood League of Connecticut opened up a birth control clinic in New Haven, Connecticut; they were promptly arrested, and the clinic was closed. Then they were able to bring this case, and they argued that the right to be able to use contraception was the right of the individual. The right of the doctor to advise patients about contraception was also an individual right. The court, in an opinion authored by William O. Douglas, agrees with them and articulates for the first time this right of privacy. This is a right that the majority in Griswold says has been percolating in the court's decisions for some time.

Did any of the justices dissent in the Roe decision, and if so, why?

Well, there were two dissents by Justice White and by Justice Rehnquist. Justice White said that the court was engaging in raw judicial power and that the justices did not have the right or the authority to strike down the abortion laws of the states, and could not rely upon a doctrine called substantive due process. Justice Rehnquist said that there is clear historical evidence that many states passed abortion limits and prohibitions precisely at the time of the framing of the 14th Amendment in the 1860s leading up to 1868, and that the evidentiary history—this history of state limits and prohibitions on abortion—contradicted any proposition that the 14th Amendment was intended to include a right to abortion. That was kind of the heart of his dissent.

So Roe was not the last word on abortion in the United States. There have been several later cases that were important to this as well, like Planned Parenthood vs. Casey or Whole Women's Health vs. Hellerstedt. Can you talk a little bit about how those cases have altered the scope of the right to abortion?

As soon as Roe is decided in 1973, there is an effort to sort of roll it back and hem it in a little bit. Frank Church, who’s a senator from Idaho, announces the Church Amendment, which basically says that physicians don't have to perform abortions if doing so would conflict with their conscience or conscience beliefs. Again, that’s one opportunity to sort of limit the reach of this right by limiting the number of providers who are available to offer abortions.

In fact, the court has kind of cut back on Roe vs. Wade in four cases over the years, Harris vs. McRae involving abortion funding, Planned Parenthood vs. Casey, and in other cases, they’ve given more deference to the states, allowed the states to pass more and more limits, at least around the margins. Even though they've continued the holding to the basic right that Roe created—that there is a right to abortion for virtually any reason at any time in pregnancy—that's still the scope of the right. But they've allowed marginal regulations, like limits on public funding, parental notice and consent, and informed consent laws. But then the court flip-flopped in June of 2016 in Whole Women's Health vs. Hellerstedt. That case makes its way to the Supreme Court, and in an opinion authored by Justice Stephen Breyer, and it’s only an eight-person court because Justice Scalia passed away in February of 2016.

So just eight people on the court in this decision—that's a five to three decision. Justice Stephen Breyer notes that the provisions that were challenged do not offer the medical benefits that they claim to offer, sufficient to justify the burdens on access that each of those provisions imposes.

What do you see as the future of Roe vs. Wade?

Well, the court has failed as the national abortion control board. It cannot monitor abortion; it can't intervene; it can't regulate or legislate itself; it can't act as public health administrators; it can't investigate. I believe it's absolutely certain that the court, sooner or later, will have to overturn the Roe vs. Wade decision because of this failure and return the issue to the states.

When we are talking about repealing or reforming these laws in the 1960s and 70s, it's also around a social movement where one of the critical questions is, what will be the role of women going forth in a modern society? When the questions of contraception come before the court, one of the questions is whether women will be allowed to choose when and how to have children, whether they can space the timing of births to accommodate careers. It's the same issue that comes up in abortion. This is allowing women freedom to be able to go into the workforce to determine when and how they will become mothers.

So it’s not surprising that the same questions that arose in the 19th century about the place of women, about what happens in a society that's undergoing change—whether it's immigration or changes in the demography of the country—are also coming up in the 1960s and 1970s at a time of incredible social change. I think abortion and these rights involving a woman's role really do come to the fore and are incredibly controversial.

So we've learned that the decision to legalize abortion in Roe vs. Wade was based on the right of privacy, which the court has inferred from the due process clause of the 14th Amendment. Since the Roe decision, a number of other cases have set limits on abortion and abortion clinics. Clark Forsythe argues that the Supreme Court has failed in regulating abortion and that the issue should be returned to the states. Melissa Murray, by contrast, suggests that the decision in Roe is crucial to giving women the freedom to join the workforce and make decisions about when to have children.

To learn more about this case, visit the National Constitution Center's interactive constitution and Khan Academy's resources on U.S. government and politics.