jan 1, 1973 - ROe V Wade

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Roe v. Wade: The 1973 Supreme Court ruling that the Constitution protects the right to abortion, which states cannot prohibit in the early stages of pregnancy. The decision galvanized social conservatives and made abortion a controversial policy issue for decades to come.


In the early 1960s, abortion was illegal in virtually every state. The women’s movement made reproductive rights a major goal, mounting both legislative and judicial strategies to legalize abortion. By the mid-1970s, thanks to intensive lobbying by women’s organizations, liberal ministers, and physicians, a handful of states (New York, Hawaii, California, and Colorado) passed laws making legal abortions easier to obtain. But progress after that was slow, and women’s advocates turned to the courts.

The Supreme Court had first addressed reproductive rights in a 1965 case, Griswold v. Connecticut. Griswold struck down an 1879 state law, which prohibited the possession of contraception, as a violation of what the court called a married couples’ constitutional “right of privacy.” Following the logic of Griswold, the Court gradually expanded the right of privacy to include individuals in a series of cases in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Those cases culminated in Roe v. Wade (1973). In that landmark decision, the justices nullified a Texas law that prohibited abortion under any circumstances, even when the woman’s health was at risk, and laid out a new national standard: abortions performed during the first trimester were protected by the right of privacy. In Roe, the Court transformed what was traditionally a matter of state policy into a national, constitutionally protected right.


For the women’s movement, Roe v. Wade represented a triumph. For evangelical and fundamentalist Christians, Catholics, and conservatives generally, it was a bitter pill. In their view, abortion was unequivocally the taking of a human life. Women’s advocates responded that illegal abortions — common prior to Roe — were often unsafe procedures that resulted in physical harm to women and even death. Roe polarized opinions on a divisive subject and motivated conservatives to seek a Supreme Court reversal or, short of that, to pursue legislation that would strictly limit the conditions under which abortions could be performed. In 1976, they convinced Congress to deny Medicaid funds for abortions, the opening move in what would become a decades-long effort to weaken Roe v. Wade that continues today.

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