Should We Outlaw Abortion? Essay example

In the controversial case, Roe v. Wade, a pregnant woman who was given the name Jane Roe to hide her identity attempted to get an abortion but they were illegal in Texas so she sued the state for invasion of privacy. Roe's real name is Norma McCorvey; she was an ex-carnival worker who was raped and became pregnant. In 1969, when she moved back to her home state, she was denied and abortion on grounds that her health was not threatened. She started to look for other options, such as an abortion clinic out of the country, but those were too risky. She had given up searching for a safe, clinical abortion when two lawyers contacted her about her story. These lawyers were Linda Coffee and Sarah Weddington. Weddington had herself been through

On February 2nd, 1970 the Supreme Court was presented with the case Roe vs Wade. The case Roe vs Wade involves a woman named Norma McCorvey who is known as Jane Roe in court documents and a man named Henry Wade. Jane Roe had her first child in 1965. The child, Melissa was taken care of by Jane’s mother. Jane would leave the child with her mother while she went out with friends. One day Jane was woken up by her mother and was told to sign insurance papers when in reality those papers were adoption papers. The second child that Jane gave birth to was given up for adoption to her mother. In 1961 Jane got pregnant for a third time and ended up moving back to Dallas, Texas. She did not wish to keep the child, but could not have an abortion just because she did not want the child. There was a law in Texas that abortion was illegal. Roe was advised by friends to falsely accuse of being raped. Although, she did claim of being raped there wasn’t enough evidence and

Norma McCorvey, who was unable to care for her ready born child felt that abortion was the only solution for her unborn child. But with Texas law only allowing abortions as a means of saving the life of a mother, she was denied the right to an abortion. That’s when Texas lawyers, who were trying desperately to bring a “lawsuit of change”, felt that McCorvey’s case was the one they needed. Unfortunately for Norma, Roe v. Wade was not passed in time for her to abort her baby. Her lawyers argued the woman’s right to abortion was protected by the 9th amendment, being that the denying abortion was a violation of the right to privacy. Abortion ties into privacy; the right to privacy ties into the 1st, 4th, 9th and 14th amendments.

Nebraska 1923, in which the Nebraska Law restricted foreign language education that violated the Fourteenth Amendment Due Process Clause (Lecture, Week 6). It was extended through the case of Griswold v. Connecticut 1965, in which the Court ruled that banning of contraceptives contravened the right to marital privacy. This is an example of how the government invaded “the area of protected freedoms” (Article, Griswold v. Connecticut (1965), Week 7). The penumbra of this case delivers a “wide range of questions that implicate the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment” (Article, Griswold v. Connecticut (1965), Week 7). Ultimately, Roe v. Wade 1973 expanded on the right to privacy for women to abort their child prior to when life begins, and if it risks their own life (Article, Roe v. Wade (1973), Week

However, since the Supreme Court has no jurisdiction over public policy, Weddington argued that current abortion laws violated the fourteenth amendment. The fourteenth amendment guarantees the right to liberty without due process of law, and the decision contended that this right was extended to a woman's right to choose to be pregnant. In her closing argument, Weddington stated that "if liberty was meaningful... that liberty to these women would mean liberty from being forced to continue an unwanted pregnancy".

not obtained the status of illegality yet. He then said therefore when the Ninth Amendment was drafted abortion included itself within the unenumerated rights the Ninth Amendment provided. Weddington also delicately referenced the Court’s divided opinion in Griswold V. Connecticut, noting that the justices themselves seemed uncertain “as to the specific constitutional framework of the right which they held to exist.” While the Court in that decision had upheld Griswold’s right to distribute birth control information and devices, the various opinions from the justices cited a range of amendments as the foundations for the rights they were upholding. The entire matter of a personal right to privacy, Weddington implied, did in fact exist in

Roe v. Wade remains one of the most prominent cases regarding abortion in the U.S due to the fact it was so controversial and impacted the lives of many american woman. The case transpired in Texas, a state which outlawed any form of abortion unless a mother's health became endangered. Norma McCorvey, famously known as Jane Roe, became pregnant for a second time with a child she was unable to care for, she seeked a form of legal abortion in Texas with no luck which lead her to two lawyers who could help bring a lawsuit to assist women in obtaining a legal means for abortion. In the case they used the name Jane Roe to protect her identity and were challenging an attorney from Dallas County Texas, Henry Wade. The case came before the supreme court in 1973, in which the court decision ruled 7 to 2 for abortion to be legal due to the 14th amendment as well as the right to

Even to this day, women have not reached maximum equality, but the landmark Supreme Court case Roe v. Wade has helped the women’s equality movement drastically take a step in the right direction. Prior to the case, women had their rights very limited and restricted. Everyone was and still is entitled to their basic rights, however pregnant women were not. Their first, fourth, fifth, ninth, and fourteenth amendment rights were violated and were not addressed until Jane Roe testified in court. The decision made by the court still has a lasting impact even to this day. The landmark Supreme Court case Roe v. Wade was not just a win for Jane Roe, but a win for all women as it helped break the barrier that surrounded women’s equality.

Norma McCorvey who was the plaintiff took on “Jane Roe” as her alias to protect her real identity. The case was originally filed on Roe’s behalf but it was transformed into a class action suit so that McCorvey could represent all pregnant women. The defendant was Henry B. Wade, the district attorney of Dallas County, Texas. Roe had two major hurdles to get over:

This case challenged the rights of marital privacy within the home. In 1961, Griswold and her partner, Dr. Buxton, opened a birth control clinic in New Haven, Connecticut. A law enacted in 1879 made it illegal to use anything to prevent contraception in the state. That’s right, nothing could be used to prevent pregnancy. Consequently due to their actions, Griswold and Buxton were arrested, tried, found guilty, and fined to pay $100. Griswold appealed her conviction to the United States Supreme Court, arguing that the state was in breach of multiple amendments including the fourteenth, first, and of course, the third amendment. The argument based on the third amendment was that the home is and should be a private place. No one is to know what happens in the home, or in the bedroom for that matter. The only way to prove that the women who visited the clinic were actually using birth control would be storm their homes. In the end, it was found that Connecticut's actions were unconstitutional and this court case paved the way for future cases such as the famous Roe vs Wade

While all the Court Justices in Griswold v. Connecticut agreed that the legislation prohibiting the use of contraception was purely irrational, Justices Douglas and Black differed with the Court’s judgment about the case decision. Justice Douglas expressed the majority’s opinion in which he stated that the Connecticut law that banned the use or supply of contraception was unconstitutional because it failed to obey the “right to privacy” derived from certain privacy rights listed on the Bill of Rights. On the other hand, Justice Black disagreed with Justice Douglas by stating that the rights enumerated by Douglas were a mere implication of privacy and that the “right to privacy” didn’t reflect anything stated directly on the Constitution.

Supreme court struck down all criminal abortion laws when they realized that a women’s decision to terminate a pregnancy was protected under the “right of privacy” founded in the Fourteenth Amendment (Justia US

Thus, by focusing on the decision of abortion and constructing that as the sole choice a woman has in pregnancy, the law functions to render the woman vulnerable to having the range of her other choices related to issues in pregnancy constrained due to their involving matters other than abortion. The effect of the law here is then to privilege the ideas, goals, and opinions of members of the medical establishment over individual women themselves. In this sense, while the law allows women to have abortions, in doing so, it deeply constricts their ability to maintain their autonomy and make other choices about their pregnancy. Women are thus rendered vulnerable to a whole host of medical interventions during pregnancy that they may not want or

of rape or incest may not want to have the baby, as it would remind

Abortion has been a complex social issue in the United States ever since restrictive abortion laws began to appear in the 1820s. By 1965, abortions had been outlawed in the U.S., although they continued illegally; about one million abortions per year were estimated to have occurred in the 1960s. (Krannich 366) Ultimately, in the 1973 Supreme Court case of Roe v. Wade, it was ruled that women had the right to privacy and could make an individual choice on whether or not to have an abortion during the first trimester of pregnancy. (Yishai 213)