The Power Of The Supreme Court

There is one remarkable legal battle that changed the American abortion laws to what they are now, Roe v. Wade. It took place in 1973 in Texas. Roe, Norma McCorvey, was an anonymous plaintiff against the State. The ruling, abortion is legal. It gives the mother the right of whether or not to terminated her pregnancy. However, that does not give the woman the right to terminate her pregnancy for any reason during all nine months. ?The court said that the woman may have an abortion until fetal viability, the time at which it first becomes realistically possible for a fetus to live outside the woman?s body. At that point the state?s interest

The case was filed anyway with the agreement that the 1859 Texas abortion law violated a women’s constitutional right to have an abortion. The attorneys in the case were Sarah Weddington and Linda Coffee who represented the plaintiff and John Tolle and Jay Floyd were chosen to represent the defendant; Tolle was selected to defend the enforcement of the Texas abortion law and

They also stated that the fetus wasn’t a life until the first trimester of pregnancy. Due to this case and the ruling of it all states have legalized abortion.

(Antevil, Jeffrey. Supreme Court rules on Roe vs. Wade in 1973. New York Daily News. print.) So the court analyzed abortion laws and its history from then till now, and with that they found 3 justifications for outlawing abortions: "a Victorian social concern to discourage illicit sexual conduct"; protecting the health of women; and protecting prenatal life.” (McBride, Alex. Roe v. Wade (1973). The Supreme Court. December 2006. Print.) The Court denied the first two as they were pointless but as for the third, the Court disputed that fetal life wasn’t necessarily a "person" as said and guarded in the U.S. Constitution. Culturally, although a few associations view fetuses as human beings that justify full rights, no general agreement exists. The Court than stated that Texas was thus capturing that only one "view" of many individuals. Securing all fetuses beneath this outlook of prenatal life wasn’t amply valuable to explain the state's prevention of roughly all

     Until a pregnant single woman, by the fictional name of Jane Roe, challenged the Texas criminal abortion law, the decision whether or not to terminate the pregnancy was left entirely up to the State. Justice Blackmun, along with six other justices, argued that the decision to abort should be available to the woman-but only up to a certain point during the pregnancy. In order to decide when the decision should fall from the woman's hands to the States, the court resolved to divide the pregnancy into three trimesters. During the first trimester, the State is not liable to regulate. The decision to abort is therefore left to the woman and her physician. This is so because until the end of the first trimester, morality in abortions is less than in normal childbirth. For the subsequent trimester, the State may only regulate the abortion procedure and where the procedure is administered. Once into the third trimester, the State can deny the right to abort entirely, but only if the health or life of the mother is implicated. These trimesters allow the state at liberty to place multiplying restrictions on abortion as the gestation lengthens.

The ruling of Roe v. Wade included three key ideas. The first key idea was that women had the right to choose to have an abortion during the stage of pregnancy when the fetus had little chance of survival outside the womb and that women were able to obtain an abortion within unreasonable interferences from the state. The second idea confirmed a state’s power to restrict abortions when a fetus could live outside the womb, except in the case when the mother’s life was at risk. The final key idea that was decided in the ruling was that the state has interests in both the health of the women and the life of the fetus (Brannen and Hanes, 2001).

"The Court today is correct in holding that the right asserted by Jane Roe is embraced within the personal liberty protected by the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. It is evident that the Texas abortion statute infringes that right directly. Indeed, it is difficult to imagine a more complete abridgment of a constitutional freedom than that worked by the inflexible criminal statute now in force in Texas. The question then becomes whether the state interests advanced to justify this abridgment can survive the 'particularly careful scrutiny' that the Fourteenth Amendment here requires. The asserted state interests are protection of the health and safety of the pregnant woman, and protection of the potential

The issue before the Supreme Court on the case of Roe v. Wade was on abortion. In august 1969 a single pregnant woman based in Texas wanted to get rid her pregnancy through an abortion. But her doctor denied the request on a reason that it was against the Texas law. Then Jane Roe identified by the media as Norma McCorvey sued her doctor for refusing to abort her baby she sought legal help and filed against henry wade, district attorney for Dallas County, Texas. Jane Roe argued that the law of Texas was unconstitutional. She later on requested an injunction to restrain Henry Wade. Roe’s lawyer claimed Texas abortion law violated her rights under due process clause of the 14th amendment.

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

During the years leading up to and after 1973, there were numerous events and situations that occurred. Before 1965, the idea of right to privacy was barely used, but Griswold v. Connecticut (1965) changed that. “The case involved a Connecticut law forbidding the use of contraceptives” (Edwards III, Wattenberg, and Lineberry 131). A doctor and a family-planner were arrested for distributing the use of contraceptives for couples in need. They were eventually brought to court by the state and were convicted. The case was taken to the Supreme Court and was later decided that everyone is entitled to their “right to privacy.” This set the precedent for Roe v. Wade because without Griswold v. Connecticut, the decision might be completely different than what it is now. A court case called Rust v. Sullivan was related to abortion. It specified that “family planning services receiving federal funds could not provide women any counseling regard abortion” (Edwards III, Wattenberg, and Lineberry 131). This decision created public scrutiny as the decision would violate the First Amendment. President Clinton eventually lifted the ban on abortion counseling as it

The conflict with anti-abortion laws were presented to the United States Supreme Court in 1973. In Roe v. Wade, the Supreme Court reviewed a Texas law in which criminalized abortion. The Texas statute stated that any abortion procedure is illegal, unless it is “an abortion procured or attempted by medical advice for the purpose of saving the life of the mother” (Roe v. Wade, 1973). The plaintiff in this case, Jane Roe argued that the law was unconstitutional. She wanted to terminate her pregnancy by means of abortion performed by a competent, licensed physician, and under safe and clinical conditions. Roe was unauthorized to have a legal abortion because her life was not endangered in having the child. However, she could not afford to travel to a jurisdiction that allowed a safe and legal abortion. Roe argued that the Texas statute violated her right to personal privacy which is protected by the First,

Before 1973, abortion access was determined by state legislature for each individual state with no consistency across the United States. Some states allowed abortions but most state statues heavily restricted or completely banned abortion. The restricted states would generally only allow abortion in the event of rape, incest, fetal anomalies, or the woman’s life is at risk. The state of Texas enforced a state statute that made it illegal for an abortion to be performed unless the woman’s

The morality of induced abortion is one of the most controversial moral issues of our time. Abortion has grown to be one, if no the most, debated argument of modern times. In the following web-page, we will be discussing abortion in three of its major aspects: Public Opinion, Congress and Courts, and Interest groups.

Abortion did not immediately engrave itself onto public agenda; it had help. The legal debate over the use of birth control proved to be the catalyst needed to propel abortion to the Supreme Court and into the ranks of public policy. The birth control movement was significant to Roe v. Wade because it served as a key in which to unlock the gates of the Supreme Court. The Supreme Courts decision to hear Griswold v. Connecticut, a case that challenged the Connecticut statute prohibiting anyone to “use any drug, article, or instrument to prevent conception or to give assistance or counsel in its use (p.39)”, is arguably the most significant factor in the Court’s

Roe had no legal justification for obtaining an abortion in Texas, considering her pregnancy was not a threat to her life, however, the District Court, consisting of three judges, ruled that Roe did have a foundation to sue and declared the law in Texas regarding abortion void, for proving to be vague and overbroad. The law in Georgia allowed for a woman to have an abortion if her health or life was at risk, if the baby was noted to have serious deformities or if the woman was raped and resulted in pregnancy. In the Doe v. Bolton case from Georgia, a married woman was also refused an abortion because she did not meet the mandatory requirements of the state. The ruling in the Doe case was split, warranting that there were some bureaucratic concerns not required that might prevent someone from undergoing a merited abortion, yet it was still defended that because of the laws that were already in place, the state has the right to inhibit an abortion. In 1973, on January 22, the verdicts from both cases on the same day, after each of the decisions were appealed and brought before the Supreme Court, were handed down. The court ruled in Roe, that although the states are interested in the protection of fetal life, until the fetus was viable, determining that to be at the start of the last, or third, trimester, such and interest was not compelling enough. Therefore, invalidating all state laws for abortion that