Roe v. Wade

On January 22, 1973, the Supreme Court ruled 7–2 in Roe v. Wade that the Constitution protected a woman's right to an abortion under the right to privacy implied by the Fourteenth Amendment. The decision was written by Justice Harry Blackmun, a former general counsel of the Mayo Clinic who approached the question partly as a medical matter, and it established a trimester framework: states could not restrict abortion in the first trimester, could regulate it in the second to protect maternal health, and could restrict or ban it in the third when the fetus was viable. The ruling immediately nationalized abortion as a political issue in a way it had not previously been.

The backlash was swift and durable. The Catholic Church mobilized within months; evangelical Protestants, who had been largely indifferent to abortion in 1973, followed over the next decade as the issue became central to the emerging religious right. Every Republican presidential platform from 1976 onward called for Roe's reversal. The decision survived three decades of legal challenges — most consequentially Planned Parenthood v. Casey (1992), which replaced the trimester framework with the undue burden standard but preserved the core holding — while reshaping American party politics, judicial confirmation battles, and the relationship between religion and public life.

On June 24, 2022, the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization, ruling 6–3 that the Constitution contains no right to abortion and returning the question to individual states. Within weeks, roughly half the states had banned or severely restricted abortion. The decision was the most significant reversal of an established constitutional right in the Court's history and immediately became the defining issue of the 2022 and 2024 election cycles.