Her lawyers, Sarah Weddington and Linda Coffee, filed a lawsuit on her behalf in U.S. federal court against her local district attorney, Henry Wade, alleging that Texas's abortion laws were unconstitutional.

[78] On June 17, 1970, the three judges unanimously[77] ruled in McCorvey's favor and declared the Texas law unconstitutional, finding that it violated the right to privacy found in the Ninth Amendment.

Another case was United States v. Vuitch, in which they considered the constitutionality of a District of Columbia statute which banned abortion except when the mother's life or health was endangered.

This preserves the guise of impartial scholarship while advancing the proper ideological goals.After the Court held the second argument session, Powell said he would agree with Blackmun's conclusion but pushed for Roe to be the lead of the two abortion cases being considered.

[6] This right of privacy, whether it be founded in the Fourteenth Amendment's concept of personal liberty and restrictions upon state action, as we feel it is, or, as the District Court determined, in the Ninth Amendment's reservation of rights to the people, is broad enough to encompass a woman's decision whether to terminate her pregnancy.The Court reasoned that outlawing abortions would infringe a pregnant woman's right to privacy for several reasons: having unwanted children "may force upon the woman a distressful life and future"; it may bring imminent psychological harm; caring for the child may tax the mother's physical and mental health; and because there may be "distress, for all concerned, associated with the unwanted child".

When those trained in the respective disciplines of medicine, philosophy, and theology are unable to arrive at any consensus, the judiciary, in this point in the development of man's knowledge, is not in a position to speculate as to the answer.

To balance women's rights to privacy and state governments' interests in protecting mothers' health and prenatal life, the Court created the trimester framework.

"[133] It also states, "For the stage, prior to approximately the end of the first trimester, the abortion decision and its effectuation must be left to the medical judgment of the pregnant woman's attending physician.

It does, for the first trimester of pregnancy, cast the abortion decision and the responsibility for it upon the attending physician.These statements appear to indicate that the justices voting in the majority thought that patients had personal physicians.

[176] That same month, the Congregation L'Dor Va-Dor filed a lawsuit against a new law in Florida that would outlaw abortion after 15 weeks of pregnancy, including in cases of rape or incest.

[182] In the 1989 decision of Webster v. Reproductive Health Services, the Supreme Court ruled against an affirmative right to nontherapeutic abortions and noted that states would not be required to pay for them.

[190] Like the dissenters in Roe, they maintain that the Constitution is silent on the issue, and that proper solutions to the question would best be found via state legislatures and the legislative process, rather than through an all-encompassing ruling from the Supreme Court.

[193] In 1976, Congress passed the Hyde Amendment, barring the federal government from using Medicaid to fund abortions except in cases of rape, incest, or a threat to the life of the mother.

[14] David Garrow said that the decision in Roe and also Doe v. Bolton "owed a great amount of their substance and language" to Justice Blackmun's law clerks, George Frampton and Randall Bezanson.

And then I realized that my perception of it had been altogether wrong.Watergate prosecutor Archibald Cox thought the "failure to confront the issue in principled terms leaves the opinion to read like a set of hospital rules and regulations whose validity is good enough this week but will be destroyed with new statistics upon the medical risks of child birth and abortion or new advances in providing for the separate existence of a fetus.

[205] What is frightening about Roe is that this super-protected right is not inferable from the language of the Constitution, the framers' thinking respecting the specific problem in issue, any general value derivable from the provisions they included, or the nation's governmental structure. ...

[13] Jeffrey Rosen,[210][211] as well as Michael Kinsley,[212] echo Ginsburg, arguing that a legislative movement would have been the correct way to build a more durable consensus in support of abortion rights.

"[215] Richard Epstein thought that the majority opinion relied on a book written by William Lloyd Prosser about tort law when it stated that it "is said" recovery of damages was allowed "only if the fetus was viable, or at least quick, when the injuries were sustained".

[216] He compared this to what was in fact written in the book,[217] which was that "when actually faced with the issue for decision, almost all of the jurisdictions have allowed recovery even though the injury occurred during the early weeks of pregnancy, when the child was neither viable nor quick.

"[223] He described Roe as "a no-win case" and predicted that, "fifty years from now, depending on the fate of the proposed constitutional amendment, abortion probably will not be as great a legal issue.

[236] In a concurring opinion, Judge Edith Jones agreed that McCorvey was raising legitimate questions about emotional and other harm suffered by women who have had abortions, about increased resources available for the care of unwanted children, and about new scientific understanding of fetal development.

Judge Haynsworth, writing for the panel, stated "Indeed, the Supreme Court declared the fetus in the womb is neither alive nor a person within the meaning of the Fourteenth Amendment.

[281] In a 5–4 decision in 1989's Webster v. Reproductive Health Services, Chief Justice Rehnquist, writing for the Court, declined to explicitly overrule Roe, because "none of the challenged provisions of the Missouri Act properly before us conflict with the Constitution."

In 2000, the Supreme Court struck down the law by a 5–4 vote in Stenberg v. Carhart, with Justice Stephen Breyer writing for the majority that sometimes partial-birth abortion "would be the safest procedure".

[322] He warned that "a constitutional right to an abortion based solely on the race, sex, or disability of an unborn child, as Planned Parenthood advocates, would constitutionalize the views of the 20th-century eugenics movement".

[332] Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization is a case that was a legal challenge to Mississippi's 2018 Gestational Age Act, which had banned abortions after 15 weeks with exceptions only for medical emergencies or fetal abnormalities.

[342] In their dissent, Justices Stephen Breyer, Elena Kagan, and Sonia Sotomayor jointly wrote, "The right Roe and Casey recognized does not stand alone.

[351] During his early career, President Jimmy Carter supported legalizing abortion in order to save the life of a woman or in the event of birth defects, or in other extreme circumstances.

As of 2011, forty-seven states and the District of Columbia had laws allowing certain people to decline to perform certain actions or provide information related to abortion or reproductive health.

Factors involved in stability include the age, education, income, of the mother, her use of drugs and alcohol, the presence of a father, and wanted as opposed to unwanted pregnancies.