Roe v. Wade , U. Supreme Court in which the Court ruled that the Constitution of the United States protected the right to have an abortion. The decision struck down many State abortion laws , and it sparked an ongoing abortion debate in the United States about whether, or to what extent, abortion should be legal, who should decide the legality of abortion, and what the role of moral and religious views in the political sphere should be.
The case was brought by Norma McCorvey βunder the legal pseudonym " Jane Roe "βwho, in , became pregnant with her third child. McCorvey wanted an abortion but lived in Texas where abortion was illegal except when necessary to save the mother's life.
A special three-judge court of the U. District Court for the Northern District of Texas heard the case and ruled in her favor. In January , the Supreme Court issued a 7β2 decision in McCorvey's favor holding that the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution provides a fundamental "right to privacy", which protects a pregnant woman's right to an abortion. It also held that the right to abortion is not absolute and must be balanced against the government's interests in protecting women's health and prenatal life.
The Court also classified the right to abortion as "fundamental", which required courts to evaluate challenged abortion laws under the " strict scrutiny " standard, the most stringent level of judicial review in the United States. The Supreme Court's decision in Roe was among the most controversial in U.
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Anti-abortion politicians and activists sought for decades to restrict abortion or overrule the decision; [ 17 ] polls into the 21st century showed that a plurality and a majority, especially into the late s to early s, opposed overruling Roe. In , the Supreme Court overruled Roe in Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization on the grounds that the substantive right to abortion was not "deeply rooted in this Nation's history or tradition", nor considered a right when the Due Process Clause was ratified in , and was unknown in U.
