We all know that Roe v Wade was the important SCOTUS ruling that made abortion legal, right? But how much do we really know about the Roe v Wade ruling?
For some of us, the ruling happened (ahem…) before we were born. So it has been a part of our collective consciousness as a synonym for “legalized abortion” and we haven’t given it much thought beyond that. Now’s probably a good time to revisit it, since many of the GOP arguments and statements seem to be blatantly disregarding the Roe v Wade ruling, and the US Constitution itself.
Who were the key players?
Jane Roe (pseudonym for Norma McCorvey) was the plaintiff. She was pregnant and unmarried in Texas, and wanted an abortion. Texas law at the time prevented any woman from accessing an abortion for reasons other than that the pregnancy threatened the life of the mother. McCorvey met with two female lawyers who were willing to challenge the Texas law, and they made their way to the Supreme Court.
The “Wade” of Roe v Wade refers to Henry Wade, Texas district attorney at the time. Thus, the case was about a woman seeking an abortion, challenging the DA who would have prevented her from having an abortion based on state law. (I always wondered why there were two last names, instead of one last name and a state, as in Griswold v Conneticut or Brown v Board of Education.)
In case you were wondering, McCorvey was unable to access an abortion, and ended up giving her child up for adoption. Since the ruling, she has distanced herself from it, claiming to have been influenced by two ambitious lawyers. She now is part of the pro-life movement, and her anti-choice arguments seem to be based on emotional and religious reasoning.
But the case is about more than the people involved– it is about the Constitution. The Supreme Court justices looked at the case in front of them and decided that the Texas law was unconstitutional. In their own words:
“State criminal abortion laws, like those involved here, that except from criminality only a life-saving procedure on the mother’s behalf without regard to the stage of her pregnancy and other interests involved violate the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.”
Basically, SCOTUS interpreted that the “personal autonomy” section of the 14th Amendment of the Constitution overrode the State of Texas’s jurisdiction in this matter, and thus, the law was unconstitutional. Thus, State law cannot criminalize something that prevents an aspect of personal liberty guaranteed in the Constitution from being enacted. Safe, legal access to abortion was deemed to be necessary in order for the Constitutionally-protected ideal of personal autonomy to be realized. The decision made abortion legal in all 50 states, in all cases, not just where the mother’s life was at risk.
Or perhaps Whoopi Goldberg said it best on yesterday’s The View:
“People get pregnant in all kinds of ways. And people cannot always afford to have the child that they are pregnant with… Perhaps [people have] forgotten why Planned Parenthood came into being, which was that people got tired of tripping over women with hangers hanging out of their bodies because they were giving themselves abortions.”
