Roe v. Wade

Context

Before the nineteenth century, abortion was fairly widely available to women in the United States, though it was extremely hazardous because of the lack of advanced medical procedures and knowledge concerning the need for sterilization. Starting in the 1820s, many states began to restrict access to abortion. The Comstock Act (1873), a federal law named for the nineteenth-century anti-obscenity crusader Anthony Comstock, restricted the dissemination of birth control devices and information. Twenty-four states passed similar laws, likewise prohibiting the distribution of birth control information and materials. Women continued to seek illegal abortions when poverty, domestic abuse, or other circumstances made pregnancy unwanted; they often suffered grievous injury or death as a result. In 1950 authorities estimated that from 200,000 to 1.3 million illegal abortions were performed in the United States that year.

To some, the abortion debate hinged on whether women should be forced to surrender control of their own bodies to their states of residence. Others held the religious view that life begins at conception, such that abortion is nothing short of murder. Laws varied from state to state, creating a situation that many decried as fundamentally unfair: A woman's ability to obtain an abortion depended upon where she happened to live as well as upon whether she had the wealth to travel to wherever facilities were available.

In the years leading up to Roe v. Wade, a series of Supreme Court precedents began relaxing restrictions on contraception and paved the way for a claim of a right to privacy under the Constitution. The most significant acknowledgement of a privacy right came in the 1965 case of Griswold v. Connecticut, which struck down a statute outlawing the use of birth control by married couples. Estelle Griswold, the executive director of Planned Parenthood of Connecticut, had been prosecuted by the state for giving contraceptives to a married couple. In her appeal, the Supreme Court determined that the Constitution presupposes a class of fundamental rights, among which is privacy in matters of marriage, family, and sex. Griswold would be a key precedent for Roe. Relying on that and other precedent cases, the attorneys Linda Coffee and Sarah Weddington teamed with the plaintiff Norma McCorvey, a former carnival worker and mother of two previous children—who would be named as Jane Roe—to file the original 1970 lawsuit against the Texas district attorney Henry Wade.