Roe v. Wade

Roe v. Wade, 410 U.S. 113 (1973), was a landmark decision of the U.S. Supreme Court ruling that the Constitution of the United States protected the right of pregnant women to choose to have an abortion before the point of fetal viability, striking down many state abortion laws and sparking an ongoing national abortion debate. The case was brought by Norma McCorvey, under the pseudonym "Jane Roe," whose lawyers Sarah Weddington and Linda Coffee sued Texas district attorney Henry Wade alleging the state's abortion laws were unconstitutional; in January 1973 the Supreme Court issued a 7-2 decision in her favor, holding that the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment provides a fundamental right to privacy protecting a woman's right to an abortion, though not an absolute one, and announcing a pregnancy trimester framework to govern abortion regulation. The decision was among the most controversial in U.S. history, reconfigured the voting coalitions of the two major parties, and was reaffirmed in its central holding by Planned Parenthood v. Casey (1992) before being overruled by the Supreme Court in Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization in 2022.