Roe v. Wade and the Fight Over Abortion Rights

What Was Roe v. Wade

Roe v. Wade is the 1973 Supreme Court decision that recognized a constitutional right to choose abortion. It held that the right to privacy, rooted in the 14th Amendment’s promise of personal liberty, “is broad enough to encompass a woman’s decision whether or not to terminate her pregnancy.” That ruling struck down laws like Texas’s, which banned abortion except to save the pregnant woman’s life, and it set a national floor that every state had to meet. Our right to privacy explainer traces where that right came from and which rulings still rest on it.

Roe is no longer the law. For where abortion is legal today and the measures on the November 2026 ballot, our Dobbs decision explainer has a state-by-state finder. This page covers what Roe decided, how it worked for 49 years, and how it fell.

Abortion Before 1973 Under State Bans

Before Roe, abortion was a crime in most states, and illegal abortion caused a large share of deaths in pregnancy. In 1930, abortion was the listed cause of death for almost 2,700 women, 18% of all maternal deaths recorded that year, according to a Guttmacher Institute review of the pre-Roe record. Antibiotics and better care cut the toll, but in 1965 illegal abortion still caused 17% of deaths tied to pregnancy and childbirth.

The hospital records show what that looked like. In 1962, nearly 1,600 women were admitted to Harlem Hospital Center in New York City for incomplete abortions. In 1968, the Los Angeles County medical center at the University of Southern California admitted 701 women with septic abortions, one for every 14 deliveries. Estimates of illegal abortions in the 1950s and 1960s ran from 200,000 to 1,200,000 a year.

The risk fell hardest on women without money. Women who could pay had some limited paths to a legal procedure, Guttmacher found, while poorer women had few options besides a dangerous illegal one. In New York City in the early 1960s, abortion caused one in four childbirth-related deaths among white women and one in two among nonwhite and Puerto Rican women.

States began to change their laws before the Court acted. Starting in 1970, 4 states, Alaska, Hawaii, New York and Washington, repealed their bans. In the year before Roe, just over 100,000 women left their home states for a legal abortion in New York City. The woman the courts called Jane Roe told a federal court in 1970 that she could not afford to make that kind of trip.

The Trimester Framework Roe Created

Roe did not make abortion unlimited. It gave states more power at each stage of pregnancy. The Court weighed two state interests, protecting the pregnant woman’s health and protecting “the potentiality of human life,” and decided each one grows stronger as pregnancy goes on. The ladder below follows the opinion’s own three-part holding.

Viability, the point at which a fetus could survive outside the womb, became the line that mattered most, and it outlasted the trimesters when Casey dropped them in 1992. Most Americans still think in the same stages: our Dobbs explainer shows Gallup’s polling by trimester.

What Changed After Roe

Deaths from illegal abortion fell sharply once the procedure was legal nationwide. CDC counted 39 such deaths in 1972. By 1976, it counted 2, a drop of 95%.

These counts are far below the thousands recorded in 1930, most likely because antibiotics had already cut the death rate before Roe, Guttmacher’s review says. What the chart shows is direction: once legal care was available across the country, the illegal procedures that killed dozens of women a year nearly disappeared from the record.

Legal abortion also became safer over time. In CDC’s first five years of counting, 1973 to 1977, there were 2.09 deaths for every 100,000 legal abortions.

How Casey Rewrote Roe in 1992

Planned Parenthood v. Casey kept the core of Roe and threw out the trimesters. On June 29, 1992, three justices appointed by Presidents Reagan and George H.W. Bush, Sandra Day O’Connor, Anthony Kennedy and David Souter, wrote a joint opinion that reaffirmed a woman’s right to choose abortion before viability. They also wrote, “We reject the trimester framework, which we do not consider to be part of the essential holding of Roe.”

In its place, Casey set the “undue burden” test. A law was invalid if its “purpose or effect is to place a substantial obstacle in the path of a woman seeking an abortion before the fetus attains viability.” Under that test the Court upheld most of Pennsylvania’s law: a 24-hour waiting period, required information before the procedure, and parental consent for minors with a way to ask a judge instead. It struck down the rule that a married woman notify her husband.

The trimester framework governed for 19 years. Casey’s test governed for the next 29, and it let states pass far more restrictions than Roe had allowed.

That last row is the whole change. Under Dobbs, a state abortion law is judged like most other laws: it stands if a court can find any rational reason for it, the lowest level of review explained in our 14th Amendment explainer.

How Roe Was Narrowed From 1973 to 2022

Roe was being narrowed from its first decade. Congress cut off federal Medicaid funding in 1976, Casey let states add waiting periods in 1992, and the Court upheld a federal ban on one procedure in 2007. It struck down Texas clinic rules in 2016, let a Texas six-week ban take effect in 2021, and overruled Roe in 2022.

1970: Alaska, Hawaii, New York and Washington repealed their bans, so legal abortion existed in parts of the country before Roe.

January 1973: Roe struck down Texas’s ban and, with it, similar laws across the country.

1976: Congress passed the Hyde Amendment, which bars federal Medicaid money for most abortions. The Court upheld it in Harris v. McRae in 1980, so the right existed on paper for many low-income women who could not pay for it.

1992: Casey kept the right by one vote and opened the door to waiting periods and other state rules.

2007: In Gonzales v. Carhart, the Court upheld the federal Partial-Birth Abortion Ban Act 5-4, which Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s dissent called the first time since Roe that the Court approved “a prohibition with no exception safeguarding a woman’s health.”

2016: In Whole Woman’s Health v. Hellerstedt, the Court struck down Texas rules that had forced clinics to close, finding they imposed an undue burden.

September 2021: Texas’s Senate Bill 8 banned abortion after about six weeks and let private citizens sue anyone who helped. On September 1, the Court declined 5-4 to block it, and the ban took effect while Roe was still the law.

June 2022: Dobbs overruled Roe and Casey. Several states’ trigger laws banned abortion within days, as our Dobbs decision explainer details.

Why the Supreme Court Overturned Roe

The majority said the Constitution does not protect abortion, so the question belongs to voters and legislatures. Justice Samuel Alito wrote that “Roe was egregiously wrong from the start” and that “the Constitution makes no reference to abortion, and no such right is implicitly protected by any constitutional provision.” The Court tested the right against the country’s history, noting that “three-quarters of the States had made abortion a crime at any stage of pregnancy” by the time the 14th Amendment was adopted in 1868. “It is time to heed the Constitution and return the issue of abortion to the people’s elected representatives,” the opinion says.

The vote came from a Court whose makeup had changed. Three justices appointed between 2017 and 2020 joined the majority. The case was Mississippi’s ban on most abortions after 15 weeks of pregnancy, before viability; the clinic argued that upholding it “would be no different than overruling Casey and Roe entirely.”

Chief Justice John Roberts voted to uphold the Mississippi law but would not have overruled Roe. He urged “a more measured course” that would “leave for another day whether to reject any right to an abortion at all.” That is why the judgment was 6-3 while the vote to overrule Roe was 5-4.

Justices Stephen Breyer, Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan wrote a joint dissent. They ended by writing that they dissented “for the many millions of American women who have today lost a fundamental constitutional protection,” and they warned that the majority’s history test could reach other rights the Court has recognized. Our same-sex marriage explainer and IVF explainer cover how those questions have played out since.

Can Congress Restore Roe?

Congress could write a right to abortion into federal law, but no version has passed both chambers. The main bill is the Women’s Health Protection Act. The House passed it twice, and it fell short both times in the Senate, where it needed 60 votes to overcome a filibuster.

A national ban has not passed either. Either change would take 60 Senate votes under current rules, or a change to the filibuster itself, which our filibuster explainer walks through.

Criticism of Roe From Both Sides

Roe drew criticism from people who wanted abortion legal as well as from people who wanted it banned, and the disagreement shaped how it fell.

• From its opponents, the core argument was democratic. Justice Byron White, dissenting in 1973, called the decision “an exercise of raw judicial power” (Doe v. Bolton). The Dobbs majority adopted a version of that view: a question the Constitution does not answer belongs to voters.
• Some scholars who supported legal abortion attacked Roe’s reasoning. Law professor John Hart Ely wrote in 1973 that he would vote for a law much like the one the Court drafted, and still called Roe “not constitutional law” (Yale Law Journal).
• Ruth Bader Ginsburg thought Roe went too far, too fast, on the wrong grounds. In a 1992 lecture, she wrote that Roe “might have been less of a storm center” had it focused on “the women’s equality dimension of the issue” and moved more gradually (NYU Law Review).
• Defenders answered that the right was settled and relied on. Casey’s joint opinion kept Roe partly because people had, “for two decades,” organized their lives “in reliance on the availability of abortion.” The Dobbs dissent made the same argument about reliance.

Frequently Asked Questions

Is Roe v. Wade still the law?

No. The Supreme Court overruled it on June 24, 2022, in Dobbs v. Jackson. Each state now sets its own abortion law, and the Dobbs explainer shows the rule in every state.

Why was Roe v. Wade overturned?

Five justices held that the Constitution does not mention abortion and that a right to it is not rooted in the nation’s history, so the question belongs to voters and legislatures. Chief Justice Roberts agreed with the result but would not have overruled Roe.

Who was Jane Roe?

Norma McCorvey, a Texas woman who was pregnant when the case was filed in 1970 under the pseudonym Jane Roe. Her pregnancy came to term before the Court ruled. The Court heard the case anyway because pregnancy ends too quickly for an appeal to finish, a problem the opinion called “capable of repetition, yet evading review.”

Why didn't Congress make Roe a federal law?

Bills to do it have been introduced, but none has passed both chambers. The Women’s Health Protection Act passed the House in 2021 and 2022 and fell short in the Senate, which needs 60 votes to end a filibuster.

Did Roe allow abortion at any point in pregnancy?

No. Roe let states ban abortion after viability, except when needed to protect the woman’s life or health, and let them regulate for health after the first trimester.

What You Can Do

1. If you need care now, start with AbortionFinder.org for verified providers and your state’s rules. For legal questions, call the Repro Legal Helpline at 844-868-2812.
2. Find out what your state allows. Our Dobbs decision explainer lists the law in every state and the four states voting on abortion on November 3, 2026.
3. Vote in state races. Since Dobbs, state legislatures write the bans and state supreme courts decide whether state constitutions protect abortion.
4. Support people who travel for care by giving to or volunteering with a local abortion fund through the National Network of Abortion Funds.
5. Ask your members of Congress to cosponsor the Women’s Health Protection Act, H.R. 12 and S. 2150, which would restore a federal right to abortion. Use the letter and call script below.