Women

"Minutes after the Supreme Court voted to overturn Roe v. Wade last summer, a group of West Wing aides raced to the Oval Office to brief President Biden on the decision. As they drafted a speech, Mr. Biden was the first person in the room to say what has been his administration’s rallying cry ever since. Passing federal legislation, he told the group, was “the only thing that will actually restore the rights that were just taken away,” recalled Jen Klein, the director of the White House Gender Policy Council. But if the prospect of codifying Roe’s protections in Congress seemed like a long shot a year ago, it is all but impossible to imagine now, with an ascendant far-right bloc in the House and a slim Democratic majority in the Senate."

"As a nation today, we have not rejected the sanctity of human life. The American people have not had an opportunity to express their view on the sanctity of human life in the unborn. I am convinced that Americans do not want to play God with the value of human life. It is not for us to decide who is worthy to live and who is not. Even the Supreme Court's opinion in Roe v. Wade did not explicitly reject the traditional American idea of intrinsic worth and value in all human life; it simply dodged this issue."

"Today, millions of Americans woke up fearing that their essential freedoms under the Constitution were at risk. If the Supreme Court ultimately decides to overturn the landmark case of Roe v. Wade, then it will not only reverse nearly 50 years of precedent — it will relegate the most intensely personal decision someone can make to the whims of politicians and ideologues."

"McCorvey’s 1995 jump from abortion rights advocate to a fierce activist against the very law her own unwanted pregnancy ushered in has long been a complicated story within the U.S. abortion debate."

"[I]t is time to admit in public that, as an example of the practice of constitutional opinion writing, Roe is a serious disappointment. You will be hard-pressed to find a constitutional law professor, even among those who support the idea of constitutional protection for the right to choose, who will embrace the opinion itself rather than the result. ... This is not surprising. As constitutional argument, Roe is barely coherent. The court pulled its fundamental right to choose more or less from the constitutional ether. It supported that right via a lengthy, but purposeless, cross-cultural historical review of abortion restrictions and a tidy but irrelevant refutation of the straw-man argument that a fetus is a constitutional 'person' entitled to the protection of the 14th Amendment. ... By declaring an inviolable fundamental right to abortion, Roe short-circuited the democratic deliberation that is the most reliable method of deciding questions of competing values."

"In 1969, McCorvey was 22 and on her third pregnancy when she tried to get an abortion, which was illegal in Texas at the time unless it was to save the mother’s life. She was referred to Linda Coffee, a lawyer in Dallas who was looking for a case to challenge the Texas law. Coffee teamed up with former law school classmate Sara Weddington, who was known for testing anti-abortion statutes. In the three years it took for the case to go through the courts, McCorvey gave birth to a baby girl who she set up for adoption."

"This paper investigates the impact of the abortion law changes on family labor supply in the United States in the early 1970s. It attempts to answer the key question: do the law changes affect labor supply of fertile women and their parents who co-reside with them? Following the works of Chiappori, Fortin, and Lacroix (2002) and Oreffice (2007), I propose a collective labor supply model for households in which a fertile daughter resides with her parents. In empirical section, using data from the March Current Population Survey and Panel Study of Income Dynamics, I find a significantly positive influence of the law on fertile women's capacity to work and a negative influence on their mothers in mother-daughter family scenario. It can be explained that the availability of the birth control allows the daughters more time to work for earning and provides their mothers fewer opportunities to financially support their newborn grandchildren. The paper uses the Heckman selection bias correction technique to correct the bias due to missing data on working behaviors of the family members. The novelty of this paper includes the investigation of the effect on working behaviors of people rather than spouses in an extended family."

"[A] sound foundation for final and reasonable resolution."

"According to a news release issued by WUSA about the interview, Sarah Weddington, one of the two lawyers who took the case to the Supreme Court, said she had never touched the issue of rape and only emphasized the question of whether the Constitution gives to the state or leaves to a woman the questions of what she can or must do with her body. Kate Michelman, executive director of the National Abortion Rights Action League, said in an interview today that Ms. McCorvey's disclosure should not cloud the discussion about the right of a woman to terminate her pregnancy. If she lied, you have to remember that abortions were illegal, Ms. Michelman said, and that women were looked down upon if they were pregnant outside of marriage. It was her life circumstances that created the conditions that mitigated against her being straightforward about the fact that she was pregnant and wanted to terminate that pregnancy. After the celebrated Supreme Court decision, Ms. McCorvey at first lived in relative obscurity in Dallas, fearing that she would become a target of anti-abortion activists."

"Norma had told the press that she was Jane Roe way back in 1973. But not until 1987-when she recanted the lie that she had been raped-did the press take much notice of her. And it was two more years before Norma was famous, lifted from the veil of a pseudonym by five weeks of press in the spring of 1989."

"[ Gay rights, contraceptives, certain fertility treatments and even interracial marriage ] are imperiled because they’re all rooted in that right to privacy. All of this has been implied because they’re understood to be core, basic human rights. You don’t need the state to recognize them because they are vested in you by virtue of being a human."

"If Roe were reversed and all high-risk states banned abortion, 39% of the national population of women aged 15–44 would experience increases in travel distances ranging from less than 1 mile to 791 miles. If these women respond similarly to travel distances as Texas women, county-level abortion rates would fall by amounts ranging from less than 1% to more than 40%. Aggregating across all affected regions, the average resident is expected to experience a 249 mile increase in travel distance, and the abortion rate is predicted to fall by 32.8% (95% confidence interval 25.9–39.6%) in the year following a Roe reversal."

"In the year following a reversal, increases in travel distances are predicted to prevent 93,546–143,561 women from accessing abortion care."

"“I am dedicated to spending the rest of my life undoing the law that bears my name,” McCorvey told a U.S. Senate subcommittee in 1998. “I would like nothing more than to have this law overturned.” A 2000 court affidavit underscores McCorvey's true feelings on the famous case: "They said yes, ‘You’re white. You’re young, pregnant, and you want an abortion.’ At that time, I didn’t know their full intent. Only that they wanted to make abortion legal and they thought I’d be a good plaintiff. I came for the food, and they led me to believe that they could help me get an abortion. At that time, I was a street person. I lived, worked, and panhandled out on the streets. My totally powerless circumstance made it easy for them to use me. My presence was a necessary evil. My real interests were not their concern." McCorvey petitioned the Supreme Court to overturn Roe v. Wade in 2005. Her request was denied."

"For the justices, Roe reflected earlier cases involving the right to privacy. That "right," wrote Justice Harry Blackmun in the main opinion for the Court is "broad enough to encompass a woman's decision whether or not to terminate her pregnancy.""

"Since the current court overturned it in 2022, “Roe is the floor, not the ceiling” has become a rallying cry for activists who vowed to rebuild access, especially for marginalized communities, according to Pamela Merritt, executive director of Medical Students for Choice, a group that opposes viability clauses."

"We can trace the emergence of healthcare refusals legislation to Congress’s passage of the Church Amendment in 1973. That legislation followed on the heels of two significant judicial decisions: the Supreme Court’s 1973 Roe v. Wade decision invalidating criminal prohibitions on abortion; and a 1972 federal district court decision enjoining a Catholic affiliated hospital, which was deemed to engage in state action because of its receipt of federal funding, from prohibiting sterilization at its facilities. The Church Amendment, which passed with near unanimous support, provided that receipt of federal funds would not provide a basis for requiring a physician or nurse “to perform or assist in the performance of any sterilization procedure or abortion if his performance or assistance in the performance of such procedure or abortion would be contrary to his religious beliefs or moral convictions.” It also provided that no “entity” could be compelled to “make its facilities available for the performance of any sterilization procedure or abortion if [such] performance . . . is prohibited by the entity on the basis of religious beliefs or moral convictions.”"

"Norma McCorvey, Jane Roe of the landmark U.S. Supreme Court Roe v. Wade decision, passed away of a heart ailment at 69 years old, reports The Washington Post. She leaves behind a complicated legacy. While many women's rights advocates originally considered her a compatriot, McCorvey never intended to become a reproductive rights activist. In fact, she eventually declared herself pro-life and sought to overturn the very legislation that turned her into a feminist icon. McCorvey adopted the pseudonym of Jane Roe to protect her anonymity during the 1973 Roe v. Wade Supreme Court case whose ruling would legalize abortion and become a crucial touchstone of female reproductive rights in America. When she first filed the now infamous suit in 1970, however, McCorvey's goal was not sweeping political reform. Rather, the then 22-year-old Texan hoped only to gain the ability to legally and safely end a pregnancy she did not want."

"After McCorvey fell out of favor, she slipped into anonymity until she resurfaced in the 1990s as a devout Christian. She apologized publicly for her role in helping to bring about access to legal abortion. "I thought I was doing something right," she said during a 1996 memorial service for unborn children. "I didn't realize I would be leading innocent children to a senseless and terrible death.""

"I think the general consensus in Louisiana is they want to see Roe v. Wade overturned, Mr. Connick said. Laws in Nearly All States Nearly all states have on their books at least some abortion restrictions that have been regarded as unconstitutional under the Supreme Court's 1973 decision in Roe v. Wade and subsequent rulings. In addition to Louisiana, 20 states plus the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico have never repealed pre-1973 statutes that made most abortions a crime. Had the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, it is unclear whether these laws would have automatically sprung back to life. The answer depends in part on how each state's legal system regards old laws that have long been unenforced. Rachael Pine, a lawyer with the American Civil Liberties Union's Reproductive Freedom Project in New York, said today that no other state appears to have embarked on Louisiana's course. Ms. Pine's office is monitoring state developments and preparing to offer legal assistance if necessary."

"No opinion with such deficiencies could be expected to provide a sound basis for resolution of a hotly contested social issue, and indeed, Roe has aged poorly. The current Supreme Court has all but explicitly discarded the constitutional methodology on which it rests. The idea that unelected judges should consult their inner oracles to decide whether a particular activity unmentioned in the Constitution deserves to be elevated to the pantheon of "fundamental rights" was always problematic. Beginning in 1986, when it refused to create constitutional protection for homosexual sodomy, the court started to hint that it was out of the fundamental rights business. Most recently, refusing to recognize a right to physician-assisted suicide in 1997, the court did not even mention Roe. The era of judicially created fundamental rights is over. The fact that there are constitutional arguments in favor of not overruling Roe doesn't mean the opinion should be celebrated, at least not as anything other than a historical artifact. Roe is an increasingly creaky anachronism, and anyone who cares about a woman's right to choose should seek a sounder constitutional basis for that right. Such arguments have been put forth frequently in the scholarly literature, and most tend to cast the abortion controversy as a question not of liberty but of equality. Unlike the fundamental rights jurisprudence that produced Roe, the right to equal protection of the laws is alive and well in the Supreme Court. This perspective offers a way to go forward."

"A leading anti-abortion voice in the Legislature, Representative Woody Jenkins, said: In the late 70's we passed an act that said if Roe v. Wade was overturned, all of our previous laws would have continued vitality. What we are doing in a friendly way is instructing D.A.'s to enforce the criminal statutes."

"McCorvey's story always included more than a few inconsistencies, according to the film. When she joined the Roe v. Wade litigation, McCorvey claimed that she had been raped and became pregnant as a result. In the 1980s, she rescinded the claim in a televised interview, saying she had never been raped."

"The Roe decision did not prompt "abortion on demand" as many opponents of the procedure predicted it would. Nor have various legislatures or court rulings restricted access as much as some supporters claim. New research from the Alan Guttmacher Institute found the rate of abortions is at its lowest level since Roe, about 1.31 million in the year 2000, down 4 percent from 1996."

"Norma McCorvey was unmarried and unemployed when she became pregnant for the third time at age 22. It was 1969, and it was illegal to have an abortion in Texas, where she lived. McCorvey resorted to seeing an underground abortion doctor but walked out because of the "filth and cockroaches." Soon after, McCorvey became a national symbol for the abortion rights movement. For years she was known simply as Jane Roe, the plaintiff from one of the most famous Supreme Court cases in history: Roe v. Wade."

"Today, Catholics and evangelical Protestants assert shared religious beliefs in conflicts over sexual norms. This coalition did not exist at the time of Roe, for example, when evangelical Protestants had different views about abortion and were unwilling to join in political coalition with Catholics in opposing it. But the views of evangelical Protestants about abortion have changed in the intervening years, as has their willingness to assert claims of common faith with Catholics on the question. Theological differences, of course, persist. But since the era of Ronald Reagan’s election, when Republican leaders encouraged evangelical Protestants to enter politics in common cause with Catholics opposed to abortion, a conservative, cross-denominational coalition of Christians has pursued self-consciously traditional and conservative ends."

"There was another factor, meanwhile, that had greatly contributed to the massive crime drop of the 1990s. It had taken shape more than twenty years earlier and concerned a young woman in Dallas named Norma McCorvey. Like the proverbial butterfly that flaps its wings on one continent and eventually causes a hurricane on another, Norma McCorvey dramatically altered the course of events without intending to. All she had wanted was an abortion. She was a poor, uneducated, unskilled, alcoholic, drug-using twenty-one-year-old woman who had already given up two children for adoption and now, in 1970, found herself pregnant again. But in Texas, as in all but a few states at that time, abortion was illegal. McCorvey’s cause came to be adopted by people far more powerful than she."

"So how did Roe v. Wade help trigger, a generation later, the greatest crime drop in recorded history? As far as crime is concerned, it turns out that not all children are born equal. Not even close. Decades of studies have shown that a child born into an adverse family environment is far more likely than other children to become a criminal. And the millions of women most likely to have an abortion in the wake of Roe v. Wade-poor, unmarried, and teenage mothers for whom illegal abortions had been too expensive or too hard to get-were often models of adversity. They were the very women whose children, if born, would have been much more likely than average to become criminals. But because of Roe v. Wade, these children weren’t being born. This powerful cause would have a drastic, distant effect: years later, just as these unborn children would have entered their criminal primes, the rate of crime began to plummet. It wasn’t gun control or a strong economy or new police strategies that finally blunted the American crime wave. It was, among other factors, the reality that the pool of potential criminals had dramatically shrunk. Now, as the crime-drop experts (the former crime doomsayers) spun their theories to the media, how many times did they cite legalized abortion as a cause? Zero."

"I should start by saying that this is not a statement about abortion being right or wrong, about whether Roe vs. Wade is a good decision or should be repealed. It's a statement trying to understand the incredible decline in crime that we had in the 1990s. And I don't know how much people are aware of it, but violent crime is down almost 50 percent in the United States. And so I have spent about five years looking at all the usual types of suspects of why crime might have fallen. There still is a lot left over and I puzzled over this for years until one day I stumbled on to a set of statistics about the amount of abortion that takes place in the United States. It turns out after legalization in 1973 to the present, about one in four pregnancies in the United States ends in abortion. How can that not have a big social impact? And since I've been thinking about crime, I thought, `Well, is it possible this could really be linked to crime?' And it turns out there's decades' worth of social scientific research that suggests that if a child comes into the world, he's unwanted, has a difficult home life, that child's at tremendously increased risk for criminal activity. And so the theory is really pretty simple. After legalized abortion, there were fewer unwanted children being born. There are fewer unwanted children. When they grew up to reach their peak crime ages, they just weren't there to do the crime. And so it looks like about a third of this decline in crime that we saw in the '90s I believe can be attributed to the legalization of abortion."

"[A]s a matter of constitutional interpretation, even most liberal jurisprudes — if you administer truth serum — will tell you it is basically indefensible."

"None of this is to say that Justice Blackmun did not delegate too much of the original design for the intellectual content for his opinions to law clerks. Notwithstanding my enormous affection and admiration for the justice, I think he did—and Garrow's discussion of how Roe v. Wade's trimester framework came into being helps illustrate the point. In my view, every justice should be deeply engaged in the original formulation of every significant doctrinal twist and turn of his or her opinions. On at least some occasions, Blackmun was not. And in this regard, a piece like Garrow's, despite its methodological failings, provides a useful counterpoint to the usual claptrap minimizing the role that clerks play in fashioning the law."

"As a matter of constitutional interpretation and judicial method, Roe borders on the indefensible. I say this as someone utterly committed to the right to choose, as someone who believes such a right has grounding elsewhere in the Constitution instead of where Roe placed it, and as someone who loved Roe’s author like a grandfather."

"Professor Ely's admiration for the Warren Court was not unbounded. The main strand of Warren Court liberalism was small-d democracy, Professor Tushnet said. There was another strand, of personal autonomy, which was 1960's stuff. Ely didn't agree with it. Professor Ely expressed that disagreement most memorably in a caustic critique of the reasoning in Roe v. Wade, the 1973 decision finding a right to abortion in the Constitution. Earl Warren was no longer chief justice by then, but the Roe decision was rooted in a 1965 decision of the court. What is frightening about Roe is that this super-protected right, Professor Ely wrote in the Yale Law Journal in 1973, is not inferable from the language of the Constitution, the framers' thinking respecting the specific problem in issue, any general value derivable from the provisions they included, or the nation's governmental structure. Professor Ely had said he supported the availability of abortion as a matter of policy. But he wrote that the Roe decision was untenable as a matter of intellectually honest jurisprudence. It is not constitutional law, he said of the decision, and gives almost no sense of an obligation to try to be."

"What, exactly, is the problem with Roe? The problem, I believe, is that it has little connection to the Constitutional right it purportedly interpreted. A constitutional right to privacy broad enough to include abortion has no meaningful foundation in constitutional text, history, or precedent – at least, it does not if those sources are fairly described and reasonably faithfully followed."

"Dellapenna also noted the radical nature of the reasoning in Roe-that a right to abortion is found in a right to privacy, which itself is nowhere mentioned in the Constitution."

"Against all odds (and, I'm afraid, against all logic), the basic holding of Roe v. Wade is secure in the Supreme Court."

"[A] freedom of choice law would guarantee abortion rights the correct way, democratically, rather than by constitutional origami."

"Roy Lucas, counsel for Roe, was aware of the unreliability of the historiography put forward by Means. Lucas received a memorandum from a colleague pointing out that Means’s conclusions “sometimes strain credibility.” The memo added: Where the important thing is to win the case no matter how, however, I suppose I agree with Means’s technique: begin with a scholarly attempt at historical research; if it doesn’t work, fudge it as necessary; write a piece so long that others will read only your introduction and conclusion; then keep citing it until courts begin picking it up. This perverts the guise of impartial scholarship while advancing the proper ideological goals."

"In 1973 the U.S. Supreme Court made its landmark decision in Roe v. Wade which prohibited states from imposing restrictions on abortion even though the Constitution is silent on such matters. To justify their decision the Court made up a new “right” not found in the Constitution: the right to privacy. The founders of course never intended for such rights to exist s we know privacy is limited in many ways."

"The better argument for the result reached in Roe v. Wade is that it's necessary for the equality of women, rather than grounding it in the privacy right," says Edward Lazarus, a former law clerk for Blackmun and the author of "Closed Chambers: The Rise, Fall, and Future of the Modern Supreme Court."

"In Roe v. Wade much of Justice Blackmun’s judgment was devoted to the history of abortion in Anglo-American law. He concluded that a constitutional right to abortion was consistent with that history. In Webster v. Reproductive Health Services, 281 American historians signed an amicus brief which claimed that Roe was consistent with the nation’s history and traditions. This article respectfully questions Justice Blackmun’s conclusion and the historians’ claim."

"“Roe is the floor, not the ceiling,” Carmona said. “Abortion rights, reproductive justice, is absolutely a part of voting rights and justice for immigrants, and racial justice because they can’t be extracted from themselves. The most impacted communities across all those groups are communities of color.”"

"Twenty-five years ago this week, the Supreme Court held that the Constitution protects a woman’s decision whether to terminate her pregnancy. Roe v. Wade guaranteed women the right to a safe, legal medical abortion. It has preserved the health and lives of millions of women, maintaining their privacy, their dignity and their future. Roe v. Wade was a landmark victory for women’s rights. Before 1973, an estimated 1.2 million women a year turned in desperation to dangerous and illegal back-alley abortions. 5,000 died every year from the appalling treatment they endured, and large numbers of others suffered serious injury. The lesson of the years before Roe is clear-if a safe, legal abortion is not available, women will turn to unsafe means to terminate pregnancies."

"Who is best suited to make this intensely personal and agonizing decision- woman in consultation with her doctor, or politicians? The guarantee contained in Roe enables women to act according to their own beliefs, with limited government interference. A new generation of women have been born since Roe, and they have never lived in a society in which the only option to terminate a pregnancy was a dangerous and illegal back-alley abortion. Let us affirm once again that they never will. We must remain vigilant in our efforts to keep abortion safe and legal, and we must also take steps to make abortion rare. Pro-choice and anti-choice Americans must deal more effectively with the causes of unintended pregnancies, and give their support to efforts in Congress and around the country to ensure greater access to family planning for both women and men. The health and dignity of all women depend upon our commitment to these principles."

"Liberal judicial activism peaked with Roe v. Wade, the 1973 abortion decision…"

"The anonymous plaintiff in the groundbreaking 1973 Supreme Court abortion rights case tells her story in the gritty, rough-edged memoir, I Am Roe: My Life, Roe v. Wade, and Freedom of Choice. Norma McCorvey was a 21-year-old drifter with a drug and alcohol problem when she found herself pregnant a third time. Her search for an abortion led to two young lawyers, Sarah Weddington and Linda Coffee, who needed a plaintiff to challenge the Texas law banning abortions. McCorvey’s role from that point was nominal: She learned of the victory in a newspaper article, months after her baby had been born and given up for adoption. There emerges a tragic juxtaposition between McCorvey’s thwarted life and Weddington’s, whose expensive Mexican abortion in 1967 enabled her to finish law school, and whose role in Roe brought fame. It’s a comparison that highlights the disadvantages of poor and disenfranchised women in the abortion rights debate."

"Centuries ago we had alchemists, people who sought to change base metal into gold. We today have our alchemists who have successfully turned what was once a crime, the crime of abortion, into the gold of an act of compassion and humanity. Roe v. Wade certainly is the keystone of that result and we are told that it is the ultimate authority, that the Supreme Court, having spoken on the question of personhood and having confessed its incompetency to determine when human life begins because it said it could find no consensus in law theology, and philosophy, then said it is not necessary to determine when human life begins, but then they did pronounce on the basis of that vacuum that the preborn is not a person within the meaning of the 14th amendment."

"What is the matter with a little congressional activism? When we are faced with a decision that has been criticized from Austin to Boston by legal scholars who themselves may support abortion as a solution to unwanted pregnancies instead of, as I would say, the failure to look for a solution, but who criticize the case as totally unwarranted, are we to be impotent? Are we to say we cannot do anything in the face of 1.5 million abortions a year? If reappointment is important for courts not to be activists, I suggest to you that the carnage involved in the killing of 1.5 million defenseless, voiceless, preborn children is justification for a little congressional activism."

"Although I am pro-choice, I was taught in law school, and still believe, that Roe v. Wade is a muddle of bad reasoning and an authentic example of judicial overreaching. I also believe it was a political disaster for liberals. Roe is what first politicized religious conservatives while cutting off a political process that was legalizing abortion state by state anyway."

"No matter one’s personal view on abortion, we can all recognize that, at least for the short term, this bill may similarly be unenforceable. As citizens of this great country, we must always respect the authority of the U.S. Supreme Court even when we disagree with their decisions. Many Americans, myself included, disagreed when Roe v. Wade was handed down in 1973. The sponsors of this bill believe that it is time, once again, for the U.S. Supreme Court to revisit this important matter, and they believe this act may bring about the best opportunity for this to occur."