"The Court, in the years following Roe, policed the constitutional abortion right by declaring which of these new state regulations exceeded the leeway granted in Roe and which did not Some regulations carried criminal penalties, but no state attempted to ban abortion altogether at any stage of pregnancy. Instead, states used regulations to construct obstacle courses that women had to navigate before they could exercise their constitutionally protected abortion right. The Court, however, declared that certain regulations impermissibly infringed on the constitutional right. It held that a state could not require spousal consent to abortion or prohibit a particular method of abortion in the first trimester. It refused to allow states to require hospitalization for all second-trimester abortions or to require that a woman listen to a “parade of horribles” about abortion before she obtained one. And the Court refused to allow states to require doctors to exercise a prescribed degree of care to save the fetus in postviability abortions and to require that two doctors be present during postviability abortions."
January 1, 1970