"Roe’s holding fused old and new legal frameworks. By protecting a woman’s decision whether to bear a child until the period of fetal viability, the Court recognized as constitutional a framework at least partly resembling abortion “repeal.” Under Roe, government could no longer ban abortion or make access to the procedure conditional on ALI-type indications (for example, rape, maternal health) in the period of pregnancy before viability. But Roe did not altogether bar government from regulating abortion. To the contrary, Roe gave constitutional sanction to government interests in regulating abortion that grow with a pregnancy; it vindicated these interests alongside women’s right to have an abortion through the trimester framework, which allowed government to restrict abortion in the interest of protecting potential life at the point of fetal viability. In the years since Roe, the Court has allowed government more leeway to regulate abortion to express its interest in protecting potential life throughout pregnancy. Roe’s reasoning fused old and new justifications for decriminalizing abortion. Roe indirectly reflected the abortion-rights claims of the women’s movement, recognizing that laws that criminalized abortion inflict constitutionally significant harms on women, and not doctors only. But Roe expressed those harms in public health-inflected language. The decision barred government from coercing women to bear children, but its reasoning did not audibly express the feminist claim (1) that a woman has dignitary interests in making her own decision about whether to bear a child, or (2) that a woman needs the ability to control the timing of motherhood in order to negotiate institutional arrangements that exclude caregivers from participation in the workplace and other arenas of civic life."
January 1, 1970