"In the Wade case, this Court held unconstitutional a Texas statute making it a crime to procure or attempt an abortion except on medical advice for the purpose of saving the mother's life. The constitutional underpinning of Wade was a recognition that the "liberty" protected by the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment includes not only the freedoms explicitly mentioned in the Bill of Rights, but also a freedom of personal choice in certain matters of marriage and family life. [Footnote 18] This implicit constitutional liberty, the Court in Wade held, includes the freedom of a woman to decide whether to terminate a pregnancy. But the Court in Wade also recognized that a State has legitimate interests during a pregnancy in both ensuring the health of the mother and protecting potential human life. These state interests, which were found to be "separate and distinct" and to "gro[w] in substantiality as the woman approaches term," id. at 410 U. S. 162-163, pose a conflict with a woman's untrammeled freedom of choice. In resolving this conflict, the Court held that, before the end of the first trimester of pregnancy, neither state interest is sufficiently substantial to justify any intrusion on the woman's freedom of choice. In the second trimester, the state interest in maternal health was found to be sufficiently substantial to justify regulation reasonably related to that concern. And at viability, usually in the third trimester, the state interest in protecting the potential life of the fetus was found to justify a criminal prohibition against abortions, except where necessary for the preservation of the life or health of the mother. Thus, inasmuch as the Texas criminal statute allowed abortions only where necessary to save the life of the mother and without regard to the stage of the pregnancy, the Court held in Wade that the statute violated the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. In Maher v. Roe, 432 U. S. 464, the Court was presented with the question whether the scope of personal constitutional freedom recognized in Roe v. Wade included an entitlement to Medicaid payments for abortions that are not medically necessary. At issue in Maher was a Connecticut welfare regulation under which Medicaid recipients received payments for medical services incident to childbirth, but not for medical services incident to nontherapeutic abortions. The District Court held that the regulation violated the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment because the unequal subsidization of childbirth and abortion impinged on the "fundamental right to abortion" recognized in Wade and its progeny. It was the view of this Court that "the District Court misconceived the nature and scope of the fundamental right recognized in Roe." 432 U.S. at 432 U. S. 471. The doctrine of Roe v. Wade, the Court held in Maher, "protects the woman from unduly burdensome interference with her freedom to decide whether to terminate her pregnancy," id. at 432 U. S. 473-474, such as the severe criminal sanctions at issue in Roe v. Wade, supra, or the absolute requirement of spousal consent for an abortion challenged in Planned Parenthood of Central Missouri v. Danforth, 428 U. S. 52. But the constitutional freedom recognized in Wade and its progeny, the Maher Court explained, did not prevent Connecticut from making "a value judgment favoring childbirth over abortion, and . . implement[ing] that judgment by the allocation of public funds." 432 U.S. at 432 U. S. 474. As the Court elaborated:"