"43. Grounding the right to abortion in the Fourteenth Amendment and in the concept of substantive due process (Roe v Wade 153, 164) was, and still is, one of the most controversial aspects of Roe v Wade. Justice Stewart concurred in Roe v Wade mainly to pay homage to substantive due process and the Court’s willingness to invoke it so explicitly after having seemingly put the doctrine to rest in Ferguson v Skrupa. Justice Stewart noted that Griswold v Connecticut should itself be understood as a substantive due process case, although the case did not rest expressly on that basis. 44. Justice Rehnquist, one of two dissenters in Roe v Wade, took issue with the new right. He thought the right to an abortion was a form of ‘liberty’ protected by the Fourteenth Amendment, but the Fourteenth Amendment imposed a procedural requirement, not a substantive one. The right, therefore, was only protected against its deprivation without due process of law (Roe v Wade 173). He disagreed that abortion was part of a right to privacy because neither the abortion procedure was private, as abortion involved a doctor, nor was abortion connected to the ‘privacy’ associated with the Fourth Amendment’s protection against unreasonable searches and seizures (ibid 172). Moreover, although Justice Rehnquist conceded that due process protected some substantive rights, he thought abortion was not among those because approximately 36 state and territorial legislatures limited abortion at the time the Fourteenth Amendment was adopted (ibid 174–75). He preferred a rational basis test that would permit more deference to the legislature, especially for some restrictions on first-trimester abortions. He thought the ‘compelling state interest’ test was inappropriate: it was borrowed from Equal Protection cases and would leave ‘this area of the law more confused’ (ibid 173), and it would trample upon the legislature’s judgment (ibid 174). He called the Court’s tripartite framework ‘judicial legislation’ not reflective of the founders’ intent (ibid 174). 45. Justice White also dissented. He focused on the claims of women who had no threat to their life or health from carrying a fetus to term, like the plaintiffs before the Court, and noted that they wanted to end the pregnancy potentially for ‘convenience, sham or caprice’ (ibid 221). He thought the resolution of the competing interests ‘should be left with the people and to the political processes’ because ‘nothing in the language or history of the Constitution’ required otherwise (ibid 221–22)."
Roe v. Wade

January 1, 1970

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