How To Argue For Abortion Rights
In 1969, a woman named Norma McCorvey, known by the legal pseudonym “Jane Roe”, became pregnant with her third child. Living in Texas, where abortion was illegal save for instances of medical complications that could kill the mother, McCorvey had her lawyers file a lawsuit in the U.S. federal court against her local DA, Henry Wade, alleging that Texas’s abortion laws were unconstitutional. The rest was history — the Supreme Court issued a 7–2 decision holding that the Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution provides a fundamental “right to privacy”, which protects a pregnant woman’s right to abortion. The landmark case resulted in the Court announcing a trimester timetable — any abortions in the first trimester could not be regulated by the government except to require that they were performed by a licensed physician. Any during the second trimester could be regulated but only for the purpose of protecting maternal health and not for protecting foetal “life”. After the third trimester, abortions could be regulated and even prohibited, except for medical exceptions (i.e. saving the life or health of the mother). Essentially, Roe v. Wade provided women with constitutional protection to receive an abortion if they so wished…that is until the 24th of June 2022.
