In a lawsuit filed three years earlier in a Texas court, Jane Roe, a pseudonym for Norm McCorveya single mother pregnant for the third time, attacked the constitutionality of Texas legislation that made abortion a crime.
The highest jurisdiction in the United States took up the matter months later due to an appeal by Jane Roe against the Dallas prosecutor, Henry Wadebut also by another of a doctor and that of a couple without children who wanted to be able to practice or undergo a voluntary interruption of pregnancy with all legality.
After having listened to the parties on two occasions, the Supreme Court waited for the presidential elections of November 1972 and the re-election of the Republican Richard Nixon to issue its decision, taken by seven votes to two.
Acknowledging the “sensitive and emotional nature of the abortion debate, the starkly opposing viewpoints, even among physicians, and the deep and unequivocal convictions that the issue inspires,” the high court ended up annulling the Texas laws on abortion.
The decision, which marked case law in a majority of states in the United States where similar laws were in force, stipulates that “The right to respect for private life, present in the 14th amendment of the Constitution, is broad enough to apply to a woman’s decision to terminate her pregnancy or not.”
“A Texas-type law that makes abortion a crime except when the life of the mother is in danger, without regard to the state of the pregnancy or other interests at stake, violates the 14th Amendment to the Constitution,” according to the decision.
But the Supreme Court agreed with the trial court that the right to respect for private life “is not, however, absolute”.
“At a certain point, the interests of the state and the protection of health, medical criteria and prenatal life become dominant,” said Judge Harry Blackmun, who wrote the court text.
The high jurisdiction thus gave reason to Jane Roe, who later became an anti-abortion activist, but rejected the appeals, described as inadmissible, by the doctor James Hallford and the couple John and Mary Doe.
Thus, “Roe v. Wade” goes hand in hand with the “Doe v. Bolton” decision, which authorizes each federal state to add restrictions to the right to abortion when the pregnancy is advanced.
The constitutional right to abortion has since been confirmed by other judicial decisions.
Source: Ambito
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