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Page Number: 56.0

48  DOBBS v. JACKSON WOMEN’S HEALTH ORGANIZATION 

Opinion of the Court 

been enacted not to protect fetal life but to further “a Victo-
rian  social  concern”  about  “illicit  sexual  conduct,”  id.,  at 
148. 

Roe’s failure even to note the overwhelming consensus of 
state  laws  in  effect  in  1868  is  striking,  and  what  it  said 
about the common law was simply wrong.  Relying on two
discredited articles by an abortion advocate, the Court er-
roneously  suggested—contrary  to  Bracton,  Coke,  Hale, 
Blackstone, and a wealth of other authority—that the com-
mon law had probably never really treated post-quickening 
abortion  as  a  crime.  See  id.,  at  136  (“[I]t  now  appear[s] 
doubtful that abortion was ever firmly established as a com-
mon-law  crime  even  with  respect  to  the  destruction  of  a
quick  fetus”).    This  erroneous  understanding  appears  to 
have played an important part in the Court’s thinking be-
cause the opinion cited “the lenity of the common law” as 
one  of  the  four  factors  that  informed  its  decision.  Id.,  at 
165. 

After  surveying  history,  the  opinion  spent  many  para-
graphs conducting the sort of fact-finding that might be un-
dertaken  by  a  legislative  committee.  This  included  a 
lengthy  account  of  the  “position  of  the  American  Medical
Association”  and  “[t]he  position  of  the  American  Public 
Health  Association,”  as  well  as  the  vote  by  the  American
Bar Association’s House of Delegates in February 1972 on
proposed abortion legislation.  Id., at 141, 144, 146 (empha-
sis  deleted).    Also  noted  were  a  British  judicial  decision 
handed down in 1939 and a new British abortion law  en-
acted in 1967.  Id., at 137–138.  The Court did not explain
why these sources shed light on the meaning of the Consti-
tution, and not one of them adopted or advocated anything 
like the scheme that Roe imposed on the country.

Finally, after all this, the Court turned to precedent.  Cit-
ing  a  broad  array  of  cases,  the  Court  found  support  for  a 
constitutional “right of personal privacy,” id., at 152, but it 
conflated two very different meanings of the term: the right