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4  DOBBS v. JACKSON WOMEN’S HEALTH ORGANIZATION 

Opinion of the Court 

overruled in toto, and Roe itself was overruled in part.10  Ca-
sey threw out Roe’s trimester scheme and substituted a new 
rule of uncertain origin under which States were forbidden
to adopt any regulation that imposed an “undue burden” on
a  woman’s  right  to  have  an  abortion.11    The  decision  pro-
vided  no  clear  guidance  about  the  difference  between  a 
“due” and an “undue” burden.  But the three Justices who 
authored  the  controlling  opinion  “call[ed]  the  contending 
sides  of  a  national  controversy  to  end  their  national  divi-
sion” by treating the Court’s decision as the final settlement
of the question of the constitutional right to abortion.12 

As has become increasingly apparent in the intervening 
years, Casey did not achieve that goal.  Americans continue 
to hold passionate and widely divergent views on abortion,
and state legislatures have acted accordingly.  Some have 
recently  enacted  laws  allowing  abortion,  with  few  re-
strictions, at all stages of pregnancy.  Others have tightly
restricted abortion beginning well before viability.  And in 
this case, 26 States have expressly asked this Court to over-
rule Roe and Casey and allow the States to regulate or pro-
hibit pre-viability abortions.

Before us now is one such state law.  The State of Missis-
sippi asks us to uphold the constitutionality of a law that 
generally prohibits an abortion after the 15th week of preg-
nancy—several weeks before the point at which a fetus is
now regarded as “viable” outside the womb.  In defending
this  law,  the  State’s  primary  argument  is  that  we  should 
reconsider and overrule Roe and Casey and once again allow
each State to regulate abortion as its citizens wish.  On the 
other side, respondents and the Solicitor General ask us to 

—————— 

10 Id., at 861, 870, 873 (overruling Akron v. Akron Center for Reproduc-
tive Health, Inc., 462 U. S. 416 (1983), and Thornburgh v. American Col-
lege of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, 476 U. S. 747 (1986)). 

11 505 U. S., at 874. 
12 Id., at 867.