Document ID: ./input/supremecourt_opinions/opinions/21pdf/19-1392_6j37.pdf/19-1392_6j37.pdf
Page Number: 193

46  DOBBS v. JACKSON WOMEN’S HEALTH ORGANIZATION 

BREYER, SOTOMAYOR, and KAGAN, JJ., dissenting 

rights with a strong basis in the Constitution’s most funda-
mental  commitments;  they  did  not,  as  the  majority  does
here, take away a right that individuals have held, and re-
lied on, for 50 years.  To take that action based on a new 
and bare majority’s declaration that two Courts got the re-
sult egregiously wrong?  And to justify that action by refer-
ence to Barnette?  Or to Brown—a case in which the Chief 
Justice also wrote an (11-page) opinion in which the entire
Court could speak with one voice?  These questions answer 
themselves. 

Casey itself addressed both West Coast Hotel and Brown, 
and found that neither supported Roe’s overruling.  In West 
Coast  Hotel,  Casey  explained,  “the  facts  of  economic  life”
had proved “different from those previously assumed.”  505 
U. S., at 862.  And even though “Plessy was wrong the day 
it  was  decided,”  the  passage  of  time  had  made  that  ever
more clear to ever more citizens: “Society’s understanding 
of the facts” in 1954 was “fundamentally different” than in
1896.  Id., at 863.  So the Court needed to reverse course. 
“In constitutional adjudication as elsewhere in life, changed 
circumstances  may  impose  new  obligations.”  Id.,  at  864. 
And because such dramatic change had occurred, the public 
could understand why the Court was acting.  “[T]he Nation
could  accept  each  decision”  as  a  “response  to  the  Court’s 
constitutional duty.”  Ibid.  But that would not be true of a 
reversal  of  Roe—“[b]ecause  neither  the  factual  underpin-
nings of Roe’s central holding nor our understanding of it
has changed.”  505 U. S., at 864. 

That is just as much so today, because Roe and Casey con-
tinue to reflect, not diverge from, broad trends in American 
society.  It is, of course, true that many Americans, includ-
ing many women, opposed those decisions when issued and 
do so now as well.  Yet the fact remains: Roe and Casey were 
the product of a profound and ongoing change in women’s
roles in the latter part of the 20th century.  Only a dozen
years before Roe, the Court described women as “the center