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6  DOBBS v. JACKSON WOMEN’S HEALTH ORGANIZATION 

BREYER, SOTOMAYOR, and KAGAN, JJ., dissenting 

on the availability of abortion both in structuring their re-
lationships  and  in  planning  their  lives.    The  legal  frame-
work Roe and Casey developed to balance the competing in-
terests in this sphere has proved workable in courts across 
the country.  No recent developments, in either law or fact, 
have eroded or cast doubt on those precedents.  Nothing, in
short,  has  changed.    Indeed,  the  Court  in  Casey  already
found all of that to be true.  Casey is a precedent about prec-
edent.  It reviewed the same arguments made here in sup-
port of overruling Roe, and it found that doing so was not
warranted.  The Court reverses course today for one reason 
and one reason only: because the composition of this Court 
has changed.  Stare decisis, this Court has often said, “con-
tributes to the actual and perceived integrity of the judicial 
process” by ensuring that decisions are “founded in the law 
rather than in the proclivities of individuals.”  Payne v. Ten-
nessee,  501  U. S.  808,  827  (1991);  Vasquez  v.  Hillery,  474 
U. S. 254, 265 (1986).  Today, the proclivities of individuals 
rule.  The Court departs from its obligation to faithfully and 
impartially apply the law.  We dissent. 

I 
We start with Roe and Casey, and with their deep connec-
tions to a broad swath of this Court’s precedents.  To hear 
the  majority  tell  the  tale,  Roe  and  Casey  are  aberrations: 
They came from nowhere, went nowhere—and so are easy 
to excise from this Nation’s constitutional law.  That is not 
true.  After describing the decisions themselves, we explain
how  they  are  rooted  in—and  themselves  led  to—other 
rights giving individuals control over their bodies and their 
most personal and intimate associations.  The majority does
not wish to talk about these matters for obvious reasons; to 
do so would both ground Roe and Casey in this Court’s prec-
edents and reveal the broad implications of today’s decision.
But the facts will not so handily disappear.  Roe and Casey 
were from the beginning, and are even more now, embedded