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2  DOBBS v. JACKSON WOMEN’S HEALTH ORGANIZATION 

Opinion of the Court 

such a right, and its survey of history ranged from the con-
stitutionally irrelevant (e.g., its discussion of abortion in an-
tiquity) to the plainly incorrect (e.g., its assertion that abor-
tion  was  probably  never  a  crime  under  the  common  law). 
After  cataloging  a  wealth  of  other  information  having  no
bearing  on  the  meaning  of  the  Constitution,  the  opinion 
concluded with a numbered set of rules much like those that 
might be found in a statute enacted by a legislature.

Under this scheme, each trimester of pregnancy was reg-
ulated differently, but the most critical line was drawn at
roughly the end of the second trimester, which, at the time,
corresponded to the point at which a fetus was thought to
achieve  “viability,”  i.e.,  the  ability  to  survive  outside  the
womb.  Although the Court acknowledged that States had 
a legitimate interest in protecting “potential life,”1 it found 
that  this  interest  could  not  justify  any  restriction  on  pre-
viability abortions.  The Court did not explain the basis for 
this line, and even abortion supporters have found it hard
to  defend  Roe’s  reasoning.  One  prominent  constitutional 
scholar wrote that he “would vote for a statute very much
like  the  one  the  Court  end[ed]  up  drafting”  if  he  were  “a
legislator,” but his assessment of Roe was memorable and 
brutal: Roe was “not constitutional law” at all and gave “al-
most no sense of an obligation to try to be.”2 

At the time of Roe, 30 States still prohibited abortion at 
all stages.  In the years prior to that decision, about a third
of  the  States  had  liberalized  their  laws,  but  Roe  abruptly 
ended  that  political  process.    It  imposed  the  same  highly 
restrictive  regime  on  the  entire  Nation,  and  it  effectively
struck  down  the  abortion  laws  of  every  single  State.3    As  

—————— 

1 Roe v. Wade, 410 U. S. 113, 163 (1973). 
2 J.  Ely,  The  Wages  of  Crying  Wolf:  A  Comment  on  Roe  v.  Wade,  82 

Yale L. J. 920, 926, 947 (1973) (Ely) (emphasis deleted). 

3 L.  Tribe,  Foreword:  Toward  a  Model  of  Roles  in  the  Due  Process  of 

Life and Law, 87 Harv. L. Rev. 1, 2 (1973) (Tribe).