Document ID: ./input/supremecourt_opinions/opinions/21pdf/19-1392_6j37.pdf/19-1392_6j37.pdf
Page Number: 3

Cite as:  597 U. S. ____ (2022) 

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Syllabus 

the  Court  has  been  “reluctant”  to  recognize  rights  that  are  not  men-
tioned in the Constitution.  Collins v. Harker Heights, 503 U. S. 115, 125. 
Guided by the history and tradition that map the essential compo-
nents  of  the  Nation’s  concept  of  ordered  liberty,  the  Court  finds  the 
Fourteenth Amendment clearly does not protect the right to an abor-
tion.  Until the latter part of the 20th century, there was no support in 
American law for a constitutional right to obtain an abortion.  No state 
constitutional provision had recognized such a right.  Until a few years 
before Roe, no federal or state court had recognized such a right.  Nor 
had any scholarly treatise.  Indeed, abortion had long been a crime in 
every single State.  At common law, abortion was criminal in at least 
some  stages  of  pregnancy  and  was  regarded  as  unlawful  and  could 
have very serious consequences at all stages.  American law followed 
the common law until a wave of statutory restrictions in the 1800s ex-
panded  criminal  liability  for  abortions.    By  the  time  the  Fourteenth 
Amendment was adopted, three-quarters of the States had made abor-
tion a crime at any stage of pregnancy.  This consensus endured until 
the day Roe was decided.  Roe either ignored or misstated this history, 
and Casey declined to reconsider Roe’s faulty historical analysis.

Respondents’ argument that this history does not matter flies in the 
face of the standard the Court has applied in determining whether an 
asserted right that is nowhere mentioned in the Constitution is never-
theless protected by the Fourteenth Amendment.  The Solicitor Gen-
eral repeats Roe’s claim that it is “doubtful . . . abortion was ever firmly 
established as a common-law crime even with respect to the destruc-
tion of a quick fetus,” 410 U. S., at 136, but the great common-law au-
thorities—Bracton, Coke, Hale, and Blackstone—all wrote that a post-
quickening  abortion  was  a  crime.    Moreover,  many  authorities  as-
serted that even a pre-quickening abortion was “unlawful” and that,
as a result, an abortionist was guilty of murder if the woman died from 
the attempt.  The Solicitor General suggests that history supports an
abortion right because of the common law’s failure to criminalize abor-
tion before quickening, but the insistence on quickening was not uni-
versal, see Mills v. Commonwealth, 13 Pa. 631, 633; State v. Slagle, 83 
N. C. 630, 632, and regardless, the fact that many States in the late 
18th and early 19th century did not criminalize pre-quickening abor-
tions does not mean that anyone thought the States lacked the author-
ity to do so. 

Instead of seriously pressing the argument that the abortion right 
itself  has  deep  roots,  supporters  of  Roe  and  Casey  contend  that  the 
abortion right is an integral part of a broader entrenched right.  Roe 
termed this a right to privacy, 410 U. S., at 154, and Casey described 
it  as  the  freedom  to  make  “intimate  and  personal  choices”  that  are 
“central to personal dignity and autonomy,” 505 U. S., at 851.  Ordered