Document ID: ./input/supremecourt_opinions/opinions/21pdf/19-1392_6j37.pdf/19-1392_6j37.pdf
Page Number: 44.0

36  DOBBS v. JACKSON WOMEN’S HEALTH ORGANIZATION 

Opinion of the Court 

devastating to its position.  We have held that the “estab-
lished  method  of  substantive-due-process  analysis”  re-
quires  that  an  unenumerated  right  be  “ ‘deeply  rooted  in 
this Nation’s history and tradition’ ” before it can be recog-
nized as a component of the “liberty” protected in the Due 
Process  Clause.  Glucksberg,  521  U. S.,  at  721;  cf.  Timbs, 
586 U. S., at ___ (slip op., at 7).  But despite the dissent’s 
professed fidelity to stare decisis, it fails to seriously engage
with  that  important  precedent—which  it  cannot  possibly 
satisfy.

The dissent attempts to obscure this failure by misrepre-
senting our application of Glucksberg.  The dissent suggests
that we have focused only on “the legal status of abortion in 
the  19th  century,”  post,  at  26,  but  our  review  of  this  Na-
tion’s tradition extends well past that period.  As explained, 
for  more  than  a  century  after  1868—including  “another 
half-century”  after  women  gained  the  constitutional  right 
to vote in 1920, see post, at 15; Amdt. 19—it was firmly es-
tablished that laws prohibiting abortion like the Texas law
at issue in Roe were permissible exercises of state regula-
tory authority.  And today, another half century later, more
than half of the States have asked us to overrule Roe and 
Casey.  The dissent cannot establish that a right to abortion 
has ever been part of this Nation’s tradition. 

2 

Because the dissent cannot argue that the abortion right 
is rooted in this Nation’s history and tradition, it contends
that the “constitutional tradition” is “not captured whole at
a single moment,” and that its “meaning gains content from
the long sweep of our history and from successive judicial 
precedents.”  Post,  at  18  (internal  quotation  marks  omit-
ted).  This vague formulation imposes no clear restraints on 
what  Justice  White  called  the  “exercise  of  raw  judicial 
power,”  Roe,  410  U. S.,  at  222  (dissenting  opinion),  and 
while the dissent claims that its standard “does not mean