Document ID: ./input/supremecourt_opinions/opinions/21pdf/19-1392_6j37.pdf/19-1392_6j37.pdf
Page Number: 158

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

11 

BREYER, SOTOMAYOR, and KAGAN, JJ., dissenting 

the place where the woman’s liberty interest gave way to a 
State’s efforts to preserve potential life.  Id., at 870 (plural-
ity  opinion).  At  that  point,  a  “second  life”  was  capable  of
“independent existence.”  Ibid.  If the woman even by then 
had not acted, she lacked adequate grounds to object to “the
State’s  intervention  on  [the  developing  child’s]  behalf.” 
Ibid.  At the same time, Casey decided, based on two dec-
ades  of  experience,  that  the  Roe  framework  did  not  give
States sufficient ability to regulate abortion prior to viabil-
ity.  In that period, Casey now made clear, the State could 
regulate not only to protect the woman’s health but also to 
“promot[e] prenatal life.”  505 U. S., at 873 (plurality opin-
ion).  In particular, the State could ensure informed choice 
and  could  try  to  promote  childbirth.    See  id.,  at  877–878. 
But the State still could not place an “undue burden”—or 
“substantial obstacle”—“in the path of a woman seeking an
abortion.”  Id., at 878.  Prior to viability, the woman, con-
sistent  with  the  constitutional  “meaning  of  liberty,”  must 
“retain the ultimate control over her destiny and her body.” 
Id., at 869. 

We make one initial point about this analysis in light of
the majority’s insistence that Roe and Casey, and we in de-
fending  them,  are  dismissive  of  a  “State’s  interest  in  pro-
tecting prenatal life.”  Ante, at 38.  Nothing could get those 
decisions more wrong.  As just described, Roe and Casey in-
voked powerful state interests in that protection, operative 
at every stage of the pregnancy and overriding the woman’s
liberty after viability.  The strength of those state interests
is exactly why the Court allowed greater restrictions on the 
abortion right than on other rights deriving from the Four-
teenth Amendment.1  But what Roe and Casey also recog-
nized—which today’s majority does not—is that a woman’s 
—————— 

1 For  this reason, we  do  not understand  the  majority’s  view  that  our 
analogy between the right to an abortion and the rights to contraception
and same-sex marriage shows that we think “[t]he Constitution does not
permit the States to regard the destruction of a ‘potential life’ as a matter