Document ID: ./input/supremecourt_opinions/opinions/21pdf/19-1392_6j37.pdf/19-1392_6j37.pdf
Page Number: 77

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

69 

Opinion of the Court 

strength  of  our  opinions,  not  an  attempt  to  exercise  “raw 
judicial power.”  Roe, 410 U. S., at 222 (White, J., dissent-
ing).

We  do  not  pretend  to  know  how  our  political  system  or
society will respond to today’s decision overruling Roe and 
Casey.  And even if we could foresee what will happen, we
would have no authority to let that knowledge influence our 
decision.  We can only do our job, which is to interpret the 
law, apply longstanding principles of stare decisis, and de-
cide this case accordingly.

We therefore hold that the Constitution does not confer a 
right to abortion.  Roe and Casey must be overruled, and the 
authority to regulate abortion must be returned to the peo-
ple and their elected representatives. 

V 
A 
1 
The dissent argues that we have “abandon[ed]” stare de-
cisis, post, at 30, but we have done no such thing, and it is
the  dissent’s  understanding  of  stare  decisis  that  breaks 
with  tradition.    The  dissent’s  foundational  contention  is 
that the Court should never (or perhaps almost never) over-
rule an egregiously wrong constitutional precedent unless 
the Court can “poin[t] to major legal or factual changes un-
dermining [the] decision’s original basis.”  Post, at 37.  To 
support  this  contention,  the  dissent  claims  that  Brown  v. 
Board  of  Education,  347  U. S.  483,  and  other  landmark 
cases  overruling  prior  precedents  “responded  to  changed 
law and to changed facts and attitudes that had taken hold 
throughout society.”  Post, at 43.  The unmistakable impli-
cation of this argument is that only the passage of time and 
new  developments  justified  those  decisions.  Recognition
that the cases they overruled were egregiously wrong on the 
day they were handed down was not enough. 

The Court has never adopted this strange new version of