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10  DOBBS v. JACKSON WOMEN’S HEALTH ORGANIZATION 

Opinion of the Court 

also  McDonald  v.  Chicago,  561  U. S.  742,  763–766  (2010) 
(majority opinion) (discussing incorporation).  And a third 
path  was  that  the  First,  Fourth,  and  Fifth  Amendments 
played no role and that the right was simply a component 
of the “liberty” protected by the Fourteenth Amendment’s 
Due Process Clause.  Roe, 410 U. S., at 153.  Roe expressed 
the “feel[ing]” that the Fourteenth Amendment was the pro-
vision that did the work, but its message seemed to be that 
the abortion right could be found somewhere in the Consti-
tution and that specifying its exact location was not of par-
amount importance.16  The Casey Court did not defend this 
unfocused analysis and instead grounded its decision solely 
on the theory that the right to obtain an abortion is part of
the “liberty” protected by the Fourteenth Amendment’s Due 
Process Clause. 

We discuss this theory in depth below, but before doing 
so,  we  briefly  address  one  additional  constitutional  provi-
sion  that  some  of  respondents’  amici  have  now  offered  as 
yet another potential home for the abortion right: the Four-
teenth Amendment’s Equal Protection Clause.  See Brief for 
United  States  as  Amicus  Curiae  24  (Brief  for  United 
States); see also Brief for Equal Protection Constitutional 
Law Scholars as Amici Curiae.  Neither Roe nor Casey saw 
fit to invoke this theory, and it is squarely foreclosed by our 
precedents,  which  establish  that  a  State’s  regulation  of 
abortion  is  not  a  sex-based  classification  and  is  thus  not 
subject  to  the  “heightened  scrutiny”  that  applies  to  such 
classifications.17  The regulation of a medical procedure that 

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16 The Court’s words were as follows: “This right of privacy, whether it 
be founded in the Fourteenth Amendment’s concept of personal liberty 
and restrictions upon state action, as we feel it is, or, as the District Court 
determined, in the Ninth Amendment’s reservation of rights to the peo-
ple, is broad enough to encompass a woman’s decision whether or not to
terminate her pregnancy.”  410 U. S., at 153. 

17 See, e.g., Sessions v. Morales-Santana, 582 U. S. 47, ___ (2017) (slip 

op., at 8).