Document ID: ./input/supremecourt_opinions/opinions/21pdf/19-1392_6j37.pdf/19-1392_6j37.pdf
Page Number: 37

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

29 

Opinion of the Court 

have been reluctant to attribute those motives to the legis-
lative body as a whole.  “What motivates one legislator to 
make a speech about a statute is not necessarily what mo-
tivates scores of others to enact it.”  Id., at 384. 

Here, the argument about legislative motive is not even 
based on statements by legislators, but on statements made
by a few supporters of the new 19th-century abortion laws, 
and it is quite a leap to attribute these motives to all the 
legislators whose votes were responsible for the enactment 
of those laws.  Recall that at the time of the adoption of the 
Fourteenth Amendment, over three-quarters of the States 
had adopted statutes criminalizing abortion (usually at all 
stages of pregnancy), and that from the early 20th century 
until the day Roe was handed down, every single State had
such a law on its books.  Are we to believe that the hundreds 
of lawmakers whose votes were needed to enact these laws 
were motivated by hostility to Catholics and women? 

There  is  ample  evidence  that  the  passage of  these  laws 
was instead spurred by a sincere belief that abortion kills a
human being.  Many judicial decisions from the late 19th 
and early 20th centuries made that point.  See, e.g., Nash 
v. Meyer, 54 Idaho 283, 301, 31 P. 2d 273, 280 (1934); State 
v. Ausplund, 86 Ore. 121, 131–132, 167 P. 1019, 1022–1023 
(1917); Trent v. State, 15 Ala. App. 485, 488, 73 S. 834, 836 
(1916);  State  v.  Miller,  90  Kan.  230,  233,  133  P.  878,  879 
(1913); State v. Tippie, 89 Ohio St. 35, 39–40, 105 N. E. 75, 
77  (1913);  State  v.  Gedicke,  43  N. J. L.  86,  90  (1881); 
Dougherty v. People, 1 Colo. 514, 522–523 (1873); State v. 
Moore, 25 Iowa 128, 131–132 (1868); Smith, 33 Me., at 57; 
see also Memphis Center for Reproductive Health v. Slatery, 
14 F. 4th 409, 446, and n. 11 (CA6 2021) (Thapar, J., con-
curring in judgment in part and dissenting in part) (citing
cases).

One may disagree with this belief (and our decision is not 
based on any view about when a State should regard pre-
natal life as having rights or legally cognizable interests),