Document ID: ./input/supremecourt_opinions/opinions/21pdf/19-1392_6j37.pdf/19-1392_6j37.pdf
Page Number: 13

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

5 

Opinion of the Court 

reaffirm Roe and Casey, and they contend that the Missis-
sippi law cannot stand if we do so.  Allowing Mississippi to
prohibit abortions after 15 weeks of pregnancy, they argue, 
“would be no different than overruling Casey and Roe en-
tirely.”  Brief for Respondents 43.  They  contend that  “no 
half-measures” are available and that we must either reaf-
firm or overrule Roe and Casey.  Brief for Respondents 50.
We hold that Roe and Casey must be overruled.  The Con-
stitution makes no reference to abortion, and no such right
is  implicitly  protected  by  any  constitutional  provision,  in-
cluding  the  one  on  which  the  defenders  of  Roe  and  Casey
now chiefly rely—the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth
Amendment.  That  provision  has  been  held  to  guarantee 
some rights that are not mentioned in the Constitution, but 
any such right must be “deeply rooted in this Nation’s his-
tory and tradition” and “implicit in the concept of ordered
liberty.”  Washington  v.  Glucksberg,  521  U. S.  702,  721 
(1997) (internal quotation marks omitted).

The right to abortion does not fall within this category.
Until the latter part of the 20th century, such a right was 
entirely unknown in American law.  Indeed, when the Four-
teenth  Amendment  was  adopted,  three  quarters  of  the 
States  made  abortion  a  crime  at  all  stages  of  pregnancy.
The abortion right is also critically different from any other 
right that this Court has held to fall within the Fourteenth
Amendment’s protection of “liberty.”  Roe’s defenders char-
acterize  the  abortion  right  as  similar  to  the  rights  recog-
nized in past decisions involving matters such as intimate
sexual relations, contraception, and marriage, but abortion
is fundamentally different, as both Roe and Casey acknowl-
edged, because it destroys what those decisions  called “fetal 
life” and what the law now before us describes as an “un-
born human being.”13
  Stare  decisis,  the  doctrine  on  which  Casey’s  controlling 

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13 Miss. Code Ann. §41–41–191(4)(b) (2018).