McCorvey was no longer claiming her pregnancy was a result of rape, and later acknowledged that she had lied about having been raped, in hope to circumvent a Texas law that banned abortions except when the woman's life is in danger. Seven justices formed the majority and joined an opinion written by Justice Harry Blackmun. Marchers participate in the "March for Life" rally in Washington, D.C. on Jan. 22, 2016. [71] Like the dissenters in Roe, they maintain that the Constitution is silent on the issue, and that proper solutions to the question would best be found via state legislatures and the legislative process, rather than through an all-encompassing ruling from the Supreme Court. We talked about truly desperate and needy women, not women already wearing maternity clothes. By the time of the adoption of the Fourteenth Amendment in 1868, there were at least 36 laws enacted by state or territorial legislatures limiting abortion. [140] Sarah Weddington explained in a speech at the Institute for Educational Ethics in Oklahoma why she used the false rape charges all the way to the Supreme Court: My conduct may not have been totally ethical. [citation needed], Chief Justice John Roberts, Scalia, Thomas, and Alito joined the majority. [154] Despite Kavanaugh's statement, there is concern that with the Supreme Court having a strong conservative majority, that Roe v. Wade will be overturned given an appropriate case to challenge it. According to Stevens, if the decision had avoided the trimester framework and simply stated that the right to privacy included a right to choose abortion, "it might have been much more acceptable" from a legal standpoint. According to the Supreme Court the task of judging whether a law puts an unconstitutional burden on a woman's right to abortion belongs with the courts and not the legislatures. While Roe v. Wade fits my personal beliefs (1st Trimester legal, 3rd illegal), it was a lousy and Unconstitutional ruling that invented law from the bench by imagining powers in the 14th (100 years after the fact) that the authors and ratifiers disagreed Subscribe for just $19.99. Roe v. Wade, 410 U.S. 113 (1973), was a landmark decision of the U.S. Supreme Court in which the Court ruled that the Constitution of the United States protects a pregnant woman's liberty to choose to have an abortion without excessive government restriction. [4][5] The Court resolved this balancing test by tying state regulation of abortion to the three trimesters of pregnancy: during the first trimester, governments could not prohibit abortions at all; during the second trimester, governments could require reasonable health regulations; during the third trimester, abortions could be prohibited entirely so long as the laws contained exceptions for cases when they were necessary to save the life or health of the mother. [133] In 1998, she testified to Congress: It was my pseudonym, Jane Roe, which had been used to create the "right" to abortion out of legal thin air. On January 22, 1973, the Supreme Court issued a 72 decision in favor of Norma McCorvey ("Jane Roe") that held that women in the United States have a fundamental right to choose whether or not to have abortions without excessive government restriction, and struck down Texas's abortion ban as unconstitutional. Write to Olivia B. Waxman at olivia.waxman@time.com. "[98], The assertion that the Supreme Court was making a legislative decision is often repeated by opponents of the ruling.