Roe Vs. Wade

1. Roe Vs. Wade 1973

2. Constitutional issue • Roe sued based on the XIV amendment which stated “nor shall any state deprive any person of life, liberty or property.” She stated that it was her life and her body and that she could do whatever she wanted in safe conditions.

3. Litigant: Roe • Norma Leah McCorvey (née Nelson, born September 22, 1947), better known by the legal pseudonym "Jane Roe", was the plaintiff in the landmark American lawsuit Roe v. Wade in 1973. The U.S. Supreme Court overturned individual states' laws against abortion by ruling them unconstitutional

4. Litigant: Wade • Wade, as Dallas County District Attorney, was the named defendant when attorneys Sarah Weddington and Linda Coffee took on a 1970 constitutional challenge to the Texas criminal statutes prohibiting doctors from performing abortions with the exception to save the life of the mother. Norma McCorvey ("Jane Roe"), The challenge sought a declaratory judgment that the Texas criminal abortion statutes were unconstitutional on their face, and an injunction restraining the defendant from enforcing the statutes. The lower court refused to grant Roe's desired injunction, but declared the criminal abortion statutes were void. Consequently, both side cross-appealed. The case worked its way through the appellate process, culminating in the Supreme Court's landmark 1973 Roe v. Wade decision which made abortion legal in the United States. Until that decision, Wade had never lost a case

5. Background Information • In September 1969, Norma L. McCorvey found out she was pregnant. She returned to Dallas, where friends told her to falsely acclaim that she had been raped, because then she could obtain a legal abortion. However, this failed, since there was no police report proving the alleged rape. She attempted to obtain an illegal abortion, but found the unauthorized site shuttered, closed down by the police. Eventually, she was referred to attorneys Linda Coffee and Sarah Weddington.

6. Background Information • In 1970, attorneys Linda Coffee and Sarah Weddington filed suit in a U.S. District Court in Texas on behalf of Norma L. McCorvey (under the alias Jane Roe). The defendant in the case was Dallas County District Attorney Henry Wade,representing the State of Texas.

7. Majority opinion • The opinion of the Roe Court, written by Justice Harry Blackmun, declined to adopt the district court's Ninth Amendment rationale, and instead asserted that the "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 people, is broad enough to encompass a woman's decision whether or not to terminate her pregnancy."

8. Dissenting Opinion Justice White wrote: • “I find nothing in the language or history of the Constitution to support the Court's judgment. The Court simply fashions and announces a new constitutional right for pregnant mothers and, with scarcely any reason or authority for its action, invests that right with sufficient substance to override most existing state abortion statutes. The upshot is that the people and the legislatures of the 50 States are constitutionally disentitled to weigh the relative importance of the continued existence and development of the fetus, on the one hand, against a spectrum of possible impacts on the mother, on the other hand. As an exercise of raw judicial power, the Court perhaps has authority to do what it does today; but, in my view, its judgment is an improvident and extravagant exercise of the power of judicial review that the Constitution extends to this Court.”

9. Dissenting Opinion Judge Rehnquist “To reach its result, the Court necessarily has had to find within the scope of the Fourteenth Amendment a right that was apparently completely unknown to the drafters of the Amendment. As early as 1821, the first state law dealing directly with abortion was enacted by the Connecticut Legislature. 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. While many States have amended or updated their laws, 21 of the laws on the books in 1868 remain in effect today.

10. Significance • The decision in Roe v. Wade began a still-continuing national debate over whether terminating pregnancies should be legal, or rather can a state choose to deem the act illegal, the role of the Supreme Court in constitutional adjudication, and the role of religious views in the political sphere. Roe v. Wade became one of the most politically significant Supreme Court decisions in history, reshaping national politics, dividing the nation into "pro-choice" and "pro-life" camps, and inspiring grassroots activism.

11. Our Reflections • We feel that this case was a very sensitive issue, and we tried to inform everyone without being byist. We Found that a basic layout of everything will provide enough information to all of you so that you can draw your own conclusions. • Weather you agree or disagree the courts ruling was final and abortion is legal. However in the future that could change. This is due to all the anti-abortion activist.

12. Bibliography Website #1- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Wade this webpage provided all the information we needed about Henry Wade Website #2- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norma_McCorvey this webpage provided all the information we needed on Jane Row. Website #3-http://www.tourolaw.edu/patch/roe/ This webpage provided information we needed on the court case