Roe v.

Wade
By, Joshua White
September 24, 2020
3rd Period

This Supreme Court case was about a pregnant woman named Jane Roe arguing that the
Texas law of abortion, which states that a woman can only get an abortion, if the baby
was life-threatening, are unconstitutional. On January 22, 1973, after much thought, the
Supreme Court justices decided that the Texas law forbidding abortion constitutes an
invasion of privacy and is therefore unconstitutional. The decision essentially legalized
abortion nationwide and put the decision in the hands of the women who wish to abort
their pregnancies nationwide.
Some characteristics of the decision include its effects, its history, and its significance.
The effects include, but are not limited to, safer abortion clinics, which were important,
because before the decision was made, 17 percent of all pregnancy-related deaths were
due to illegal abortions. Now, less than 0.3 percent of women within the gestational age
range ever sustain any serious complications, which is a huge improvement. With the
additional liberty granted to women of child-bearing age, they can pursue any economic
or employment goals they want, because they can now control their reproductive lives.
To make the decision, the justices had to revisit any prior cases pertaining to the topic.
About 10 years earlier, in Griswold v. Connecticut, they decided that the banning of birth
control was an invasion of privacy for married couples, which was unconstitutional. In
Eisenstadt v. Baird, they extended the right to include single people as well, Due to those
decisions, the court decided that it would be within reason to extend the right to include
unmarried pregnant women, which was exactly what she was. The decision served as a
culmination to a decade’s worth of work pushing for legalized abortion.
I personally believe that if the woman who seeks abortion truly wants to, she should be
allowed to abort her pregnancy, because it doesn’t seem fair to me to allow other people
to decide when the baby is growing inside the woman in question. Criminalizing abortion
essentially deprives women of the liberty to choose when they’re ready to become a
mother. No one should make the woman have the child when she isn’t ready! I feel that
women should have a say in when to have a baby, because they’ve fought for their rights
long ago, so they’ve earned them.
https://www.plannedparenthoodaction.org/uploads/filer_public/c6/59/c65961ce-447c-
48e1-b315-79bfac151e42/abortion_roe_history.pdf
https://www.law.cornell.edu/supremecourt/text/410/113
https://fabiusmaximus.files.wordpress.com/2012/08/20120821-justice-sword.jpg
https://piedtype.files.wordpress.com/2016/01/roevwade.jpg