This case is a historic and landmark one for women all over the world. The decision in this case changed the law of the land and essentially empowered women to take charge of their most personal decisions, with regard to their bodies.

The Roe v. Wade decision itself, however, reflects much more than the politics of this issue. It was an event that was a major defining moment in legal philosophy that continues to permeate very many legal decisions of our time: the idea that the Constitution could contain specific rights that are not mentioned in the Constitution.

A pregnant single woman named Roe brought a class action challenging the constitutionality of the Texas criminal abortion laws, which prohibits procuring or attempting an abortion except on medical advice for the sole purpose of saving the mother’s life. A licensed physician named Hallford, who had two state abortion prosecutions pending against him, was permitted to intervene. A childless married couple (the Does), the wife not being pregnant, separately attacked the laws, basing alleged injury on the future possibilities of contraceptive failure, resulting in  pregnancy.

A three-judge District Court, which consolidated the actions, held that Roe and Hallford, and members of their classes, had standing to sue and presented justiciable controversies. The court declared the abortion statutes void as vague and overbroadly infringing those plaintiffs’ rights. The court ruled the Does’ complaint not justiciable.

In the Supreme Court the constitutional question to be decided was that does the Constitution embrace the right of a woman to obtain an abortion,thereby nullifying the Texas prohibition?

The Court held that a woman’s right to an abortion fell within the right to privacy, as recognized in Griswold v. Connecticut 381 U.S. 479 (1965),protected by the Fourteenth Amendment. In Griswold, the Court for the first time found that the Constitution contained a general right of privacy, although privacy is not actually mentioned in the Constitution. (Griswold concerned the constitutionality of a Connecticut law that outlawed giving married persons information, medical advice and services on how to prevent conception.)

The Supreme Court decision gave a woman the right to an abortion during the entire period of the pregnancy, and defined different levels of state interest for regulating abortion in the second and third trimesters. As a result, the laws of 46 states were affected.

According to the Court, state criminal abortion laws like those involved here, that hold only a life-saving procedure on the mother’s behalf without regard to the stage of her pregnancy and other interests involved may be performed, violate the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, which protects against state action and the right to privacy, including a woman’s qualified right to terminate her pregnancy. Though the State cannot override that right, it has legitimate interests in protecting both the pregnant woman’s health and the potentiality of human life, each of which interests grows and reaches a “compelling” point at various stages of the woman’s approach to term.

The Court set the three different standards governing the government’s ability to intervene in abortion decisions, based on the three trimesters of pregnancy. As is now well-known, during the first trimester (three months) of pregnancy, a woman’s right to make her own choice is her own, in consultation with her doctor, with the government having increasing interest and increasing ability to regulate that choice in the later stages of the pregnancy.

Justice (now Chief Justice) William H. Rehnquist dissented from the majority decision in Roe v. Wade:

The question of abortion rights remains a hot political topic 25 years after this landmark decision, and politics still plays a vital part in whether people agree or criticize it.

If the Court means by the term “privacy” no more than that the claim of a person to be free from unwanted state regulation of consensual transactions may be a form of “liberty” protected by the Fourteenth Amendment, there is no doubt that similar claims have been upheld in our earlier decisions on the basis of that liberty. … But that liberty is not guaranteed absolutely against deprivation, only against deprivation without due process of law. The test traditionally applied in the area of social and economic legislation is whether or not a law such as that challenged has a rational relation to a valid state objective. … But the Court’s sweeping invalidation of any restrictions on abortion during the first trimester is impossible to justify under that standard, and the conscious weighing of competing factors that the Court’s opinion apparently substitutes for the established test is far more appropriate to a legislative judgment than to a judicial one.