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(1973)

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Chief Justice Warren E. Burger Associate Justices William O. Douglas · William J. Brennan Jr. Potter Stewart · Byron White Thurgood Marshall · Harry Blackmun Lewis F. Powell Jr. · William Rehnquist

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In 1970, Jane Roe (a fictional name used in court documents to protect the plaintiff’s identity) filed a lawsuit against Henry Wade, the district attorney of Dallas County, Texas, where she resided, challenging a Texas law making abortion illegal except by a doctor’s orders to save a woman’s life. In her lawsuit, Roe alleged that the state laws were unconstitutionally vague and abridged her right of personal privacy, protected by the First, Fourth, Fifth, Ninth, and Fourteenth Amendments.

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There was no lower court prior to the supreme court

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There was no lower court prior to the supreme court

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Jane Roe brought the case to the supreme court against Wade, because she believed that under the 14th amendment she had the right to abortion, and that the state should not be allowed to outlaw it.

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The 14th amendment had nothing to do with abortion and there is nothing in the constitution about abortion.

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Does the Constitution recognize a woman's right to terminate her pregnancy by abortion?

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The Court's opinion decides that a State may impose virtually no restriction on the performance
of abortions during the first trimester of pregnancy. Our previous decisions indicate that a
necessary predicate for such an opinion is a plaintiff who was in her first trimester of pregnancy
at some time during the pendency of her law-suit. While a party may vindicate his own
constitutional rights, he may not seek vindication for the rights of others. Moose Lodge v.
Irvis, 407 U.S. 163 (1972); Sierra Club v. Morton, 405 U.S. 727 (1972). The Court's statement of
facts in this case makes clear, however, that the record in no way indicates the presence of such a
plaintiff. We know only that plaintiff Roe at the time of filing her complaint was a pregnant
woman; for aught that appears in this record, she may have been in her last trimester of
pregnancy as of the date the complaint was filed.

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MR. JUSTICE BLACKMUN delivered the opinion of the Court.
This Texas federal appeal and its Georgia companion, Doe v. Bolton, post, p. 179, present
constitutional challenges to state criminal abortion legislation. The Texas statutes under attack
here are typical of those that have been in effect in many States for approximately a century. The
Georgia statutes, in contrast, have a modern cast and are a legislative product that, to an extent at
least, obviously reflects the influences of recent attitudinal change, of advancing medical
knowledge and techniques, and of new thinking about an old issue.

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The significance of this is that it ruled against a state official of texas, and that it changed a tradition that had been going on for a long time. There had never been legal abortions before this case.

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This is an example of Activism, because the judges used the constitution loosely and ruled in favor of social progressiveness.