What, I'm going to get quizzed now?
Roe won the case, in the sense that the Texas abortion laws where found to be unconstitutional by the court. Roe was the pregnant woman who wanted an abortion.
What Roe made up was that "a right to privacy" equals "a right to have an abortion". In an earlier case, Griswold v. Connecticut, the court had created the idea of a constitutional privacy right. The privacy right was claimed to emanate from the "penumbras" of the 1st, 3rd, 4th, 5th, and 9th amendments, and is also assumed to have support in the 14th amendment.
In Roe it was decided that the right to privacy includes the right to an abortion. That abortion was a fundamental right so that restrictions on abortion face strict scrutiny requiring a compelling state interest to be allowed. It was decided that the state's interest in fetal life does not become compelling to viability which was set at 6 months (even though fetuses can be viable earlier than that) It was also decided that the fetus was not considered a person under the 14th amendment. It was decided that the state may regulate abortion during the second trimester only for the protection of the woman's health and that it may regulate or ban abortion during the third trimester to protect fetal life. However in practice many attempts to ban late term abortions have been struck down by later court decisions.
None of the referenced amendments mentions abortion (or contraception which was at issue in Griswold). None of them say anything about a generalized right to privacy, nor is there any indication anywhere in the constitution or even pre-Griswold USSC cases, as to why such a right to privacy should apply to abortion and contraception but not to information about my income (source, amount, ect.) or in many other areas where there is information about ourselves which we would like to keep private. Also the cases don't even really deal with privacy (keeping information private, or keeping others from observing us) but rather with actions and how they can and can't be regulated.
Tim |
