This conclusion, however, does not of itself fully answer the contentions
raised by Texas, and we pass on to other considerations.

B. The pregnant woman cannot be isolated in her privacy. She carries an
embryo and, later, a fetus, if one accepts the medical definitions of the
developing young in the human uterus. See Dorland's Illustrated Medical
Dictionary 478-479, 547 (24th ed. 1965). The situation therefore is inherently
different from marital intimacy, or bedroom possession of obscene material, or
marriage, or procreation, or education, with which Eisenstadt and Griswold,
Stanley, Loving, Skinner, and Pierce and Meyer were respectively concerned. As
we have intimated above, it is reasonable and appropriate for a State to decide
that at some point in time another interest, that of health of the mother or
that of potential human life, becomes significantly involved. The woman's
privacy is no longer sole and any right of privacy she possesses must be
measured accordingly.

Texas urges that, apart from the Fourteenth Amendment, life begins at
conception and is present throughout pregnancy, and that, therefore, the State
has a compelling interest in protecting that life from and after conception.
We need not resolve the difficult question of when life begins. When
those trained in the respective disciplines of medicine, philosophy, and
theology are unable to arrive at any consensus, the judiciary, at this point in
the development of man's knowledge, is not in a position to speculate as to the
answer. [410 U.S. 113, 160]