SCOTUS Opinion: 6-3 Overturn Roe V. Wade

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SCOTUS Opinion No. 19–1392

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Opinion of the Court NOTICE: This opinion is subject to formal revision before publication in the preliminary print of the United States Reports. Readers are requested to notify the Reporter of Decisions, Supreme Court of the United States, Wash-ington, D. C. 20543, of any typographical or other formal errors, in order that corrections may be made before the preliminary print goes to press. SUPREME COURT OF THE UNITED STATES _________________ No. 19–1392 _________________ THOMAS E. DOBBS, STATE HEALTH OFFICER OF THE MISSISSIPPI DEPARTMENT OF HEALTH, ET AL., PETITIONERS v. JACKSON WOMEN’S HEALTH ORGANIZATION, ET AL. ON WRIT OF CERTIORARI TO THE UNITED STATES COURT OF APPEALS FOR THE FIFTH CIRCUIT [June 24, 2022] JUSTICE ALITO delivered the opinion of the Court. Abortion presents a profound moral issue on which Amer-icans hold sharply conflicting views. Some believe fervently that a human person comes into being at conception and that abortion ends an innocent life. Others feel just as strongly that any regulation of abortion invades a woman’s right to control her own body and prevents women from achieving full equality. Still others in a third group think that abortion should be allowed under some but not all cir-cumstances, and those within this group hold a variety of views about the particular restrictions that should be im-posed. For the first 185 years after the adoption of the Constitu-tion, each State was permitted to address this issue in ac-cordance with the views of its citizens. Then, in 1973, this Court decided Roe v. Wade, 410 U. S. 113. Even though the Constitution makes no mention of abortion, the Court held that it confers a broad right to obtain one. It did not claim that American law or the common law had ever recognized

such a right, and its survey of history ranged from the con-stitutionally irrelevant (e.g., its discussion of abortion in an-tiquity) to the plainly incorrect (e.g., its assertion that abor-tion was probably never a crime under the common law). After cataloging a wealth of other information having no bearing on the meaning of the Constitution, the opinion concluded with a numbered set of rules much like those that might be found in a statute enacted by a legislature. Under this scheme, each trimester of pregnancy was reg-ulated differently, but the most critical line was drawn at roughly the end of the second trimester, which, at the time, corresponded to the point at which a fetus was thought to achieve “viability,” i.e., the ability to survive outside the womb. Although the Court acknowledged that States had a legitimate interest in protecting “potential life,”1 it found that this interest could not justify any restriction on pre-viability abortions. The Court did not explain the basis for this line, and even abortion supporters have found it hard to defend Roe’s reasoning. One prominent constitutional scholar wrote that he “would vote for a statute very much like the one the Court end[ed] up drafting” if he were “a legislator,” but his assessment of Roe was memorable and brutal: Roe was “not constitutional law” at all and gave “al-most no sense of an obligation to try to be.”2 At the time of Roe, 30 States still prohibited abortion at all stages. In the years prior to that decision, about a third of the States had liberalized their laws, but Roe abruptly ended that political process. It imposed the same highly restrictive regime on the entire Nation, and it effectively struck down the abortion laws of every single State.3 As —————— 1 Roe v. Wade, 410 U. S. 113, 163 (1973). 2 J. Ely, The Wages of Crying Wolf: A Comment on Roe v. Wade, 82 Yale L. J. 920, 926, 947 (1973) (Ely) (emphasis deleted). 3 L. Tribe, Foreword: Toward a Model of Roles in the Due Process of Life and Law, 87 Harv. L. Rev. 1, 2 (1973) (Tribe).

Justice Byron White aptly put it in his dissent, the decision represented the “exercise of raw judicial power,” 410 U. S., at 222, and it sparked a national controversy that has em-bittered our political culture for a half century.4 Eventually, in Planned Parenthood of Southeastern Pa. v. Casey, 505 U. S. 833 (1992), the Court revisited Roe, but the Members of the Court split three ways. Two Justices ex-pressed no desire to change Roe in any way.5 Four others wanted to overrule the decision in its entirety.6 And the three remaining Justices, who jointly signed the controlling opinion, took a third position.7 Their opinion did not en-dorse Roe’s reasoning, and it even hinted that one or more of its authors might have “reservations” about whether the Constitution protects a right to abortion.8 But the opinion concluded that stare decisis, which calls for prior decisions to be followed in most instances, required adherence to what it called Roe’s “central holding”—that a State may not constitutionally protect fetal life before “viability”—even if that holding was wrong.9 Anything less, the opinion claimed, would undermine respect for this Court and the rule of law. Paradoxically, the judgment in Casey did a fair amount of overruling. Several important abortion decisions were —————— 4 See R. Ginsburg, Speaking in a Judicial Voice, 67 N. Y. U. L. Rev. 1185, 1208 (1992) (“Roe . . . halted a political process that was moving in a reform direction and thereby, I believed, prolonged divisiveness and deferred stable settlement of the issue”). 5 See 505 U. S., at 911 (Stevens, J., concurring in part and dissenting in part); id., at 922 (Blackmun, J., concurring in part, concurring in judg-ment in part, and dissenting in part). 6 See id., at 944 (Rehnquist, C. J., concurring in judgment in part and dissenting in part); id., at 979 (Scalia, J., concurring in judgment in part and dissenting in part). 7 See id., at 843 (joint opinion of O’Connor, Kennedy, and Souter, JJ.). 8 Id., at 853. 9 Id., at 860.

overruled in toto, and Roe itself was overruled in part.10 Ca-sey threw out Roe’s trimester scheme and substituted a new rule of uncertain origin under which States were forbidden to adopt any regulation that imposed an “undue burden” on a woman’s right to have an abortion.11 The decision pro-vided no clear guidance about the difference between a “due” and an “undue” burden. But the three Justices who authored the controlling opinion “call[ed] the contending sides of a national controversy to end their national divi-sion” by treating the Court’s decision as the final settlement of the question of the constitutional right to abortion.12 As has become increasingly apparent in the intervening years, Casey did not achieve that goal. Americans continue to hold passionate and widely divergent views on abortion, and state legislatures have acted accordingly. Some have recently enacted laws allowing abortion, with few re-strictions, at all stages of pregnancy. Others have tightly restricted abortion beginning well before viability. And in this case, 26 States have expressly asked this Court to over-rule Roe and Casey and allow the States to regulate or pro-hibit pre-viability abortions. Before us now is one such state law. The State of Missis-sippi asks us to uphold the constitutionality of a law that generally prohibits an abortion after the 15th week of preg-nancy—several weeks before the point at which a fetus is now regarded as “viable” outside the womb. In defending this law, the State’s primary argument is that we should reconsider and overrule Roe and Casey and once again allow each State to regulate abortion as its citizens wish. On the other side, respondents and the Solicitor General ask us to —————— 10 Id., at 861, 870, 873 (overruling Akron v. Akron Center for Reproduc-tive Health, Inc., 462 U. S. 416 (1983), and Thornburgh v. American Col-lege of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, 476 U. S. 747 (1986)). 11 505 U. S., at 874. 12 Id., at 867.

Cite as: 597 U. S. ____ (2022)5 Opinion of the Court reaffirm Roe and Casey, and they contend that the Missis-sippi law cannot stand if we do so. Allowing Mississippi to prohibit abortions after 15 weeks of pregnancy, they argue, “would be no different than overruling Casey and Roe en-tirely.” Brief for Respondents 43. They contend that “no half- measures” are available and that we must either reaf-firm or overrule Roe and Casey. Brief for Respondents 50. We hold that Roe and Casey must be overruled. The Con-stitution makes no reference to abortion, and no such right is implicitly protected by any constitutional provision, in-cluding the one on which the defenders of Roe and Casey now chiefly rely—the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. That provision has been held to guarantee some rights that are not mentioned in the Constitution, but any such right must be “deeply rooted in this Nation’s his-tory and tradition” and “implicit in the concept of ordered liberty.” Washington v. Glucksberg, 521 U. S. 702, 721 (1997) (internal quotation marks omitted). The right to abortion does not fall within this category. Until the latter part of the 20th century, such a right was entirely unknown in American law. Indeed, when the Four-teenth Amendment was adopted, three quarters of the States made abortion a crime at all stages of pregnancy. The abortion right is also critically different from any other right that this Court has held to fall within the Fourteenth Amendment’s protection of “liberty.” Roe’s defenders char-acterize the abortion right as similar to the rights recog-nized in past decisions involving matters such as intimate sexual relations, contraception, and marriage, but abortion is fundamentally different, as both Roe and Casey acknowl-edged, because it destroys what those decisions called “fetal life” and what the law now before us describes as an “un-born human being.”13 Stare decisis, the doctrine on which Casey’s controlling

—————— 13 Miss. Code Ann. §41–41–191(4)(b) (2018).

6 DOBBS v. JACKSON WOMEN’S HEALTH ORGANIZATION Opinion of the Court opinion was based, does not compel unending adherence to Roe’s abuse of judicial authority. Roe was egregiously wrong from the start. Its reasoning was exceptionally weak, and the decision has had damaging consequences. And far from bringing about a national settlement of the abortion issue, Roe and Casey have enflamed debate and deepened division. It is time to heed the Constitution and return the issue of abortion to the people’s elected representatives. “The per-missibility of abortion, and the limitations, upon it, are to be resolved like most important questions in our democ-racy: by citizens trying to persuade one another and then voting.” Casey, 505 U. S., at 979 (Scalia, J., concurring in judgment in part and dissenting in part). That is what the Constitution and the rule of law demand. I The law at issue in this case, Mississippi’s Gestational Age Act, see Miss. Code Ann. §41–41–191 (2018), contains this central provision: “Except in a medical emergency or in the case of a severe fetal abnormality, a person shall not intentionally or knowingly perform . . . or induce an abor-tion of an unborn human being if the probable gestational age of the unborn human being has been determined to be greater than fifteen (15) weeks.” §4(b).14 To support this Act, the legislature made a series of fac-tual findings. It began by noting that, at the time of enact-ment, only six countries besides the United States “per-mit[ted] nontherapeutic or elective abortion-on-demand after the twentieth week of gestation.”15 §2(a). The legisla- —————— 14 The Act defines “gestational age” to be “the age of an unborn human being as calculated from the first day of the last menstrual period of the pregnant woman.” §3(f ). 15 Those other six countries were Canada, China, the Netherlands,

Cite as: 597 U. S. ____ (2022)7 Opinion of the Court ture then found that at 5 or 6 weeks’ gestational age an “un-born human being’s heart begins beating”; at 8 weeks the “unborn human being begins to move about in the womb”; at 9 weeks “all basic physiological functions are present”; at 10 weeks “vital organs begin to function,” and “[h]air, fin-gernails, and toenails . . . begin to form”; at 11 weeks “an unborn human being’s diaphragm is developing,” and he or she may “move about freely in the womb”; and at 12 weeks the “unborn human being” has “taken on ‘the human form’ in all relevant respects.” §2(b)(i) (quoting Gonzales v. Car-hart, 550 U. S. 124, 160 (2007)). It found that most abor-tions after 15 weeks employ “dilation and evacuation proce-dures which involve the use of surgical instruments to crush and tear the unborn child,” and it concluded that the “intentional commitment of such acts for nontherapeutic or elective reasons is a barbaric practice, dangerous for the maternal patient, and demeaning to the medical profes-sion.” §2(b)(i)(8). Respondents are an abortion clinic, Jackson Women’s Health Organization, and one of its doctors. On the day the Gestational Age Act was enacted, respondents filed suit in Federal District Court against various Mississippi officials, alleging that the Act violated this Court’s precedents estab-lishing a constitutional right to abortion. The District —————— North Korea, Singapore, and Vietnam. See A. Baglini, Charlotte Lozier Institute, Gestational Limits on Abortion in the United States Compared to International Norms 6–7 (2014); M. Lee, Is the United States One of Seven Countries That “Allow Elective Abortions After 20 Weeks of Preg-nancy?” Wash. Post (Oct. 8, 2017), www.washingtonpost.com/news/fact-checker/wp/2017/10/09/is-the-united-states-one-of-seven-countries-that-allow-elective-abortions-after-20-weeks-of-preganacy (stating that the claim made by the Mississippi Legislature and the Charlotte Lozier In-stitute was “backed by data”). A more recent compilation from the Cen-ter for Reproductive Rights indicates that Iceland and Guinea-Bissau are now also similarly permissive. See The World’s Abortion Laws, Center for Reproductive Rights (Feb. 23, 2021), https://reproductiverights.org/ maps/worlds-abortion-laws/.

8 DOBBS v. JACKSON WOMEN’S HEALTH ORGANIZATION Opinion of the Court Court granted summary judgment in favor of respondents and permanently enjoined enforcement of the Act, reason-ing that “viability marks the earliest point at which the State’s interest in fetal life is constitutionally adequate to justify a legislative ban on nontherapeutic abortions” and that 15 weeks’ gestational age is “prior to viability.” Jack-son Women’s Health Org. v. Currier, 349 F. Supp. 3d 536, 539–540 (SD Miss. 2019) (internal quotation marks omit-ted). The Fifth Circuit affirmed. 945 F. 3d 265 (2019). We granted certiorari, 593 U. S. ___ (2021), to resolve the question whether “all pre-viability prohibitions on elective abortions are unconstitutional,” Pet. for Cert. i. Petition-ers’ primary defense of the Mississippi Gestational Age Act is that Roe and Casey were wrongly decided and that “the Act is constitutional because it satisfies rational-basis re-view.” Brief for Petitioners 49. Respondents answer that allowing Mississippi to ban pre- viability abortions “would be no different than overruling Casey and Roe entirely.” Brief for Respondents 43. They tell us that “no half-measures” are available: We must either reaffirm or over-rule Roe and Casey. Brief for Respondents 50. II We begin by considering the critical question whether the Constitution, properly understood, confers a right to obtain an abortion. Skipping over that question, the controlling opinion in Casey reaffirmed Roe’s “central holding” based solely on the doctrine of stare decisis, but as we will explain, proper application of stare decisis required an assessment of the strength of the grounds on which Roe was based. See infra, at 45–56. We therefore turn to the question that the Casey plurality did not consider, and we address that question in three steps. First, we explain the standard that our cases have used in determining whether the Fourteenth Amendment’s reference to “liberty” protects a particular right. Second,

Cite as: 597 U. S. ____ (2022)9 Opinion of the Court we examine whether the right at issue in this case is rooted in our Nation’s history and tradition and whether it is an essential component of what we have described as “ordered liberty.” Finally, we consider whether a right to obtain an abortion is part of a broader entrenched right that is sup-ported by other precedents. A 1 Constitutional analysis must begin with “the language of the instrument,” Gibbons v. Ogden, 9 Wheat. 1, 186–189 (1824), which offers a “fixed standard” for ascertaining what our founding document means, 1 J. Story, Commen-taries on the Constitution of the United States §399, p. 383 (1833). The Constitution makes no express reference to a right to obtain an abortion, and therefore those who claim that it protects such a right must show that the right is somehow implicit in the constitutional text. Roe, however, was remarkably loose in its treatment of the constitutional text. It held that the abortion right, which is not mentioned in the Constitution, is part of a right to privacy, which is also not mentioned. See 410 U. S., at 152–153. And that privacy right, Roe observed, had been found to spring from no fewer than five different constitu-tional provisions—the First, Fourth, Fifth, Ninth, and Fourteenth Amendments. Id., at 152. The Court’s discussion left open at least three ways in which some combination of these provisions could protect the abortion right. One possibility was that the right was “founded . . . in the Ninth Amendment’s reservation of rights to the people.” Id., at 153. Another was that the right was rooted in the First, Fourth, or Fifth Amendment, or in some combination of those provisions, and that this right had been “incorporated” into the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment just as many other Bill of Rights provisions had by then been incorporated. Ibid; see

10 DOBBS v. JACKSON WOMEN’S HEALTH ORGANIZATION Opinion of the Court also McDonald v. Chicago, 561 U. S. 742, 763–766 (2010) (majority opinion) (discussing incorporation) . And a third path was that the First, Fourth, and Fifth Amendments played no role and that the right was simply a component of the “liberty” protected by the Fourteenth Amendment’s Due Process Clause. Roe, 410 U. S., at 153. Roe expressed the “feel[ing]” that the Fourteenth Amendment was the pro-vision that did the work, but its message seemed to be that the abortion right could be found somewhere in the Consti-tution and that specifying its exact location was not of par-amount importance.16 The Casey Court did not defend this unfocused analysis and instead grounded its decision solely on the theory that the right to obtain an abortion is part of the “liberty” protected by the Fourteenth Amendment’s Due Process Clause. We discuss this theory in depth below, but before doing so, we briefly address one additional constitutional provi-sion that some of respondents’ amici have now offered as yet another potential home for the abortion right: the Four-teenth Amendment’s Equal Protection Clause. See Brief for United States as Amicus Curiae 24 (Brief for United States); see also Brief for Equal Protection Constitutional Law Scholars as Amici Curiae. Neither Roe nor Casey saw fit to invoke this theory, and it is squarely foreclosed by our precedents, which establish that a State’s regulation of abortion is not a sex-based classification and is thus not subject to the “heightened scrutiny” that applies to such classifications.17 The regulation of a medical procedure that —————— 16 The Court’s words were as follows: “This right of privacy, whether it be founded in the Fourteenth Amendment’s concept of personal liberty and restrictions upon state action, as we feel it is, or, as the District Court determined, in the Ninth Amendment’s reservation of rights to the peo-ple, is broad enough to encompass a woman’s decision whether or not to terminate her pregnancy.” 410 U. S., at 153. 17 See, e.g., Sessions v. Morales-Santana, 582 U. S. 47, ___ (2017) (slip op., at 8).

Cite as: 597 U. S. ____ (2022)11 Opinion of the Court only one sex can undergo does not trigger heightened con-stitutional scrutiny unless the regulation is a “mere pre-tex[t] designed to effect an invidious discrimination against members of one sex or the other.” Geduldig v. Aiello, 417 U. S. 484, 496, n. 20 (1974). And as the Court has stated, the “goal of preventing abortion” does not constitute “invid-iously discriminatory animus” against women. Bray v. Al-exandria Women’s Health Clinic, 506 U. S. 263, 273–274 (1993) (internal quotation marks omitted). Accordingly, laws regulating or prohibiting abortion are not subject to heightened scrutiny. Rather, they are governed by the same standard of review as other health and safety measures.18 With this new theory addressed, we turn to Casey’s bold assertion that the abortion right is an aspect of the “liberty” protected by the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. 505 U. S., at 846; Brief for Respondents 17; Brief for United States 21–22. 2 The underlying theory on which this argument rests— that the Fourteenth Amendment’s Due Process Clause pro-vides substantive, as well as procedural, protection for “lib-erty”—has long been controversial. But our decisions have held that the Due Process Clause protects two categories of substantive rights. The first consists of rights guaranteed by the first eight Amendments. Those Amendments originally applied only to the Federal Government, Barron ex rel. Tiernan v. Mayor of Baltimore, 7 Pet. 243, 247–251 (1833) (opinion for the Court by Marshall, C. J.), but this Court has held that the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment “incor-porates” the great majority of those rights and thus makes them equally applicable to the States. See McDonald, 561

—————— 18 We discuss this standard in Part VI of this opinion.

12 DOBBS v. JACKSON WOMEN’S HEALTH ORGANIZATION Opinion of the Court U. S., at 763–767, and nn. 12–13. The second category— which is the one in question here—comprises a select list of fundamental rights that are not mentioned anywhere in the Constitution. In deciding whether a right falls into either of these cat-egories, the Court has long asked whether the right is “deeply rooted in [our] history and tradition” and whether it is essential to our Nation’s “scheme of ordered liberty.” Timbs v. Indiana, 586 U. S. ___, ___ (2019) (slip op., at 3) (internal quotation marks omitted); McDonald, 561 U. S., at 764, 767 (internal quotation marks omitted); Glucksberg, 521 U. S., at 721 (internal quotation marks omitted) .19 And in conducting this inquiry, we have engaged in a careful analysis of the history of the right at issue. Justice Ginsburg’s opinion for the Court in Timbs is a re-cent example. In concluding that the Eighth Amendment’s protection against excessive fines is “fundamental to our scheme of ordered liberty” and “deeply rooted in this Na-tion’s history and tradition,” 586 U. S., at ___ (slip op., at 7) (internal quotation marks omitted), her opinion traced the right back to Magna Carta, Blackstone’s Commentaries, and 35 of the 37 state constitutions in effect at the ratifica-tion of the Fourteenth Amendment. 586 U. S., at ___–___ (slip op., at 3–7). A similar inquiry was undertaken in McDonald, which held that the Fourteenth Amendment protects the right to keep and bear arms. The lead opinion surveyed the origins of the Second Amendment, the debates in Congress about —————— 19 See also, e.g., Duncan v. Louisiana, 391 U. S. 145, 148 (1968) (asking whether “a right is among those ‘fundamental principles of liberty and justice which lie at the base of our civil and political institutions’ ”); Palko v. Connecticut, 302 U. S. 319, 325 (1937) (requiring “a ‘principle of justice so rooted in the traditions and conscience of our people as to be ranked as fundamental’ ” (quoting Snyder v. Massachusetts, 291 U. S. 97, 105 (1934))).

Cite as: 597 U. S. ____ (2022)13 Opinion of the Court the adoption of the Fourteenth Amendment, the state con-stitutions in effect when that Amendment was ratified (at least 22 of the 37 States protected the right to keep and bear arms), federal laws enacted during the same period, and other relevant historical evidence. 561 U. S., at 767–777. Only then did the opinion conclude that “the Framers and ratifiers of the Fourteenth Amendment counted the right to keep and bear arms among those fundamental rights nec-essary to our system of ordered liberty.” Id ., at 778; see also id., at 822–850 (THOMAS, J., concurring in part and concur-ring in judgment) (surveying history and reaching the same result under the Fourteenth Amendment’s Privileges or Im-munities Clause). Timbs and McDonald concerned the question whether the Fourteenth Amendment protects rights that are ex-pressly set out in the Bill of Rights, and it would be anom-alous if similar historical support were not required when a putative right is not mentioned anywhere in the Constitu-tion. Thus, in Glucksberg, which held that the Due Process Clause does not confer a right to assisted suicide, the Court surveyed more than 700 years of “Anglo-American common law tradition,” 521 U. S., at 711, and made clear that a fun-damental right must be “objectively, deeply rooted in this Nation’s history and tradition,” id., at 720–721. Historical inquiries of this nature are essential when-ever we are asked to recognize a new component of the “lib-erty” protected by the Due Process Clause because the term “liberty” alone provides little guidance. “Liberty” is a capa-cious term. As Lincoln once said: “We all declare for Lib-erty; but in using the same word we do not all mean the same thing.”20 In a well- known essay, Isaiah Berlin re-ported that “[h]istorians of ideas” had cataloged more than —————— 20 Address at Sanitary Fair at Baltimore, Md. (Apr. 18, 1864), reprinted in 7 The Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln 301 (R. Basler ed. 1953).

14 DOBBS v. JACKSON WOMEN’S HEALTH ORGANIZATION Opinion of the Court 200 different senses in which the term had been used.21 In interpreting what is meant by the Fourteenth Amend- ment’s reference to “liberty,” we must guard against the natural human tendency to confuse what that Amendment protects with our own ardent views about the liberty that Americans should enjoy. That is why the Court has long been “reluctant” to recognize rights that are not mentioned in the Constitution. Collins v. Harker Heights, 503 U. S. 115, 125 (1992). “Substantive due process has at times been a treacherous field for this Court,” Moore v. East Cleveland, 431 U. S. 494, 503 (1977) (plurality opinion), and it has sometimes led the Court to usurp authority that the Con-stitution entrusts to the people’s elected representatives. See Regents of Univ. of Mich. v. Ewing, 474 U. S. 214, 225– 226 (1985). As the Court cautioned in Glucksberg, “[w]e must . . . exercise the utmost care whenever we are asked to break new ground in this field, lest the liberty protected by the Due Process Clause be subtly transformed into the policy preferences of the Members of this Court.” 521 U. S., at 720 (internal quotation marks and citation omitted). On occasion, when the Court has ignored the “[a]ppropri-ate limits” imposed by “‘respect for the teachings of his-tory,’” Moore, 431 U. S., at 503 (plurality opinion), it has fallen into the freewheeling judicial policymaking that characterized discredited decisions such as Lochner v. New York , 198 U. S. 45 (1905). The Court must not fall prey to such an unprincipled approach. Instead, guided by the his-tory and tradition that map the essential components of our Nation’s concept of ordered liberty, we must ask what the Fourteenth Amendment means by the term “liberty.” When we engage in that inquiry in the present case, the clear an-swer is that the Fourteenth Amendment does not protect

—————— 21 Four Essays on Liberty 121 (1969).

Cite as: 597 U. S. ____ (2022)15 Opinion of the Court the right to an abortion.22 B 1 Until the latter part of the 20th century, there was no support in American law for a constitutional right to obtain an abortion. No state constitutional provision had recog-nized such a right. Until a few years before Roe was handed down, no federal or state court had recognized such a right. Nor had any scholarly treatise of which we are aware. And although law review articles are not reticent about advocat-ing new rights, the earliest article proposing a constitu-tional right to abortion that has come to our attention was published only a few years before Roe.23 —————— 22 That is true regardless of whether we look to the Amendment’s Due Process Clause or its Privileges or Immunities Clause. Some scholars and Justices have maintained that the Privileges or Immunities Clause is the provision of the Fourteenth Amendment that guarantees substan-tive rights. See, e.g., McDonald v. Chicago, 561 U. S. 742, 813–850 (2010) (THOMAS, J., concurring in part and concurring in judgment); Dun-can, 391 U. S., at 165–166 (Black, J., concurring); A. Amar, Bill of Rights:Creation and Reconstruction 163–180 (1998) (Amar); J. Ely, Democracy and Distrust 22–30 (1980); 2 W. Crosskey, Politics and the Constitution in the History of the United States 1089–1095 (1953). But even on that view, such a right would need to be rooted in the Nation’s history and tradition. See Corfield v. Coryell, 6 F. Cas. 546, 551–552 (No. 3,230) (CC ED Pa. 1823) (describing unenumerated rights under the Privileges and Immunities Clause, Art. IV, §2, as those “fundamental” rights “which have, at all times, been enjoyed by the citizens of the several states”); Amar 176 (relying on Corfield to interpret the Privileges or Immunities Clause); cf. McDonald, 561 U. S., at 819–820, 832, 854 (opinion of THOMAS, J.) (reserving the question whether the Privileges or Immuni-ties Clause protects “any rights besides those enumerated in the Consti-tution”). 23 See R. Lucas, Federal Constitutional Limitations on the Enforce-ment and Administration of State Abortion Statutes, 46 N. C. L. Rev. 730 (1968) (Lucas); see also D. Garrow, Liberty and Sexuality 334–335 (1994) (Garrow) (stating that Lucas was “undeniably the first person to fully

16 DOBBS v. JACKSON WOMEN’S HEALTH ORGANIZATION Opinion of the Court Not only was there no support for such a constitutional right until shortly before Roe, but abortion had long been a crime in every single State. At common law, abortion was criminal in at least some stages of pregnancy and was re-garded as unlawful and could have very serious conse-quences at all stages. American law followed the common law until a wave of statutory restrictions in the 1800s ex-panded criminal liability for abortions. By the time of the adoption of the Fourteenth Amendment, three-quarters of the States had made abortion a crime at any stage of preg-nancy, and the remaining States would soon follow. Roe either ignored or misstated this history, and Casey declined to reconsider Roe’s faulty historical analysis. It is therefore important to set the record straight. 2 a We begin with the common law, under which abortion was a crime at least after “quickening”—i.e., the first felt movement of the fetus in the womb, which usually occurs between the 16th and 18th week of pregnancy.24 —————— articulate on paper” the argument that “a woman’s right to choose abor-tion was a fundamental individual freedom protected by the U. S. Con-stitution’s guarantee of personal liberty”). 24 The exact meaning of “quickening” is subject to some debate. Com-pare Brief for Scholars of Jurisprudence as Amici Curiae 12–14, and n. 32 (emphasis deleted) (“ ‘a quick child’ ” meant simply a “live” child, and under the era’s outdated knowledge of embryology, a fetus was thought to become “quick” at around the sixth week of pregnancy), with Brief for American Historical Association et al. as Amici Curiae 6, n. 2 (“quick” and “quickening” consistently meant “the woman’s perception of fetal movement”). We need not wade into this debate. First, it suffices for present purposes to show that abortion was criminal by at least the 16th or 18th week of pregnancy. Second, as we will show, during the relevant period—i.e., the period surrounding the enactment of the Four-teenth Amendment—the quickening distinction was abandoned as States criminalized abortion at all stages of pregnancy. See infra, at 21–

Cite as: 597 U. S. ____ (2022)17 Opinion of the Court The “eminent common-law authorities (Blackstone, Coke, Hale, and the like),” Kahler v. Kansas, 589 U. S. ___, ___ (2020) (slip op., at 7), all describe abortion after quick-ening as criminal. Henry de Bracton’s 13th-century trea-tise explained that if a person has “struck a pregnant woman, or has given her poison, whereby he has caused abortion, if the foetus be already formed and animated, and particularly if it be animated, he commits homicide.” 2 De Legibus et Consuetudinibus Angliae 279 (T. Twiss ed. 1879); see also 1 Fleta, c. 23, reprinted in 72 Selden Soc. 60– 61 (H. Richardson & G. Sayles eds. 1955) (13th-century treatise).25 Sir Edward Coke’s 17th-century treatise likewise as-serted that abortion of a quick child was “murder” if the “childe be born alive” and a “great misprision” if the “childe dieth in her body.” 3 Institutes of the Laws of England 50– 51 (1644). (“Misprision” referred to “some heynous offence under the degree of felony.” Id., at 139.) Two treatises by Sir Matthew Hale likewise described abortion of a quick child who died in the womb as a “great crime” and a “great misprision.” Pleas of the Crown 53 (P. Glazebrook ed. 1972); 1 History of the Pleas of the Crown 433 (1736) (Hale). And writing near the time of the adoption of our Constitu-tion, William Blackstone explained that abortion of a “quick” child was “by the ancient law homicide or man-slaughter” (citing Bracton), and at least a very “heinous misdemeanor” (citing Coke). 1 Commentaries on the Laws of England 129–130 (7th ed. 1775) (Blackstone). English cases dating all the way back to the 13th century corroborate the treatises’ statements that abortion was a crime. See generally J. Dellapenna, Dispelling the Myths —————— 25. 25 Even before Bracton’s time, English law imposed punishment for the killing of a fetus. See Leges Henrici Primi 222–223 (L. Downer ed. 1972) (imposing penalty for any abortion and treating a woman who aborted a “quick” child “as if she were a murderess”).

18 DOBBS v. JACKSON WOMEN’S HEALTH ORGANIZATION Opinion of the Court of Abortion History 126, and n. 16, 134–142, 188–194, and nn. 84–86 (2006) (Dellapenna); J. Keown, Abortion, Doctors and the Law 3–12 (1988) (Keown). In 1732, for example, Eleanor Beare was convicted of “destroying the Foetus in the Womb” of another woman and “thereby causing her to miscarry.”26 For that crime and another “misdemeanor,” Beare was sentenced to two days in the pillory and three years’ imprisonment.27 Although a pre-quickening abortion was not itself consid-ered homicide, it does not follow that abortion was permis-sible at common law—much less that abortion was a legal right. Cf. Glucksberg, 521 U. S., at 713 (removal of “com-mon law’s harsh sanctions did not represent an acceptance of suicide”). Quite to the contrary, in the 1732 case men-tioned above, the judge said of the charge of abortion (with no mention of quickening) that he had “never met with a case so barbarous and unnatural.”28 Similarly, an indict-ment from 1602, which did not distinguish between a pre-quickening and post-quickening abortion, described abor-tion as “pernicious” and “against the peace of our Lady the Queen, her crown and dignity.” Keown 7 (discussing R. v. Webb, Calendar of Assize Records, Surrey Indictments 512 (1980)). That the common law did not condone even pre-quickening abortions is confirmed by what one might call a proto-felony-murder rule. Hale and Blackstone explained a way in which a pre-quickening abortion could rise to the level of a homicide. Hale wrote that if a physician gave a woman “with child” a “potion” to cause an abortion, and the woman died, it was “murder” because the potion was given “unlawfully to destroy her child within her.” 1 Hale 429– 430 (emphasis added). As Blackstone explained, to be —————— 26 2 Gentleman’s Magazine 931 (Aug. 1732). 27 Id., at 932. 28 Ibid.

Cite as: 597 U. S. ____ (2022)19 Opinion of the Court “murder” a killing had to be done with “malice afore-thought, . . . either express or implied.” 4 Blackstone 198 (emphasis deleted). In the case of an abortionist, Black-stone wrote, “the law will imply [malice]” for the same rea-son that it would imply malice if a person who intended to kill one person accidentally killed a different person: “[I]f one shoots at A and misses him, but kills B, this is murder; because of the previous felonious intent, which the law transfers from one to the other. The same is the case, where one lays poison for A; and B, against whom the prisoner had no malicious intent, takes it, and it kills him; this is likewise murder. So also, if one gives a woman with child a medicine to procure abor-tion, and it operates so violently as to kill the woman, this is murder in the person who gave it.” Id., at 200– 201 (emphasis added; footnote omitted).29 Notably, Blackstone, like Hale, did not state that this proto- felony-murder rule required that the woman be “with quick child”—only that she be “with child.” Id., at 201. And it is revealing that Hale and Blackstone treated abortion-ists differently from other physicians or surgeons who caused the death of a patient “without any intent of doing [the patient] any bodily hurt.” Hale 429; see 4 Blackstone 197. These other physicians—even if “unlicensed”—would not be “guilty of murder or manslaughter.” Hale 429. But a physician performing an abortion would, precisely be-cause his aim was an “unlawful” one. In sum, although common-law authorities differed on the severity of punishment for abortions committed at different —————— 29 Other treatises restated the same rule. See 1 W. Russell & C. Greaves, Crimes and Misdemeanors 540 (5th ed. 1845) (“So where a per-son gave medicine to a woman to procure an abortion, and where a per-son put skewers into the woman for the same purpose, by which in both cases the women were killed, these acts were clearly held to be murder” (footnotes omitted)); 1 E. East, Pleas of the Crown 230 (1803) (similar).

20 DOBBS v. JACKSON WOMEN’S HEALTH ORGANIZATION Opinion of the Court points in pregnancy, none endorsed the practice. Moreover, we are aware of no common -law case or authority, and the parties have not pointed to any, that remotely suggests a positive right to procure an abortion at any stage of preg-nancy. b In this country, the historical record is similar. The “most important early American edition of Blackstone’s Commen-taries,” District of Columbia v. Heller, 554 U. S. 570, 594 (2008), reported Blackstone’s statement that abortion of a quick child was at least “a heinous misdemeanor,” 2 St. George Tucker, Blackstone’s Commentaries 129–130 (1803), and that edition also included Blackstone’s discus-sion of the proto-felony-murder rule, 5 id., at 200–201. Manuals for justices of the peace printed in the Colonies in the 18th century typically restated the common -law rule on abortion, and some manuals repeated Hale’s and Black-stone’s statements that anyone who prescribed medication “unlawfully to destroy the child” would be guilty of murder if the woman died. See, e.g., J. Parker, Conductor Generalis 220 (1788); 2 R. Burn, Justice of the Peace, and Parish Of-ficer 221–222 (7th ed. 1762) (English manual stating the same).30 —————— 30 For manuals restating one or both rules, see J. Davis, Criminal Law 96, 102–103, 339 (1838); Conductor Generalis 194–195 (1801) (printed in Philadelphia); Conductor Generalis 194–195 (1794) (printed in Albany); Conductor Generalis 220 (1788) (printed in New York); Conductor Gen-eralis 198 (1749) (printed in New York); G. Webb, Office and Authority of a Justice of Peace 232 (1736) (printed in Williamsburg); Conductor Generalis 161 (1722) (printed in Philadelphia); see also J. Conley, Doing It by the Book: Justice of the Peace Manuals and English Law in Eight-eenth Century America, 6 J. Legal Hist. 257, 265, 267 (1985) (noting that these manuals were the justices’ “primary source of legal reference” and of “practical value for a wider audience than the justices”). For cases stating the proto-felony-murder rule, see, e.g., Common-wealth v. Parker, 50 Mass. 263, 265 (1845); People v. Sessions, 58 Mich.

Cite as: 597 U. S. ____ (2022)21 Opinion of the Court The few cases available from the early colonial period cor-roborate that abortion was a crime. See generally Del-lapenna 215–228 (collecting cases). In Maryland in 1652, for example, an indictment charged that a man “Mur-therously endeavoured to destroy or Murther the Child by him begotten in the Womb.” Proprietary v. Mitchell, 10 Md. Archives 80, 183 (1652) (W. Browne ed. 1891). And by the 19th century, courts frequently explained that the common law made abortion of a quick child a crime. See, e.g., Smith v. Gaffard , 31 Ala. 45, 51 (1857); Smith v. State, 33 Me. 48, 55 (1851); State v. Cooper , 22 N. J. L. 52, 52–55 (1849); Com-monwealth v. Parker, 50 Mass. 263, 264–268 (1845). c The original ground for drawing a distinction between pre- and post-quickening abortions is not entirely clear, but some have attributed the rule to the difficulty of proving that a pre-quickening fetus was alive. At that time, there were no scientific methods for detecting pregnancy in its early stages,31 and thus, as one court put it in 1872: “[U]ntil the period of quickening there is no evidence of life; and whatever may be said of the feotus, the law has fixed upon this period of gestation as the time when the child is en-dowed with life” because “foetal movements are the first clearly marked and well defined evidences of life.” Evans v. People, 49 N. Y. 86, 90 (emphasis added); Cooper, 22 N. J. L., at 56 (“In contemplation of law life commences at the moment of quickening, at that moment when the em-bryo gives the first physical proof of life, no matter when it first received it” (emphasis added)). —————— 594, 595–596, 26 N. W. 291, 292–293 (1886); State v. Moore, 25 Iowa 128, 131–132 (1868); Smith v. State, 33 Me. 48, 54–55 (1851). 31 See E. Rigby, A System of Midwifery 73 (1841) (“Under all circum-stances, the diagnosis of pregnancy must ever be difficult and obscure during the early months”); see also id., at 74–80 (discussing rudimentary techniques for detecting early pregnancy); A. Taylor, A Manual of Medi-cal Jurisprudence 418–421 (6th Am. ed. 1866) (same).

22 DOBBS v. JACKSON WOMEN’S HEALTH ORGANIZATION Opinion of the Court The Solicitor General offers a different explanation of the basis for the quickening rule, namely, that before quicken-ing the common law did not regard a fetus “as having a ‘sep-arate and independent existence.’” Brief for United States 26 (quoting Parker, 50 Mass., at 266). But the case on which the Solicitor General relies for this proposition also suggested that the criminal law’s quickening rule was out of step with the treatment of prenatal life in other areas of law, noting that “to many purposes, in reference to civil rights, an infant in ventre sa mere is regarded as a person in being.” Ibid. (citing 1 Blackstone 129); see also Evans, 49 N. Y., at 89; Mills v. Commonwealth, 13 Pa. 631, 633 (1850); Morrow v. Scott, 7 Ga. 535, 537 (1849); Hall v. Han-cock, 32 Mass. 255, 258 (1834); Thellusson v. Woodford, 4 Ves. 227, 321–322, 31 Eng. Rep. 117, 163 (1789). At any rate, the original ground for the quickening rule is of little importance for present purposes because the rule was abandoned in the 19th century. During that period, treatise writers and commentators criticized the quicken-ing distinction as “neither in accordance with the result of medical experience, nor with the principles of the common law.” F. Wharton, Criminal Law §1220, p. 606 (rev. 4th ed. 1857) (footnotes omitted); see also J. Beck, Researches in Medicine and Medical Jurisprudence 26–28 (2d ed. 1835) (describing the quickening distinction as “absurd” and “in-jurious”).32 In 1803, the British Parliament made abortion —————— 32 See Mitchell v. Commonwealth, 78 Ky. 204, 209–210 (1879) (ac-knowledging the common-law rule but arguing that “the law should pun-ish abortions and miscarriages, willfully produced, at any time during the period of gestation”); Mills v. Commonwealth, 13 Pa., 631, 633 (1850) (the quickening rule “never ought to have been the law anywhere”); J. Bishop, Commentaries on the Law of Statutory Crimes §744, p. 471 (1873) (“If we look at the reason of the law, we shall prefer” a rule that “discard[s] this doctrine of the necessity of a quickening”); I. Dana, Re-port of the Committee on the Production of Abortion, in 5 Transactions

Cite as: 597 U. S. ____ (2022)23 Opinion of the Court a crime at all stages of pregnancy and authorized the impo-sition of severe punishment. See Lord Ellenborough’s Act, 43 Geo. 3, c. 58 (1803). One scholar has suggested that Par-liament’s decision “may partly have been attributable to the medical man’s concern that fetal life should be protected by the law at all stages of gestation.” Keown 22. In this country during the 19th century, the vast majority of the States enacted statutes criminalizing abortion at all stages of pregnancy. See Appendix A, infra (listing state statutory provisions in chronological order).33 By 1868, the year when the Fourteenth Amendment was ratified, three-quarters of the States, 28 out of 37, had enacted statutes making abortion a crime even if it was performed before quickening.34 See ibid. Of the nine States that had not yet —————— of the Maine Medical Association 37–39 (1866); Report on Criminal Abor-tion, in 12 Transactions of the American Medical Association 75–77 (1859); W. Guy, Principles of Medical Forensics 133–134 (1845); J. Chitty, Practical Treatise on Medical Jurisprudence 438 (2d Am. ed. 1836); 1 T. Beck & J. Beck, Elements of Medical Jurisprudence 293 (5th ed. 1823); 2 T. Percival, The Works, Literary, Moral and Medical 430 (1807); see also Keown 38–39 (collecting English authorities). 33 See generally Dellapenna 315–319 (cataloging the development of the law in the States); E. Quay, Justifiable Abortion—Medical and Legal Foundations, 49 Geo. L. J. 395, 435–437, 447–520 (1961) (Quay) (same); J. Witherspoon, Reexamining Roe: Nineteenth-Century Abortion Stat-utes and The Fourteenth Amendment, 17 St. Mary’s L. J. 29, 34–36 (1985) (Witherspoon) (same). 34 Some scholars assert that only 27 States prohibited abortion at all stages. See, e.g., Dellapenna 315; Witherspoon 34–35, and n. 15. Those scholars appear to have overlooked Rhode Island, which criminalized abortion at all stages in 1861. See Acts and Resolves R. I. 1861, ch. 371, §1, p. 133 (criminalizing the attempt to “procure the miscarriage” of “any pregnant woman” or “any woman supposed by such person to be preg-nant,” without mention of quickening). The amicus brief for the Ameri-can Historical Association asserts that only 26 States prohibited abortion at all stages, but that brief incorrectly excludes West Virginia and Ne-braska from its count. Compare Brief for American Historical Associa-tion 27–28 (citing Quay), with Appendix A, infra.

24 DOBBS v. JACKSON WOMEN’S HEALTH ORGANIZATION Opinion of the Court criminalized abortion at all stages, all but one did so by 1910. See ibid. The trend in the Territories that would become the last 13 States was similar: All of them criminalized abortion at all stages of pregnancy between 1850 (the Kingdom of Ha-waii) and 1919 (New Mexico). See Appendix B, infra; see also Casey, 505 U. S., at 952 (Rehnquist, C. J., concurring in judgment in part and dissenting in part); Dellapenna 317–319. By the end of the 1950s, according to the Roe Court’s own count, statutes in all but four States and the District of Columbia prohibited abortion “however and whenever performed, unless done to save or preserve the life of the mother.” 410 U. S., at 139.35 This overwhelming consensus endured until the day Roe was decided. At that time, also by the Roe Court’s own count, a substantial majority—30 States—still prohibited abortion at all stages except to save the life of the mother. See id., at 118, and n. 2 (listing States). And though Roe discerned a “trend toward liberalization” in about “one-third of the States,” those States still criminalized some abortions and regulated them more stringently than Roe would allow. Id., at 140, and n. 37; Tribe 2. In short, the —————— 35 The statutes of three States (Massachusetts, New Jersey, and Penn-sylvania) prohibited abortions performed “unlawfully” or “without lawful justification.” Roe, 410 U. S., at 139 (internal quotation marks omitted). In Massachusetts, case law held that abortion was allowed when, accord-ing to the judgment of physicians in the relevant community, the proce-dure was necessary to preserve the woman’s life or her physical or emo-tional health. Commonwealth v. Wheeler, 315 Mass. 394, 395, 53 N. E. 2d 4, 5 (1944). In the other two States, however, there is no clear support in case law for the proposition that abortion was lawful where the mother’s life was not at risk. See State v. Brandenberg, 137 N. J. L. 124, 58 A. 2d 709 (1948); Commonwealth v. Trombetta, 131 Pa. Super. 487, 200 A. 107 (1938). Statutes in the two remaining jurisdictions (the District of Columbia and Alabama) permitted “abortion to preserve the mother’s health.” Roe, 410 U. S., at 139. Case law in those jurisdictions does not clarify the breadth of these exceptions.

Cite as: 597 U. S. ____ (2022)25 Opinion of the Court “Court’s opinion in Roe itself convincingly refutes the notion that the abortion liberty is deeply rooted in the history or tradition of our people.” Thornburgh v. American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, 476 U. S. 747, 793 (1986)(White, J., dissenting). d The inescapable conclusion is that a right to abortion is not deeply rooted in the Nation’s history and traditions. On the contrary, an unbroken tradition of prohibiting abortion on pain of criminal punishment persisted from the earliest days of the common law until 1973. The Court in Roe could have said of abortion exactly what Glucksberg said of as-sisted suicide: “Attitudes toward [abortion] have changed since Bracton, but our laws have consistently condemned, and continue to prohibit, [that practice].” 521 U. S., at 719. 3 Respondents and their amici have no persuasive answer to this historical evidence. Neither respondents nor the Solicitor General disputes the fact that by 1868 the vast majority of States criminal-ized abortion at all stages of pregnancy. See Brief for Peti-tioners 12–13; see also Brief for American Historical Asso-ciation et al. as Amici Curiae 27–28, and nn. 14–15 (conceding that 26 out of 37 States prohibited abortion be-fore quickening); Tr. of Oral Arg. 74–75 (respondents’ coun-sel conceding the same). Instead, respondents are forced to argue that it “does [not] matter that some States prohibited abortion at the time Roe was decided or when the Four-teenth Amendment was adopted.” Brief for Respondents 21. But that argument flies in the face of the standard we have applied in determining whether an asserted right that is nowhere mentioned in the Constitution is nevertheless protected by the Fourteenth Amendment. Not only are respondents and their amici unable to show

26 DOBBS v. JACKSON WOMEN’S HEALTH ORGANIZATION Opinion of the Court that a constitutional right to abortion was established when the Fourteenth Amendment was adopted, but they have found no support for the existence of an abortion right that predates the latter part of the 20th century—no state con-stitutional provision, no statute, no judicial decision, no learned treatise. The earliest sources called to our atten-tion are a few district court and state court decisions de-cided shortly before Roe and a small number of law review articles from the same time period.36 A few of respondents’ amici muster historical arguments, but they are very weak. The Solicitor General repeats Roe’s claim that it is “‘doubtful’ . . . ‘abortion was ever firmly es-tablished as a common-law crime even with respect to the destruction of a quick fetus.’” Brief for United States 26 (quoting Roe, 410 U. S., at 136). But as we have seen, great common-law authorities like Bracton, Coke, Hale, and Blackstone all wrote that a post-quickening abortion was a crime—and a serious one at that. Moreover, Hale and Blackstone (and many other authorities following them) as-serted that even a pre-quickening abortion was “unlawful” and that, as a result, an abortionist was guilty of murder if the woman died from the attempt. Instead of following these authorities, Roe relied largely on two articles by a pro-abortion advocate who claimed that Coke had intentionally misstated the common law because of his strong anti-abortion views.37 These articles have —————— 36 See 410 U. S., at 154–155 (collecting cases decided between 1970 and 1973); C. Means, The Phoenix of Abortional Freedom: Is a Penumbral or Ninth-Amendment Right About To Arise From the Nineteenth-Century Legislative Ashes of a Fourteenth-Century Common-Law Liberty? 17 N. Y. L. Forum 335, 337–339 (1971) (Means II); C. Means, The Law of New York Concerning Abortion and the Status of the Foetus, 1664–1968: A Case of Cessation of Constitutionality, 14 N. Y. L. Forum 411 (1968) (Means I); Lucas 730. 37 See 410 U. S., at 136, n. 26 (citing Means II); 410 U. S., at 132–133, n. 21 (citing Means I).

Cite as: 597 U. S. ____ (2022)27 Opinion of the Court been discredited,38 and it has come to light that even mem-bers of Jane Roe’s legal team did not regard them as serious scholarship. An internal memorandum characterized this author’s work as donning “the guise of impartial scholar-ship while advancing the proper ideological goals.”39 Con-tinued reliance on such scholarship is unsupportable. The Solicitor General next suggests that history supports an abortion right because the common law’s failure to crim-inalize abortion before quickening means that “at the Founding and for decades thereafter, women generally could terminate a pregnancy, at least in its early stages.”40 Brief for United States 26–27; see also Brief for Respond-ents 21. But the insistence on quickening was not univer-sal, see Mills, 13 Pa., at 633; State v. Slagle, 83 N. C. 630, 632 (1880), and regardless, the fact that many States in the —————— 38 For critiques of Means’s work, see, e.g., Dellapenna 143–152, 325– 331; Keown 3–12; J. Finnis, “Shameless Acts” in Colorado: Abuse of Scholarship in Constitutional Cases, 7 Academic Questions 10, 11–12 (1994); R. Destro, Abortion and the Constitution: The Need for a Life-Protective Amendment, 63 Cal. L. Rev. 1250, 1267–1282 (1975); R. Byrn, An American Tragedy: The Supreme Court on Abortion, 41 Ford. L. Rev. 807, 814–829 (1973). 39 Garrow 500–501, and n. 41 (internal quotation marks omitted). 40 In any event, Roe, Casey, and other related abortion decisions im-posed substantial restrictions on a State’s capacity to regulate abortions performed after quickening. See, e.g., June Medical Services L. L. C. v. Russo, 591 U. S. ___ (2020) (holding a law requiring doctors performing abortions to secure admitting privileges to be unconstitutional); Whole Woman’s Health v. Hellerstedt, 579 U. S. 582 (2016) (similar); Casey, 505 U. S., at 846 (declaring that prohibitions on “abortion before viability” are unconstitutional); id., at 887–898 (holding that a spousal notification provision was unconstitutional). In addition, Doe v. Bolton, 410 U. S. 179 (1973), has been interpreted by some to protect a broad right to obtain an abortion at any stage of pregnancy provided that a physician is willing to certify that it is needed due to a woman’s “emotional” needs or “famil-ial” concerns. Id., at 192. See, e.g., Women’s Medical Professional Corp. v. Voinovich, 130 F. 3d 187, 209 (CA6 1997), cert. denied, 523 U. S. 1036 (1998); but see id., at 1039 (THOMAS, J., dissenting from denial of certio-rari).

28 DOBBS v. JACKSON WOMEN’S HEALTH ORGANIZATION Opinion of the Court late 18th and early 19th century did not criminalize pre-quickening abortions does not mean that anyone thought the States lacked the authority to do so. When legislatures began to exercise that authority as the century wore on, no one, as far as we are aware, argued that the laws they en-acted violated a fundamental right. That is not surprising since common-law authorities had repeatedly condemned abortion and described it as an “unlawful” act without re-gard to whether it occurred before or after quickening. See supra, at 16–21. Another amicus brief relied upon by respondents (see Brief for Respondents 21) tries to dismiss the significance of the state criminal statutes that were in effect when the Fourteenth Amendment was adopted by suggesting that they were enacted for illegitimate reasons. According to this account, which is based almost entirely on statements made by one prominent proponent of the statutes, im-portant motives for the laws were the fear that Catholic im-migrants were having more babies than Protestants and that the availability of abortion was leading White Protestant women to “shir[k their] maternal duties.” Brief for American Historical Association et al. as Amici Curiae 20. Resort to this argument is a testament to the lack of any real historical support for the right that Roe and Casey rec-ognized. This Court has long disfavored arguments based on alleged legislative motives. See, e.g., Erie v. Pap’s A. M., 529 U. S. 277, 292 (2000) (plurality opinion); Turner Broad-casting System, Inc. v. FCC, 512 U. S. 622, 652 (1994); United States v. O’Brien , 391 U. S. 367, 383 (1968); Arizona v. California, 283 U. S. 423, 455 (1931) (collecting cases). The Court has recognized that inquiries into legislative mo-tives “are a hazardous matter.” O’Brien, 391 U. S., at 383. Even when an argument about legislative motive is backed by statements made by legislators who voted for a law, we

Cite as: 597 U. S. ____ (2022)29 Opinion of the Court have been reluctant to attribute those motives to the legis-lative body as a whole. “What motivates one legislator to make a speech about a statute is not necessarily what mo-tivates scores of others to enact it.” Id., at 384. Here, the argument about legislative motive is not even based on statements by legislators, but on statements made by a few supporters of the new 19th-century abortion laws, and it is quite a leap to attribute these motives to all the legislators whose votes were responsible for the enactment of those laws. Recall that at the time of the adoption of the Fourteenth Amendment, over three-quarters of the States had adopted statutes criminalizing abortion (usually at all stages of pregnancy), and that from the early 20th century until the day Roe was handed down, every single State had such a law on its books. Are we to believe that the hundreds of lawmakers whose votes were needed to enact these laws were motivated by hostility to Catholics and women? There is ample evidence that the passage of these laws was instead spurred by a sincere belief that abortion kills a human being. Many judicial decisions from the late 19th and early 20th centuries made that point. See, e.g., Nash v. Meyer, 54 Idaho 283, 301, 31 P. 2d 273, 280 (1934); State v. Ausplund, 86 Ore. 121, 131–132, 167 P. 1019, 1022–1023 (1917); Trent v. State, 15 Ala. App. 485, 488, 73 S. 834, 836 (1916); State v. Miller, 90 Kan. 230, 233, 133 P. 878, 879 (1913); State v. Tippie, 89 Ohio St. 35, 39–40, 105 N. E. 75, 77 (1913); State v. Gedicke, 43 N. J. L. 86, 90 (1881); Dougherty v. People, 1 Colo. 514, 522–523 (1873); State v. Moore, 25 Iowa 128, 131–132 (1868); Smith, 33 Me., at 57; see also Memphis Center for Reproductive Health v. Slatery, 14 F. 4th 409, 446, and n. 11 (CA6 2021) (Thapar, J., con-curring in judgment in part and dissenting in part) (citing cases). One may disagree with this belief (and our decision is not based on any view about when a State should regard pre-natal life as having rights or legally cognizable interests),

30 DOBBS v. JACKSON WOMEN’S HEALTH ORGANIZATION Opinion of the Court but even Roe and Casey did not question the good faith of abortion opponents. See, e.g., Casey, 505 U. S., at 850 (“Men and women of good conscience can disagree . . . about the profound moral and spiritual implications of terminat-ing a pregnancy even in its earliest stage”). And we see no reason to discount the significance of the state laws in ques-tion based on these amici’s suggestions about legislative motive.41 C 1 Instead of seriously pressing the argument that the abor-tion right itself has deep roots, supporters of Roe and Casey contend that the abortion right is an integral part of a broader entrenched right. Roe termed this a right to pri-vacy, 410 U. S., at 154, and Casey described it as the free-dom to make “intimate and personal choices” that are “cen-tral to personal dignity and autonomy,” 505 U. S., at 851. Casey elaborated: “At the heart of liberty is the right to de-fine one’s own concept of existence, of meaning, of the uni-verse, and of the mystery of human life.” Ibid. The Court did not claim that this broadly framed right is absolute, and no such claim would be plausible. While in-dividuals are certainly free to think and to say what they —————— 41 Other amicus briefs present arguments about the motives of propo-nents of liberal access to abortion. They note that some such supporters have been motivated by a desire to suppress the size of the African-American population. See Brief for African-American Organization et al. as Amici Curiae 14–21; see also Box v. Planned Parenthood of Ind. and Ky., Inc., 587 U. S. ___, ___–___ (2019) (THOMAS, J., concurring) (slip op., at 1–4). And it is beyond dispute that Roe has had that demographic effect. A highly disproportionate percentage of aborted fetuses are Black. See, e.g., Dept. of Health and Human Servs., Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), K. Kortsmit et al., Abortion Surveillance—United States, 2019, 70 Morbidity and Mortality Report, Surveillance Summar-ies, p. 20 (Nov. 26, 2021) (Table 6). For our part, we do not question the motives of either those who have supported or those who have opposed laws restricting abortions.

Cite as: 597 U. S. ____ (2022)31 Opinion of the Court wish about “existence,” “meaning,” the “universe,” and “the mystery of human life,” they are not always free to act in accordance with those thoughts. License to act on the basis of such beliefs may correspond to one of the many under-standings of “liberty,” but it is certainly not “ordered lib-erty.” Ordered liberty sets limits and defines the boundary be-tween competing interests. Roe and Casey each struck a particular balance between the interests of a woman who wants an abortion and the interests of what they termed “potential life.” Roe, 410 U. S., at 150 (emphasis deleted); Casey, 505 U. S., at 852. But the people of the various States may evaluate those interests differently. In some States, voters may believe that the abortion right should be even more extensive than the right that Roe and Casey rec-ognized. Voters in other States may wish to impose tight restrictions based on their belief that abortion destroys an “unborn human being.” Miss. Code Ann. §41–41–191(4)(b). Our Nation’s historical understanding of ordered liberty does not prevent the people’s elected representatives from deciding how abortion should be regulated. Nor does the right to obtain an abortion have a sound ba-sis in precedent. Casey relied on cases involving the right to marry a person of a different race, Loving v. Virginia, 388 U. S. 1 (1967); the right to marry while in prison, Turner v. Safley, 482 U. S. 78 (1987); the right to obtain contracep-tives, Griswold v. Connecticut, 381 U. S. 479 (1965), Eisen-stadt v. Baird, 405 U. S. 438 (1972), Carey v. Population Services Int’l, 431 U. S. 678 (1977); the right to reside with relatives, Moore v. East Cleveland, 431 U. S. 494 (1977); the right to make decisions about the education of one’s chil-dren, Pierce v. Society of Sisters, 268 U. S. 510 (1925), Meyer v. Nebraska, 262 U. S. 390 (1923); the right not to be steri-lized without consent, Skinner v. Oklahoma ex rel. William-son, 316 U. S. 535 (1942); and the right in certain circum-stances not to undergo involuntary surgery, forced

32 DOBBS v. JACKSON WOMEN’S HEALTH ORGANIZATION Opinion of the Court administration of drugs, or other substantially similar pro-cedures, Winston v. Lee, 470 U. S. 753 (1985), Washington v. Harper, 494 U. S. 210 (1990), Rochin v. California, 342 U. S. 165 (1952). Respondents and the Solicitor General also rely on post-Casey decisions like Lawrence v. Texas, 539 U. S. 558 (2003) (right to engage in private, consensual sexual acts), and Obergefell v. Hodges, 576 U. S. 644 (2015) (right to marry a person of the same sex). See Brief for Re-spondents 18; Brief for United States 23–24. These attempts to justify abortion through appeals to a broader right to autonomy and to define one’s “concept of existence” prove too much. Casey, 505 U. S., at 851. Those criteria, at a high level of generality, could license funda-mental rights to illicit drug use, prostitution, and the like. See Compassion in Dying v. Washington, 85 F. 3d 1440, 1444 (CA9 1996) (O’Scannlain, J., dissenting from denial of rehearing en banc). None of these rights has any claim to being deeply rooted in history. Id., at 1440, 1445. What sharply distinguishes the abortion right from the rights recognized in the cases on which Roe and Casey rely is something that both those decisions acknowledged: Abor-tion destroys what those decisions call “potential life” and what the law at issue in this case regards as the life of an “unborn human being.” See Roe, 410 U. S., at 159 (abortion is “inherently different”); Casey, 505 U. S., at 852 (abortion is “a unique act”). None of the other decisions cited by Roe and Casey involved the critical moral question posed by abortion. They are therefore inapposite. They do not sup-port the right to obtain an abortion, and by the same token, our conclusion that the Constitution does not confer such a right does not undermine them in any way. 2 In drawing this critical distinction between the abortion right and other rights, it is not necessary to dispute Casey’s claim (which we accept for the sake of argument) that “the

Cite as: 597 U. S. ____ (2022)33 Opinion of the Court specific practices of States at the time of the adoption of the Fourteenth Amendment” do not “mar[k] the outer limits of the substantive sphere of liberty which the Fourteenth Amendment protects.” 505 U. S., at 848. Abortion is noth-ing new. It has been addressed by lawmakers for centuries, and the fundamental moral question that it poses is age-less. Defenders of Roe and Casey do not claim that any new scientific learning calls for a different answer to the under-lying moral question, but they do contend that changes in society require the recognition of a constitutional right to obtain an abortion. Without the availability of abortion, they maintain, people will be inhibited from exercising their freedom to choose the types of relationships they de-sire, and women will be unable to compete with men in the workplace and in other endeavors. Americans who believe that abortion should be restricted press countervailing arguments about modern develop-ments. They note that attitudes about the pregnancy of un-married women have changed drastically; that federal and state laws ban discrimination on the basis of pregnancy;42 that leave for pregnancy and childbirth are now guaranteed by law in many cases;43 that the costs of medical care asso- —————— 42 See, e.g., Pregnancy Discrimination Act, 92 Stat. 2076, 42 U. S. C. §2000e(k) (federal law prohibiting pregnancy discrimination in employ-ment); Dept. of Labor, Women’s Bureau, Employment Protections for Workers Who Are Pregnant or Nursing, https://www.dol.gov/agencies/ wb/pregnant-nursing-employment-protections (showing that 46 States and the District of Columbia have employment protections against preg-nancy discrimination). 43 See, e.g., Family and Medical Leave Act of 1993, 107 Stat. 9, 29 U. S. C. §2612 (federal law guaranteeing employment leave for preg-nancy and birth); Bureau of Labor Statistics, Access to Paid and Unpaid Family Leave in 2018, https://www.bls.gov/opub/ted/2019/access-to-paid-

34 DOBBS v. JACKSON WOMEN’S HEALTH ORGANIZATION Opinion of the Court ciated with pregnancy are covered by insurance or govern-ment assistance;44 that States have increasingly adopted “safe haven” laws, which generally allow women to drop off babies anonymously;45 and that a woman who puts her new-born up for adoption today has little reason to fear that the baby will not find a suitable home.46 They also claim that many people now have a new appreciation of fetal life and that when prospective parents who want to have a child view a sonogram, they typically have no doubt that what they see is their daughter or son. —————— and-unpaid-family-leave-in-2018.htm (showing that 89 percent of civil- ian workers had access to unpaid family leave in 2018). 44 The Affordable Care Act (ACA) requires non-grandfathered health plans in the individual and small group markets to cover certain essen-tial health benefits, which include maternity and newborn care. See 124 Stat. 163, 42 U. S. C. §18022(b)(1)(D). The ACA also prohibits annual limits, see §300gg–11, and limits annual cost-sharing obligations on such benefits, §18022(c). State Medicaid plans must provide coverage for pregnancy-related services—including, but not limited to, prenatal care, delivery, and postpartum care—as well as services for other conditions that might complicate the pregnancy. 42 CFR §§440.210(a)(2)(i)–(ii) (2020). State Medicaid plans are also prohibited from imposing deduc-tions, cost-sharing, or similar charges for pregnancy-related services for pregnant women. 42 U. S. C. §§1396o(a)(2)(B), (b)(2)(B). 45 Since Casey, all 50 States and the District of Columbia have enacted such laws. Dept. of Health and Human Servs., Children’s Bureau, Infant Safe Haven Laws 1–2 (2016), https://www.childwelfare.gov/pubPDFs/ safehaven.pdf (noting that safe haven laws began in Texas in 1999). 46 See, e.g., CDC, Adoption Experiences of Women and Men and De-mand for Children To Adopt by Women 18–44 Years of Age in the United States 16 (Aug. 2008) (“[N]early 1 million women were seeking to adopt children in 2002 (i.e., they were in demand for a child), whereas the do-mestic supply of infants relinquished at birth or within the first month of life and available to be adopted had become virtually nonexistent”); CDC, National Center for Health Statistics, Adoption and Nonbiological Parenting, https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nsfg/key_statistics/a-keystat.htm# adoption (showing that approximately 3.1 million women between the ages of 18–49 had ever “[t]aken steps to adopt a child” based on data collected from 2015–2019).

Cite as: 597 U. S. ____ (2022)35 Opinion of the Court Both sides make important policy arguments, but sup-porters of Roe and Casey must show that this Court has the authority to weigh those arguments and decide how abor-tion may be regulated in the States. They have failed to make that showing, and we thus return the power to weigh those arguments to the people and their elected represent-atives. D 1 The dissent is very candid that it cannot show that a con-stitutional right to abortion has any foundation, let alone a “‘deeply rooted’” one, “‘in this Nation’s history and tradi-tion.’” Glucksberg, 521 U. S., at 721; see post, at 12–14 (joint opinion of BREYER, SOTOMAYOR, and KAGAN, JJ.). The dissent does not identify any pre-Roe authority that supports such a right—no state constitutional provision or statute, no federal or state judicial precedent, not even a scholarly treatise. Compare post, at 12–14, n. 2, with su-pra, at 15–16, and n. 23. Nor does the dissent dispute the fact that abortion was illegal at common law at least after quickening; that the 19th century saw a trend toward crim-inalization of pre-quickening abortions; that by 1868, a su-permajority of States (at least 26 of 37) had enacted stat-utes criminalizing abortion at all stages of pregnancy; that by the late 1950s at least 46 States prohibited abortion “however and whenever performed” except if necessary to save “the life of the mother,” Roe, 410 U. S., at 139; and that when Roe was decided in 1973 similar statutes were still in effect in 30 States. Compare post, at 12–14, nn. 2–3, with supra, at 23–25, and nn. 33–34.47 The dissent’s failure to engage with this long tradition is —————— 47 By way of contrast, at the time Griswold v. Connecticut, 381 U. S. 479 (1965), was decided, the Connecticut statute at issue was an extreme outlier. See Brief for Planned Parenthood Federation of America, Inc. as Amicus Curiae in Griswold v. Connecticut, O. T. 1964, No. 496, p. 27.

36 DOBBS v. JACKSON WOMEN’S HEALTH ORGANIZATION Opinion of the Court devastating to its position. We have held that the “estab-lished method of substantive-due- process analysis” re-quires that an unenumerated right be “‘deeply rooted in this Nation’s history and tradition’” before it can be recog-nized as a component of the “liberty” protected in the Due Process Clause. Glucksberg, 521 U. S., at 721; cf. Timbs, 586 U. S., at ___ (slip op., at 7). But despite the dissent’s professed fidelity to stare decisis, it fails to seriously engage with that important precedent—which it cannot possibly satisfy. The dissent attempts to obscure this failure by misrepre-senting our application of Glucksberg. The dissent suggests that we have focused only on “the legal status of abortion in the 19th century,” post, at 26, but our review of this Na-tion’s tradition extends well past that period. As explained, for more than a century after 1868—including “another half-century” after women gained the constitutional right to vote in 1920, see post, at 15; Amdt. 19—it was firmly es-tablished that laws prohibiting abortion like the Texas law at issue in Roe were permissible exercises of state regula-tory authority. And today, another half century later, more than half of the States have asked us to overrule Roe and Casey. The dissent cannot establish that a right to abortion has ever been part of this Nation’s tradition. 2 Because the dissent cannot argue that the abortion right is rooted in this Nation’s history and tradition, it contends that the “constitutional tradition” is “not captured whole at a single moment,” and that its “meaning gains content from the long sweep of our history and from successive judicial precedents.” Post, at 18 (internal quotation marks omit-ted). This vague formulation imposes no clear restraints on what Justice White called the “exercise of raw judicial power,” Roe, 410 U. S., at 222 (dissenting opinion), and while the dissent claims that its standard “does not mean

Cite as: 597 U. S. ____ (2022)37 Opinion of the Court anything goes,” post, at 17, any real restraints are hard to discern. The largely limitless reach of the dissenters’ standard is illustrated by the way they apply it here. First, if the “long sweep of history” imposes any restraint on the recognition of unenumerated rights, then Roe was surely wrong, since abortion was never allowed (except to save the life of the mother) in a majority of States for over 100 years before that decision was handed down. Second, it is impossible to defend Roe based on prior precedent because all of the prec-edents Roe cited, including Griswold and Eisenstadt, were critically different for a reason that we have explained: None of those cases involved the destruction of what Roe called “potential life.” See supra, at 32. So without support in history or relevant precedent, Roe’s reasoning cannot be defended even under the dissent’s pro-posed test, and the dissent is forced to rely solely on the fact that a constitutional right to abortion was recognized in Roe and later decisions that accepted Roe’s interpretation. Un-der the doctrine of stare decisis, those precedents are enti-tled to careful and respectful consideration, and we engage in that analysis below. But as the Court has reiterated time and time again, adherence to precedent is not “‘an inexora-ble command.’” Kimble v. Marvel Entertainment, LLC , 576 U. S. 446, 455 (2015). There are occasions when past deci-sions should be overruled, and as we will explain, this is one of them. 3 The most striking feature of the dissent is the absence of any serious discussion of the legitimacy of the States’ inter-est in protecting fetal life. This is evident in the analogy that the dissent draws between the abortion right and the rights recognized in Griswold (contraception), Eisenstadt (same), Lawrence (sexual conduct with member of the same sex), and Obergefell (same-sex marriage). Perhaps this is

38 DOBBS v. JACKSON WOMEN’S HEALTH ORGANIZATION Opinion of the Court designed to stoke unfounded fear that our decision will im-peril those other rights, but the dissent’s analogy is objec-tionable for a more important reason: what it reveals about the dissent’s views on the protection of what Roe called “po-tential life.” The exercise of the rights at issue in Griswold, Eisenstadt, Lawrence, and Obergefell does not destroy a “po-tential life,” but an abortion has that effect. So if the rights at issue in those cases are fundamentally the same as the right recognized in Roe and Casey , the implication is clear: The Constitution does not permit the States to regard the destruction of a “potential life” as a matter of any signifi-cance. That view is evident throughout the dissent. The dissent has much to say about the effects of pregnancy on women, the burdens of motherhood, and the difficulties faced by poor women. These are important concerns. However, the dissent evinces no similar regard for a State’s interest in protecting prenatal life. The dissent repeatedly praises the “balance,” post, at 2, 6, 8, 10, 12, that the viability line strikes between a woman’s liberty interest and the State’s interest in prenatal life. But for reasons we discuss later, see infra, at 50–54, 55–56, and given in the opinion of THE CHIEF JUSTICE, post, at 2–5 (opinion concurring in judg-ment), the viability line makes no sense. It was not ade-quately justified in Roe, and the dissent does not even try to defend it today. Nor does it identify any other point in a pregnancy after which a State is permitted to prohibit the destruction of a fetus. Our opinion is not based on any view about if and when prenatal life is entitled to any of the rights enjoyed after birth. The dissent, by contrast, would impose on the people a particular theory about when the rights of personhood begin. According to the dissent, the Constitution requires the States to regard a fetus as lacking even the most basic human right—to live—at least until an arbitrary point in a pregnancy has passed. Nothing in the Constitution or in

Cite as: 597 U. S. ____ (2022)39 Opinion of the Court our Nation’s legal traditions authorizes the Court to adopt that “‘theory of life.’” Post, at 8. III We next consider whether the doctrine of stare decisis counsels continued acceptance of Roe and Casey. Stare de-cisis plays an important role in our case law, and we have explained that it serves many valuable ends. It protects the interests of those who have taken action in reliance on a past decision. See Casey, 505 U. S., at 856 (joint opinion); see also Payne v. Tennessee, 501 U. S. 808, 828 (1991). It “reduces incentives for challenging settled precedents, sav-ing parties and courts the expense of endless relitigation.” Kimble, 576 U. S., at 455. It fosters “evenhanded” deci-sionmaking by requiring that like cases be decided in a like manner. Payne, 501 U. S., at 827. It “contributes to the actual and perceived integrity of the judicial process.” Ibid. And it restrains judicial hubris and reminds us to respect the judgment of those who have grappled with important questions in the past. “Precedent is a way of accumulating and passing down the learning of past generations, a font of established wisdom richer than what can be found in any single judge or panel of judges.” N. Gorsuch, A Republic, If You Can Keep It 217 (2019). We have long recognized, however, that stare decisis is “not an inexorable command,” Pearson v. Callahan, 555 U. S. 223, 233 (2009) (internal quotation marks omitted), and it “is at its weakest when we interpret the Constitu-tion,” Agostini v. Felton, 521 U. S. 203, 235 (1997) . It has been said that it is sometimes more important that an issue “‘be settled than that it be settled right.’” Kimble, 576 U. S., at 455 (quoting Burnet v. Coronado Oil & Gas Co., 285 U. S. 393, 406 (1932) (Brandeis, J., dissenting)). But when it comes to the interpretation of the Constitution— the “great charter of our liberties,” which was meant “to en-

40 DOBBS v. JACKSON WOMEN’S HEALTH ORGANIZATION Opinion of the Court dure through a long lapse of ages,” Martin v. Hunter’s Les-see, 1 Wheat. 304, 326 (1816) (opinion for the Court by Story, J.)—we place a high value on having the matter “set-tled right.” In addition, when one of our constitutional de-cisions goes astray, the country is usually stuck with the bad decision unless we correct our own mistake. An erro-neous constitutional decision can be fixed by amending the Constitution, but our Constitution is notoriously hard to amend. See Art. V; Kimble, 576 U. S., at 456. Therefore, in appropriate circumstances we must be willing to reconsider and, if necessary, overrule constitutional decisions. Some of our most important constitutional decisions have overruled prior precedents. We mention three. In Brown v. Board of Education, 347 U. S. 483 (1954), the Court re-pudiated the “separate but equal” doctrine, which had al-lowed States to maintain racially segregated schools and other facilities. Id., at 488 (internal quotation marks omit-ted). In so doing, the Court overruled the infamous decision in Plessy v. Ferguson, 163 U. S. 537 (1896), along with six other Supreme Court precedents that had applied the separate-but-equal rule. See Brown, 347 U. S., at 491. In West Coast Hotel Co. v. Parrish, 300 U. S. 379 (1937), the Court overruled Adkins v. Children’s Hospital of D. C., 261 U. S. 525 (1923), which had held that a law setting min-imum wages for women violated the “liberty” protected by the Fifth Amendment’s Due Process Clause. Id., at 545. West Coast Hotel signaled the demise of an entire line of important precedents that had protected an individual lib-erty right against state and federal health and welfare leg-islation. See Lochner v. New York, 198 U. S. 45 (1905) (holding invalid a law setting maximum working hours); Coppage v. Kansas, 236 U. S. 1 (1915) (holding invalid a law banning contracts forbidding employees to join a union); Jay Burns Baking Co. v. Bryan, 264 U. S. 504 (1924) (hold-ing invalid laws fixing the weight of loaves of bread). Finally, in West Virginia Bd. of Ed. v. Barnette, 319 U. S.

Cite as: 597 U. S. ____ (2022)41 Opinion of the Court 624 (1943), after the lapse of only three years, the Court overruled Minersville School Dist. v. Gobitis, 310 U. S. 586 (1940), and held that public school students could not be compelled to salute the flag in violation of their sincere be-liefs. Barnette stands out because nothing had changed during the intervening period other than the Court’s be-lated recognition that its earlier decision had been seriously wrong. On many other occasions, this Court has overruled im-portant constitutional decisions. (We include a partial list in the footnote that follows.48) Without these decisions, —————— 48 See, e.g., Obergefell v. Hodges, 576 U. S. 644 (2015) (right to same-sex marriage), overruling Baker v. Nelson, 409 U. S. 810 (1972); Citizens United v. Federal Election Comm’n, 558 U. S. 310 (2010) (right to engage in campaign-related speech), overruling Austin v. Michigan Chamber of Commerce, 494 U. S. 652 (1990), and partially overruling McConnell v. Federal Election Comm’n, 540 U. S. 93 (2003); Montejo v. Louisiana, 556 U. S. 778 (2009) (Sixth Amendment right to counsel), overruling Michi-gan v. Jackson, 475 U. S. 625 (1986); Crawford v. Washington, 541 U. S. 36 (2004) (Sixth Amendment right to confront witnesses), overruling Ohio v. Roberts, 448 U. S. 56 (1980); Lawrence v. Texas, 539 U. S. 558 (2003) (right to engage in consensual, same-sex intimacy in one’s home), overruling Bowers v. Hardwick, 478 U. S. 186 (1986); Ring v. Arizona, 536 U. S. 584 (2002) (Sixth Amendment right to a jury trial in capital prosecutions), overruling Walton v. Arizona, 497 U. S. 639 (1990); Agos-tini v. Felton, 521 U. S. 203 (1997) (evaluating whether government aid violates the Establishment Clause), overruling Aguilar v. Felton, 473 U. S. 402 (1985), and School Dist. of Grand Rapids v. Ball, 473 U. S. 373 (1985); Seminole Tribe of Fla. v. Florida, 517 U. S. 44 (1996) (lack of con-gressional power under the Indian Commerce Clause to abrogate States’ Eleventh Amendment immunity), overruling Pennsylvania v. Union Gas Co., 491 U. S. 1 (1989); Payne v. Tennessee, 501 U. S. 808 (1991) (the Eighth Amendment does not erect a per se bar to the admission of victim impact evidence during the penalty phase of a capital trial), overruling Booth v. Maryland, 482 U. S. 496 (1987), and South Carolina v. Gathers, 490 U. S. 805 (1989); Batson v. Kentucky, 476 U. S. 79 (1986) (the Equal Protection Clause guarantees the defendant that the State will not ex-clude members of his race from the jury venire on account of race), over-ruling Swain v. Alabama, 380 U. S. 202 (1965); Garcia v. San Antonio

42 DOBBS v. JACKSON WOMEN’S HEALTH ORGANIZATION Opinion of the Court —————— Metropolitan Transit Authority, 469 U. S. 528, 530 (1985) (rejecting the principle that the Commerce Clause does not empower Congress to en-force requirements, such as minimum wage laws, against the States “ ‘in areas of traditional governmental functions’ ”), overruling National League of Cities v. Usery, 426 U. S. 833 (1976); Illinois v. Gates, 462 U. S. 213 (1983) (the Fourth Amendment requires a totality of the circum-stances approach for determining whether an informant’s tip establishes probable cause), overruling Aguilar v. Texas, 378 U. S. 108 (1964), and Spinelli v. United States, 393 U. S. 410 (1969); United States v. Scott, 437 U. S. 82 (1978) (the Double Jeopardy Clause does not apply to Govern-ment appeals from orders granting defense motions to terminate a trial before verdict), overruling United States v. Jenkins, 420 U. S. 358 (1975); Craig v. Boren, 429 U. S. 190 (1976) (gender-based classifications are subject to intermediate scrutiny under the Equal Protection Clause), overruling Goesaert v. Cleary, 335 U. S. 464 (1948); Taylor v. Louisiana, 419 U. S. 522 (1975) (jury system which operates to exclude women from jury service violates the defendant’s Sixth and Fourteenth Amendment right to an impartial jury), overruling Hoyt v. Florida, 368 U. S. 57 (1961); Brandenburg v. Ohio, 395 U. S. 444 (1969) (per curiam) (the mere advocacy of violence is protected under the First Amendment unless it is directed to incite or produce imminent lawless action), overruling Whit-ney v. California, 274 U. S. 357 (1927); Katz v. United States, 389 U. S. 347, 351 (1967) (Fourth Amendment “protects people, not places,” and extends to what a person “seeks to preserve as private”), overruling Olmstead v. United States, 277 U. S. 438 (1928), and Goldman v. United States, 316 U. S. 129 (1942); Miranda v. Arizona, 384 U. S. 436 (1966) (procedural safeguards to protect the Fifth Amendment privilege against self-incrimination), overruling Crooker v. California, 357 U. S. 433 (1958), and Cicenia v. Lagay, 357 U. S. 504 (1958); Malloy v. Hogan, 378 U. S. 1 (1964) (the Fifth Amendment privilege against self-incrimination is also protected by the Fourteenth Amendment against abridgment by the States), overruling Twining v. New Jersey, 211 U. S. 78 (1908), and Adamson v. California, 332 U. S. 46 (1947); Wesberry v. Sanders, 376 U. S. 1, 7–8 (1964) (congressional districts should be apportioned so that “as nearly as is practicable one man’s vote in a congressional election is to be worth as much as another’s”), overruling in effect Colegrove v. Green , 328 U. S. 549 (1946); Gideon v. Wainwright, 372 U. S. 335 (1963) (right to counsel for indigent defendant in a criminal prosecution in state court under the Sixth and Fourteenth Amendments), overruling Betts v. Brady, 316 U. S. 455 (1942); Baker v. Carr, 369 U. S. 186 (1962) (federal courts have jurisdiction to consider constitutional challenges to state re-districting plans), effectively overruling in part Colegrove, 328 U. S. 549;

Cite as: 597 U. S. ____ (2022)43 Opinion of the Court American constitutional law as we know it would be unrec-ognizable, and this would be a different country. No Justice of this Court has ever argued that the Court should never overrule a constitutional decision, but overrul-ing a precedent is a serious matter. It is not a step that should be taken lightly. Our cases have attempted to pro-vide a framework for deciding when a precedent should be overruled, and they have identified factors that should be considered in making such a decision. Janus v. State, County, and Municipal Employees , 585 U. S. ___, ___–___ (2018) (slip op., at 34–35); Ramos v. Louisiana, 590 U. S. ___, ___–___ (2020) (KAVANAUGH, J., concurring in part) (slip op., at 7–9). In this case, five factors weigh strongly in favor of over-ruling Roe and Casey: the nature of their error, the quality of their reasoning, the “workability” of the rules they im-posed on the country, their disruptive effect on other areas of the law, and the absence of concrete reliance. A The nature of the Court’s error. An erroneous interpreta-tion of the Constitution is always important, but some are more damaging than others. The infamous decision in Plessy v. Ferguson, was one —————— Mapp v. Ohio, 367 U. S. 643 (1961) (the exclusionary rule regarding the inadmissibility of evidence obtained in violation of the Fourth Amend-ment applies to the States), overruling Wolf v. Colorado, 338 U. S. 25 (1949); Smith v. Allwright, 321 U. S. 649 (1944) (racial restrictions on the right to vote in primary elections violates the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment), overruling Grovey v. Townsend, 295 U. S. 45 (1935); United States v. Darby, 312 U. S. 100 (1941) (con-gressional power to regulate employment conditions under the Com-merce Clause), overruling Hammer v. Dagenhart, 247 U. S. 251 (1918); Erie R. Co. v. Tompkins, 304 U. S. 64 (1938) (Congress does not have the power to declare substantive rules of common law; a federal court sitting in diversity jurisdiction must apply the substantive state law), overrul-ing Swift v. Tyson, 16 Pet. 1 (1842).

44 DOBBS v. JACKSON WOMEN’S HEALTH ORGANIZATION Opinion of the Court such decision. It betrayed our commitment to “equality be-fore the law.” 163 U. S., at 562 (Harlan, J., dissenting) . It was “egregiously wrong” on the day it was decided, see Ra-mos, 590 U. S., at ___ (opinion of KAVANAUGH, J.) (slip op., at 7), and as the Solicitor General agreed at oral argument, it should have been overruled at the earliest opportunity, see Tr. of Oral Arg. 92–93. Roe was also egregiously wrong and deeply damaging. For reasons already explained, Roe’s constitutional analysis was far outside the bounds of any reasonable interpretation of the various constitutional provisions to which it vaguely pointed. Roe was on a collision course with the Constitution from the day it was decided, Casey perpetuated its errors, and those errors do not concern some arcane corner of the law of little importance to the American people. Rather, wield-ing nothing but “raw judicial power,” Roe, 410 U. S., at 222 (White, J., dissenting), the Court usurped the power to ad-dress a question of profound moral and social importance that the Constitution unequivocally leaves for the people. Casey described itself as calling both sides of the national controversy to resolve their debate, but in doing so, Casey necessarily declared a winning side. Those on the losing side—those who sought to advance the State’s interest in fetal life—could no longer seek to persuade their elected representatives to adopt policies consistent with their views. The Court short-circuited the democratic process by closing it to the large number of Americans who dissented in any respect from Roe. “Roe fanned into life an issue that has inflamed our national politics in general, and has ob-scured with its smoke the selection of Justices to this Court in particular, ever since.” Casey, 505 U. S., at 995–996 (opinion of Scalia, J.). Together, Roe and Casey represent an error that cannot be allowed to stand. As the Court’s landmark decision in West Coast Hotel il-lustrates, the Court has previously overruled decisions that

Cite as: 597 U. S. ____ (2022)45 Opinion of the Court wrongly removed an issue from the people and the demo-cratic process. As Justice White later explained, “decisions that find in the Constitution principles or values that can-not fairly be read into that document usurp the people’s au-thority, for such decisions represent choices that the people have never made and that they cannot disavow through cor-rective legislation. For this reason, it is essential that this Court maintain the power to restore authority to its proper possessors by correcting constitutional decisions that, on re-consideration, are found to be mistaken.” Thornburgh, 476 U. S., at 787 (dissenting opinion). B The quality of the reasoning. Under our precedents, the quality of the reasoning in a prior case has an important bearing on whether it should be reconsidered. See Janus, 585 U. S., at ___ (slip op., at 38); Ramos, 590 U. S., at ___– ___ (opinion of KAVANAUGH, J.) (slip op., at 7–8). In Part II, supra, we explained why Roe was incorrectly decided, but that decision was more than just wrong. It stood on excep-tionally weak grounds. Roe found that the Constitution implicitly conferred a right to obtain an abortion, but it failed to ground its deci-sion in text, history, or precedent. It relied on an erroneous historical narrative; it devoted great attention to and pre-sumably relied on matters that have no bearing on the meaning of the Constitution; it disregarded the fundamen-tal difference between the precedents on which it relied and the question before the Court; it concocted an elaborate set of rules, with different restrictions for each trimester of pregnancy, but it did not explain how this veritable code could be teased out of anything in the Constitution, the his-tory of abortion laws, prior precedent, or any other cited source; and its most important rule (that States cannot pro-tect fetal life prior to “viability”) was never raised by any

46 DOBBS v. JACKSON WOMEN’S HEALTH ORGANIZATION Opinion of the Court party and has never been plausibly explained. Roe’s rea-soning quickly drew scathing scholarly criticism, even from supporters of broad access to abortion. The Casey plurality, while reaffirming Roe’s central hold-ing, pointedly refrained from endorsing most of its reason-ing. It revised the textual basis for the abortion right, si-lently abandoned Roe’s erroneous historical narrative, and jettisoned the trimester framework. But it replaced that scheme with an arbitrary “undue burden” test and relied on an exceptional version of stare decisis that, as explained be-low, this Court had never before applied and has never in-voked since. 1 a The weaknesses in Roe’s reasoning are well -known. Without any grounding in the constitutional text, history, or precedent, it imposed on the entire country a detailed set of rules much like those that one might expect to find in a statute or regulation. See 410 U. S., at 163–164. Dividing pregnancy into three trimesters, the Court imposed special rules for each. During the first trimester, the Court an-nounced, “the abortion decision and its effectuation must be left to the medical judgment of the pregnant woman’s at-tending physician.” Id., at 164. After that point, a State’s interest in regulating abortion for the sake of a woman’s health became compelling, and accordingly, a State could “regulate the abortion procedure in ways that are reasona-bly related to maternal health.” Ibid. Finally, in “the stage subsequent to viability,” which in 1973 roughly coincided with the beginning of the third trimester, the State’s inter-est in “the potentiality of human life” became compelling, and therefore a State could “regulate, and even proscribe, abortion except where it is necessary, in appropriate medi-cal judgment, for the preservation of the life or health of the mother.” Id., at 164–165.

Cite as: 597 U. S. ____ (2022)47 Opinion of the Court This elaborate scheme was the Court’s own brainchild. Neither party advocated the trimester framework; nor did either party or any amicus argue that “viability” should mark the point at which the scope of the abortion right and a State’s regulatory authority should be substantially transformed. See Brief for Appellant and Brief for Appellee in Roe v. Wade, O. T. 1972, No. 70–18; see also C. Forsythe, Abuse of Discretion: The Inside Story of Roe v. Wade 127, 141 (2012). b Not only did this scheme resemble the work of a legisla-ture, but the Court made little effort to explain how these rules could be deduced from any of the sources on which constitutional decisions are usually based. We have al-ready discussed Roe’s treatment of constitutional text, and the opinion failed to show that history, precedent, or any other cited source supported its scheme. Roe featured a lengthy survey of history, but much of its discussion was irrelevant, and the Court made no effort to explain why it was included. For example, multiple para-graphs were devoted to an account of the views and prac-tices of ancient civilizations where infanticide was widely accepted. See 410 U. S., at 130–132 (discussing ancient Greek and Roman practices).49 When it came to the most important historical fact—how the States regulated abor-tion when the Fourteenth Amendment was adopted—the Court said almost nothing. It allowed that States had tight-ened their abortion laws “in the middle and late 19th cen-tury,” id., at 139, but it implied that these laws might have —————— 49 See, e.g., C. Patterson, “Not Worth the Rearing”: The Causes of In-fant Exposure in Ancient Greece, 115 Transactions Am. Philosophical Assn. 103, 111–123 (1985); A. Cameron, The Exposure of Children and Greek Ethics, 46 Classical Rev. 105–108 (1932); H. Bennett, The Expo-sure of Infants in Ancient Rome, 18 Classical J. 341–351 (1923); W. Har-ris, Child-Exposure in the Roman Empire, 84 J. Roman Studies 1 (1994).

48 DOBBS v. JACKSON WOMEN’S HEALTH ORGANIZATION Opinion of the Court been enacted not to protect fetal life but to further “a Victo-rian social concern” about “illicit sexual conduct,” id., at 148. Roe’s failure even to note the overwhelming consensus of state laws in effect in 1868 is striking, and what it said about the common law was simply wrong. Relying on two discredited articles by an abortion advocate, the Court er-roneously suggested—contrary to Bracton, Coke, Hale, Blackstone, and a wealth of other authority—that the com-mon law had probably never really treated post-quickening abortion as a crime. See id., at 136 (“[I]t now appear[s] doubtful that abortion was ever firmly established as a com-mon-law crime even with respect to the destruction of a quick fetus”). This erroneous understanding appears to have played an important part in the Court’s thinking be-cause the opinion cited “the lenity of the common law” as one of the four factors that informed its decision. Id., at 165. After surveying history, the opinion spent many para-graphs conducting the sort of fact-finding that might be un-dertaken by a legislative committee. This included a lengthy account of the “position of the American Medical Association” and “[t]he position of the American Public Health Association,” as well as the vote by the American Bar Association’s House of Delegates in February 1972 on proposed abortion legislation. Id., at 141, 144, 146 (empha-sis deleted). Also noted were a British judicial decision handed down in 1939 and a new British abortion law en-acted in 1967. Id., at 137–138. The Court did not explain why these sources shed light on the meaning of the Consti-tution, and not one of them adopted or advocated anything like the scheme that Roe imposed on the country. Finally, after all this, the Court turned to precedent. Cit-ing a broad array of cases, the Court found support for a constitutional “right of personal privacy,” id., at 152, but it conflated two very different meanings of the term: the right

Cite as: 597 U. S. ____ (2022)49 Opinion of the Court to shield information from disclosure and the right to make and implement important personal decisions without gov-ernmental interference. See Whalen v. Roe, 429 U. S. 589, 599–600 (1977). Only the cases involving this second sense of the term could have any possible relevance to the abor-tion issue, and some of the cases in that category involved personal decisions that were obviously very, very far afield. See Pierce, 268 U. S. 510 (right to send children to religious school); Meyer, 262 U. S. 390 (right to have children receive German language instruction). What remained was a handful of cases having something to do with marriage, Loving, 388 U. S. 1 (right to marry a person of a different race), or procreation, Skinner, 316 U. S. 535 (right not to be sterilized); Griswold, 381 U. S. 479 (right of married persons to obtain contraceptives); Eisen-stadt, 405 U. S. 438 (same, for unmarried persons) . But none of these decisions involved what is distinctive about abortion: its effect on what Roe termed “potential life.” When the Court summarized the basis for the scheme it imposed on the country, it asserted that its rules were “con-sistent with” the following: (1) “the relative weights of the respective interests involved,” (2) “the lessons and exam-ples of medical and legal history,” (3) “the lenity of the com-mon law,” and (4) “the demands of the profound problems of the present day.” Roe, 410 U. S., at 165. Put aside the second and third factors, which were based on the Court’s flawed account of history, and what remains are precisely the sort of considerations that legislative bodies often take into account when they draw lines that accommodate com-peting interests. The scheme Roe produced looked like leg-islation, and the Court provided the sort of explanation that might be expected from a legislative body. c What Roe did not provide was any cogent justification for the lines it drew. Why, for example, does a State have no

50 DOBBS v. JACKSON WOMEN’S HEALTH ORGANIZATION Opinion of the Court authority to regulate first trimester abortions for the pur-pose of protecting a woman’s health? The Court’s only ex-planation was that mortality rates for abortion at that stage were lower than the mortality rates for childbirth. Id., at 163. But the Court did not explain why mortality rates were the only factor that a State could legitimately con-sider. Many health and safety regulations aim to avoid ad-verse health consequences short of death. And the Court did not explain why it departed from the normal rule that courts defer to the judgments of legislatures “in areas fraught with medical and scientific uncertainties.” Mar-shall v. United States, 414 U. S. 417, 427 (1974). An even more glaring deficiency was Roe’s failure to jus-tify the critical distinction it drew between pre- and post-viability abortions. Here is the Court’s entire explanation: “With respect to the State’s important and legitimate interest in potential life, the ‘compelling’ point is at vi-ability. This is so because the fetus then presumably has the capability of meaningful life outside the womb.” 410 U. S., at 163. As Professor Laurence Tribe has written, “[c]learly, this mistakes ‘a definition for a syllogism.’” Tribe 4 (quoting Ely 924). The definition of a “viable” fetus is one that is capable of surviving outside the womb, but why is this the point at which the State’s interest becomes compelling? If, as Roe held, a State’s interest in protecting prenatal life is compel-ling “after viability,” 410 U. S., at 163, why isn’t that inter-est “equally compelling before viability”? Webster v. Repro-ductive Health Services, 492 U. S. 490, 519 (1989) (plurality opinion) (quoting Thornburgh , 476 U. S., at 795 (White, J., dissenting)). Roe did not say, and no explanation is appar-ent. This arbitrary line has not found much support among philosophers and ethicists who have attempted to justify a right to abortion. Some have argued that a fetus should not

Cite as: 597 U. S. ____ (2022)51 Opinion of the Court be entitled to legal protection until it acquires the charac-teristics that they regard as defining what it means to be a “person.” Among the characteristics that have been offered as essential attributes of “personhood” are sentience, self-awareness, the ability to reason, or some combination thereof.50 By this logic, it would be an open question whether even born individuals, including young children or those afflicted with certain developmental or medical con-ditions, merit protection as “persons.” But even if one takes the view that “personhood” begins when a certain attribute or combination of attributes is acquired, it is very hard to see why viability should mark the point where “personhood” begins. The most obvious problem with any such argument is that viability is heavily dependent on factors that have nothing to do with the characteristics of a fetus. One is the —————— 50 See, e.g., P. Singer, Rethinking Life & Death 218 (1994) (defining a person as “a being with awareness of her or his own existence over time, and the capacity to have wants and plans for the future”); B. Steinbock, Life Before Birth: The Moral and Legal Status of Embryos and Fetuses 9–13 (1992) (arguing that “the possession of interests is both necessary and sufficient for moral status” and that the “capacity for conscious awareness is a necessary condition for the possession of interests” (em-phasis deleted)); M. Warren, On the Moral and Legal Status of Abortion, 57 The Monist 1, 5 (1973) (arguing that, to qualify as a person, a being must have at least one of five traits that are “central to the concept of personhood”: (1) “consciousness (of objects and events external and/or in-ternal to the being), and in particular the capacity to feel pain”; (2) “rea-soning (the developed capacity to solve new and relatively complex prob-lems)”; (3) “self-motivated activity (activity which is relatively independent of either genetic or direct external control)”; (4) “the capac-ity to communicate, by whatever means, messages of an indefinite vari-ety of types”; and (5) “the presence of self-concepts, and self-awareness, either individual or racial, or both” (emphasis deleted)); M. Tooley, Abor-tion & Infanticide, 2 Philosophy & Pub. Affairs 37, 49 (Autumn 1972) (arguing that “having a right to life presupposes that one is capable of desiring to continue existing as a subject of experiences and other mental states”).

52 DOBBS v. JACKSON WOMEN’S HEALTH ORGANIZATION Opinion of the Court state of neonatal care at a particular point in time. Due to the development of new equipment and improved practices, the viability line has changed over the years. In the 19th century, a fetus may not have been viable until the 32d or 33d week of pregnancy or even later.51 When Roe was de-cided, viability was gauged at roughly 28 weeks. See 410 U. S., at 160. Today, respondents draw the line at 23 or 24 weeks. Brief for Respondents 8. So, according to Roe’s logic, States now have a compelling interest in protecting a fetus with a gestational age of, say, 26 weeks, but in 1973 States did not have an interest in protecting an identical fetus. How can that be? Viability also depends on the “quality of the available medical facilities.” Colautti v. Franklin, 439 U. S. 379, 396 (1979). Thus, a 24-week-old fetus may be viable if a woman gives birth in a city with hospitals that provide advanced care for very premature babies, but if the woman travels to a remote area far from any such hospital, the fetus may no longer be viable. On what ground could the constitutional status of a fetus depend on the pregnant woman’s location? And if viability is meant to mark a line having universal moral significance, can it be that a fetus that is viable in a big city in the United States has a privileged moral status —————— 51 See W. Lusk, Science and the Art of Midwifery 74–75 (1882) (explain-ing that “[w]ith care, the life of a child born within [the eighth month of pregnancy] may be preserved”); id., at 326 (“Where the choice lies with the physician, the provocation of labor is usually deferred until the thirty-third or thirty-fourth week”); J. Beck, Researches in Medicine and Medical Jurisprudence 68 (2d ed. 1835) (“Although children born before the completion of the seventh month have occasionally survived, and been reared, yet in a medico-legal point of view, no child ought to be con-sidered as capable of sustaining an independent existence until the sev-enth month has been fully completed”); see also J. Baker, The Incubator and the Medical Discovery of the Premature Infant, J. Perinatology 322 (2000) (explaining that, in the 19th century, infants born at seven to eight months’ gestation were unlikely to survive beyond “the first days of life”).

Cite as: 597 U. S. ____ (2022)53 Opinion of the Court not enjoyed by an identical fetus in a remote area of a poor country? In addition, as the Court once explained, viability is not really a hard -and-fast line. Ibid. A physician determining a particular fetus’s odds of surviving outside the womb must consider “a number of variables,” including “gesta-tional age,” “fetal weight,” a woman’s “general health and nutrition,” the “quality of the available medical facilities,” and other factors. Id., at 395–396. It is thus “only with difficulty” that a physician can estimate the “probability” of a particular fetus’s survival. Id., at 396. And even if each fetus’s probability of survival could be ascertained with cer-tainty, settling on a “probabilit[y] of survival” that should count as “viability” is another matter. Ibid. Is a fetus via-ble with a 10 percent chance of survival? 25 percent? 50 percent? Can such a judgment be made by a State? And can a State specify a gestational age limit that applies in all cases? Or must these difficult questions be left entirely to the individual “attending physician on the particular facts of the case before him”? Id., at 388. The viability line, which Casey termed Roe’s central rule, makes no sense, and it is telling that other countries almost uniformly eschew such a line.52 The Court thus asserted raw judicial power to impose, as a matter of constitutional law, a uniform viability rule that allowed the States less freedom to regulate abortion than the majority of western democracies enjoy. d All in all, Roe’s reasoning was exceedingly weak, and ac-ademic commentators, including those who agreed with the —————— 52 According to the Center for Reproductive Rights, only the United States and the Netherlands use viability as a gestational limit on the availability of abortion on-request. See Center for Reproductive Rights, The World’s Abortion Laws (Feb. 23, 2021), https://reproductiverights .org/maps/worlds-abortion-laws.

54 DOBBS v. JACKSON WOMEN’S HEALTH ORGANIZATION Opinion of the Court decision as a matter of policy, were unsparing in their crit-icism. John Hart Ely famously wrote that Roe was “not con-stitutional law and g[ave] almost no sense of an obligation to try to be.” Ely 947 (emphasis deleted). Archibald Cox, who served as Solicitor General under President Kennedy, commented that Roe “read[s] like a set of hospital rules and regulations” that “[n]either historian, layman, nor lawyer will be persuaded . . . are part of . . . the Constitution.” The Role of the Supreme Court in American Government 113– 114 (1976). Laurence Tribe wrote that “even if there is a need to divide pregnancy into several segments with lines that clearly identify the limits of governmental power, ‘interest-balancing’ of the form the Court pursues fails to justify any of the lines actually drawn.” Tribe 4–5. Mark Tushnet termed Roe a “totally unreasoned judicial opinion.” Red, White, and Blue: A Critical Analysis of Constitutional Law 54 (1988). See also P. Bobbitt, Constitutional Fate 157 (1982); A. Amar, Foreword: The Document and the Doc-trine, 114 Harv. L. Rev. 26, 110 (2000). Despite Roe’s weaknesses, its reach was steadily ex-tended in the years that followed. The Court struck down laws requiring that second-trimester abortions be per-formed only in hospitals, Akron v. Akron Center for Repro-ductive Health, Inc., 462 U. S. 416, 433–439 (1983); that mi-nors obtain parental consent, Planned Parenthood of Central Mo. v. Danforth, 428 U. S. 52, 74 (1976); that women give written consent after being informed of the sta-tus of the developing prenatal life and the risks of abortion, Akron, 462 U. S., at 442–445; that women wait 24 hours for an abortion, id., at 449–451; that a physician determine vi-ability in a particular manner, Colautti, 439 U. S., at 390– 397; that a physician performing a post-viability abortion use the technique most likely to preserve the life of the fe-tus, id., at 397–401; and that fetal remains be treated in a humane and sanitary manner, Akron, 462 U. S., at 451– 452.

Cite as: 597 U. S. ____ (2022)55 Opinion of the Court Justice White complained that the Court was engaging in “unrestrained imposition of its own extraconstitutional value preferences.” Thornburgh, 476 U. S., at 794 (dissent-ing opinion). And the United States as amicus curiae asked the Court to overrule Roe five times in the decade before Casey, see 505 U. S., at 844 (joint opinion), and then asked the Court to overrule it once more in Casey itself. 2 When Casey revisited Roe almost 20 years later, very lit-tle of Roe’s reasoning was defended or preserved. The Court abandoned any reliance on a privacy right and instead grounded the abortion right entirely on the Fourteenth Amendment’s Due Process Clause. 505 U. S., at 846. The Court did not reaffirm Roe’s erroneous account of abortion history. In fact, none of the Justices in the majority said anything about the history of the abortion right. And as for precedent, the Court relied on essentially the same body of cases that Roe had cited. Thus, with respect to the standard grounds for constitutional decisionmaking—text, history, and precedent—Casey did not attempt to bolster Roe’s rea-soning. The Court also made no real effort to remedy one of the greatest weaknesses in Roe’s analysis: its much-criticized discussion of viability. The Court retained what it called Roe’s “central holding”—that a State may not regulate pre-viability abortions for the purpose of protecting fetal life— but it provided no principled defense of the viability line. 505 U. S., at 860, 870–871. Instead, it merely rephrased what Roe had said, stating that viability marked the point at which “the independent existence of a second life can in reason and fairness be the object of state protection that now overrides the rights of the woman.” 505 U. S., at 870. Why “reason and fairness” demanded that the line be drawn at viability the Court did not explain. And the Jus-tices who authored the controlling opinion conspicuously

56 DOBBS v. JACKSON WOMEN’S HEALTH ORGANIZATION Opinion of the Court failed to say that they agreed with the viability rule; in-stead, they candidly acknowledged “the reservations [some] of us may have in reaffirming [that] holding of Roe.” Id., at 853. The controlling opinion criticized and rejected Roe’s tri-mester scheme, 505 U. S., at 872, and substituted a new “undue burden” test, but the basis for this test was obscure. And as we will explain, the test is full of ambiguities and is difficult to apply. Casey , in short, either refused to reaffirm or rejected im-portant aspects of Roe’s analysis, failed to remedy glaring deficiencies in Roe’s reasoning, endorsed what it termed Roe’s central holding while suggesting that a majority might not have thought it was correct, provided no new sup-port for the abortion right other than Roe’s status as prece-dent, and imposed a new and problematic test with no firm grounding in constitutional text, history, or precedent. As discussed below, Casey also deployed a novel version of the doctrine of stare decisis. See infra, at 64–69. This new doctrine did not account for the profound wrongness of the decision in Roe, and placed great weight on an intangi-ble form of reliance with little if any basis in prior case law. Stare decisis does not command the preservation of such a decision. C Workability. Our precedents counsel that another im-portant consideration in deciding whether a precedent should be overruled is whether the rule it imposes is work-able—that is, whether it can be understood and applied in a consistent and predictable manner. Montejo v. Louisiana, 556 U. S. 778, 792 (2009); Patterson v. McLean Credit Un-ion, 491 U. S. 164, 173 (1989); Gulfstream Aerospace Corp. v. Mayacamas Corp., 485 U. S. 271, 283–284 (1988). Ca-sey’s “undue burden” test has scored poorly on the worka-bility scale.

Cite as: 597 U. S. ____ (2022)57 Opinion of the Court 1 Problems begin with the very concept of an “undue bur-den.” As Justice Scalia noted in his Casey partial dissent, determining whether a burden is “due” or “undue” is “inher-ently standardless.” 505 U. S., at 992; see also June Medi-cal Services L. L. C. v. Russo, 591 U. S. ___, ___ (2020) (GORSUCH, J., dissenting) (slip op., at 17) (“[W]hether a bur-den is deemed undue depends heavily on which factors the judge considers and how much weight he accords each of them” (internal quotation marks and alterations omitted)). The Casey plurality tried to put meaning into the “undue burden” test by setting out three subsidiary rules, but these rules created their own problems. The first rule is that “a provision of law is invalid, if its purpose or effect is to place a substantial obstacle in the path of a woman seeking an abortion before the fetus attains viability.” 505 U. S., at 878 (emphasis added); see also id., at 877. But whether a par-ticular obstacle qualifies as “substantial” is often open to reasonable debate. In the sense relevant here, “substan-tial” means “of ample or considerable amount, quantity, or size.” Random House Webster’s Unabridged Dictionary 1897 (2d ed. 2001). Huge burdens are plainly “substantial,” and trivial ones are not, but in between these extremes, there is a wide gray area. This ambiguity is a problem, and the second rule, which applies at all stages of a pregnancy, muddies things further. It states that measures designed “to ensure that the woman’s choice is informed” are constitutional so long as they do not impose “an undue burden on the right.” Casey, 505 U. S., at 878. To the extent that this rule applies to pre-viability abortions, it overlaps with the first rule and ap-pears to impose a different standard. Consider a law that imposes an insubstantial obstacle but serves little purpose. As applied to a pre-viability abortion, would such a regula-tion be constitutional on the ground that it does not impose a “substantial obstacle”? Or would it be unconstitutional on

58 DOBBS v. JACKSON WOMEN’S HEALTH ORGANIZATION Opinion of the Court the ground that it creates an “undue burden” because the burden it imposes, though slight, outweighs its negligible benefits? Casey does not say, and this ambiguity would lead to confusion down the line. Compare June Medical, 591 U. S., at ___–___ (plurality opinion) (slip op., at 1–2), with id., at ___–___ (ROBERTS, C. J., concurring) (slip op., at 5– 6). The third rule complicates the picture even more. Under that rule, “[u]nnecessary health regulations that have the purpose or effect of presenting a substantial obstacle to a woman seeking an abortion impose an undue burden on the right.” Casey, 505 U. S., at 878 (emphasis added). This rule contains no fewer than three vague terms. It includes the two already discussed—“undue burden” and “substantial obstacle”—even though they are inconsistent. And it adds a third ambiguous term when it refers to “unnecessary health regulations.” The term “necessary” has a range of meanings—from “essential” to merely “useful.” See Black’s Law Dictionary 928 (5th ed. 1979); American Heritage Dic-tionary of the English Language 877 (1971) . Casey did not explain the sense in which the term is used in this rule. In addition to these problems, one more applies to all three rules. They all call on courts to examine a law’s effect on women, but a regulation may have a very different im-pact on different women for a variety of reasons, including their places of residence, financial resources, family situa-tions, work and personal obligations, knowledge about fetal development and abortion, psychological and emotional dis-position and condition, and the firmness of their desire to obtain abortions. In order to determine whether a regula-tion presents a substantial obstacle to women, a court needs to know which set of women it should have in mind and how many of the women in this set must find that an obstacle is “substantial.” Casey provided no clear answer to these questions. It said that a regulation is unconstitutional if it imposes a

Cite as: 597 U. S. ____ (2022)59 Opinion of the Court substantial obstacle “in a large fraction of cases in which [it] is relevant,” 505 U. S., at 895, but there is obviously no clear line between a fraction that is “large” and one that is not. Nor is it clear what the Court meant by “cases in which” a regulation is “relevant.” These ambiguities have caused confusion and disagreement. Compare Whole Woman’s Health v. Hellerstedt, 579 U. S. 582, 627–628 (2016), with id., at 666–667, and n. 11 (ALITO, J., dissent-ing). 2 The difficulty of applying Casey’s new rules surfaced in that very case. The controlling opinion found that Pennsyl-vania’s 24-hour waiting period requirement and its informed-consent provision did not impose “undue bur-den[s],” Casey, 505 U. S., at 881–887, but Justice Stevens, applying the same test, reached the opposite result, id., at 920–922 (opinion concurring in part and dissenting in part). That did not bode well, and then-Chief Justice Rehnquist aptly observed that “the undue burden standard presents nothing more workable than the trimester framework.” Id., at 964–966 (dissenting opinion). The ambiguity of the “undue burden” test also produced disagreement in later cases. In Whole Woman’s Health, the Court adopted the cost-benefit interpretation of the test, stating that “[t]he rule announced in Casey . . . requires that courts consider the burdens a law imposes on abortion access together with the benefits those laws confer.” 579 U. S., at 607 (emphasis added). But five years later, a ma-jority of the Justices rejected that interpretation. See June Medical, 591 U. S. ___. Four Justices reaffirmed Whole Woman’s Health’s instruction to “weigh” a law’s “benefits”against “the burdens it imposes on abortion access.” 591 U. S., at ___ (plurality opinion) (slip op., at 2) (internal quo-tation marks omitted). But THE CHIEF JUSTICE—who cast

60 DOBBS v. JACKSON WOMEN’S HEALTH ORGANIZATION Opinion of the Court the deciding vote—argued that “[n]othing about Casey sug-gested that a weighing of costs and benefits of an abortion regulation was a job for the courts.” Id., at ___ (opinion con-curring in judgment) (slip op., at 6). And the four Justices in dissent rejected the plurality’s interpretation of Casey. See 591 U. S., at ___ (opinion of ALITO, J., joined in relevant part by THOMAS, GORSUCH, and KAVANAUGH, JJ.) (slip op., at 4); id., at ___–___ (opinion of GORSUCH, J.) (slip op., at 15–18); id., at ___–___ (opinion of KAVANAUGH, J.) (slip op., at 1–2) (“[F]ive Members of the Court reject the Whole Woman’s Health cost-benefit standard”). This Court’s experience applying Casey has confirmed Chief Justice Rehnquist’s prescient diagnosis that the undue-burden standard was “not built to last.” Casey, 505 U. S., at 965 (opinion concurring in judgment in part and dissenting in part). 3 The experience of the Courts of Appeals provides further evidence that Casey’s “line between” permissible and un-constitutional restrictions “has proved to be impossible to draw with precision.” Janus, 585 U. S., at ___ (slip op., at 38). Casey has generated a long list of Circuit conflicts. Most recently, the Courts of Appeals have disagreed about whether the balancing test from Whole Woman’s Health correctly states the undue-burden framework.53 They have disagreed on the legality of parental notification rules.54 —————— 53 Compare Whole Woman’s Health v. Paxton, 10 F. 4th 430, 440 (CA5 2021), EMW Women’s Surgical Center, P.S.C. v. Friedlander, 978 F. 3d 418, 437 (CA6 2020), and Hopkins v. Jegley, 968 F. 3d 912, 915 (CA8 2020) (per curiam), with Planned Parenthood of Ind. & Ky., Inc. v. Box, 991 F. 3d 740, 751–752 (CA7 2021). 54 Compare Planned Parenthood of Blue Ridge v. Camblos, 155 F. 3d 352, 367 (CA4 1998), with Planned Parenthood of Ind. & Ky., Inc. v. Ad-

Cite as: 597 U. S. ____ (2022)61 Opinion of the Court They have disagreed about bans on certain dilation and evacuation procedures.55 They have disagreed about when an increase in the time needed to reach a clinic constitutes an undue burden.56 And they have disagreed on whether a State may regulate abortions performed because of the fe-tus’s race, sex, or disability.57 The Courts of Appeals have experienced particular diffi-culty in applying the large-fraction- of-relevant-cases test. They have criticized the assignment while reaching unpre-dictable results.58 And they have candidly outlined Casey’s many other problems.59 —————— ams, 937 F. 3d 973, 985–990 (CA7 2019), cert. granted, judgment va-cated, 591 U. S. ___ (2020), and Planned Parenthood, Sioux Falls Clinic v. Miller, 63 F. 3d 1452, 1460 (CA8 1995). 55 Compare Whole Woman’s Health v. Paxton, 10 F. 4th, at 435–436, with West Ala. Women’s Center v. Williamson, 900 F. 3d 1310, 1319, 1327 (CA11 2018), and EMW Women’s Surgical Center, P.S.C. v. Friedlander, 960 F. 3d 785, 806–808 (CA6 2020). 56 Compare Tucson Woman’s Clinic v. Eden, 379 F. 3d 531, 541 (CA9 2004), with Women’s Medical Professional Corp. v. Baird, 438 F. 3d 595, 605 (CA6 2006), and Greenville Women’s Clinic v. Bryant, 222 F. 3d 157, 171–172 (CA4 2000). 57 Compare Preterm-Cleveland v. McCloud, 994 F. 3d 512, 520–535 (CA6 2021), with Little Rock Family Planning Servs. v. Rutledge, 984 F. 3d 682, 688–690 (CA8 2021). 58 See, e.g., Bristol Regional Women’s Center, P.C. v. Slatery, 7 F. 4th 478, 485 (CA6 2021); Reproductive Health Servs. v. Strange, 3 F. 4th 1240, 1269 (CA11 2021) (per curiam); June Medical Servs., L.L.C. v. Gee, 905 F. 3d 787, 814 (CA5 2020), rev’d, 591 U. S. ___; Preterm-Cleveland, 994 F. 3d, at 534; Planned Parenthood of Ark. & Eastern Okla. v. Jegley, 864 F. 3d 953, 958–960 (CA8 2017); McCormack v. Hertzog, 788 F. 3d 1017, 1029–1030 (CA9 2015); compare A Womans Choice–East Side Womens Clinic v. Newman, 305 F. 3d 684, 699 (CA7 2002) (Coffey, J., concurring), with id., at 708 (Wood, J., dissenting). 59 See, e.g., Memphis Center for Reproductive Health v. Slatery, 14 F. 4th 409, 451 (CA6 2021) (Thapar, J., concurring in judgment in part and dissenting in part); Preterm-Cleveland, 994 F. 3d, at 524; Planned Parenthood of Ind. & Ky., Inc. v. Commissioner of Ind. State Dept. of

62 DOBBS v. JACKSON WOMEN’S HEALTH ORGANIZATION Opinion of the Court Casey’s “undue burden” test has proved to be unworkable. “[P]lucked from nowhere,” 505 U. S., at 965 (opinion of Rehnquist, C. J.), it “seems calculated to perpetuate give-it-a-try litigation” before judges assigned an unwieldy and in-appropriate task. Lehnert v. Ferris Faculty Assn., 500 U. S. 507, 551 (1991) (Scalia, J., concurring in judgment in part and dissenting in part). Continued adherence to that standard would undermine, not advance, the “evenhanded, predictable, and consistent development of legal princi-ples.” Payne, 501 U. S., at 827. D Effect on other areas of law. Roe and Casey have led to the distortion of many important but unrelated legal doc-trines, and that effect provides further support for overrul-ing those decisions. See Ramos, 590 U. S., at ___ (opinion of KAVANAUGH, J.) (slip op., at 8); Janus, 585 U. S., at ___ (slip op., at 34). Members of this Court have repeatedly lamented that “no legal rule or doctrine is safe from ad hoc nullification by this Court when an occasion for its application arises in a case involving state regulation of abortion.” Thornburgh, 476 U. S., at 814 (O’Connor, J., dissenting); see Madsen v. Women’s Health Center, Inc., 512 U. S. 753, 785 (1994) (Scalia, J., concurring in judgment in part and dissenting —————— Health, 888 F. 3d 300, 313 (CA7 2018) (Manion, J., concurring in judg-ment in part and dissenting in part); Planned Parenthood of Ind. & Ky., Inc. v. Box, 949 F. 3d 997, 999 (CA7 2019) (Easterbrook, J., concurring in denial of reh’g en banc) (“How much burden is ‘undue’ is a matter of judg-ment, which depends on what the burden would be . . . and whether that burden is excessive (a matter of weighing costs against benefits, which one judge is apt to do differently from another, and which judges as a group are apt to do differently from state legislators)”); National Abor-tion Federation v. Gonzales , 437 F. 3d 278, 290–296 (CA2 2006) (Walker, C. J., concurring); Planned Parenthood of Rocky Mountains Servs. Corp. v. Owens, 287 F. 3d 910, 931 (CA10 2002) (Baldock, J., dissenting).

Cite as: 597 U. S. ____ (2022)63 Opinion of the Court in part); Whole Woman’s Health, 579 U. S., at 631–633 (THOMAS, J., dissenting); id., at 645–666, 678–684 (ALITO, J., dissenting); June Medical, 591 U. S., at ___–___ (GORSUCH, J., dissenting) (slip op., at 1–15). The Court’s abortion cases have diluted the strict stand-ard for facial constitutional challenges.60 They have ig-nored the Court’s third-party standing doctrine.61 They have disregarded standard res judicata principles.62 They have flouted the ordinary rules on the severability of uncon-stitutional provisions,63 as well as the rule that statutes should be read where possible to avoid unconstitutional-ity.64 And they have distorted First Amendment doc-trines.65 When vindicating a doctrinal innovation requires courts to engineer exceptions to longstanding background rules, the doctrine “has failed to deliver the ‘principled and intel-ligible’ development of the law that stare decisis purports to secure.” Id., at ___ (THOMAS, J., dissenting) (slip op., at 19) (quoting Vasquez v. Hillery, 474 U. S. 254, 265 (1986)). E Reliance interests. We last consider whether overruling Roe and Casey will upend substantial reliance interests. —————— 60 Compare United States v. Salerno, 481 U. S. 739, 745 (1987), with Casey, 505 U. S., at 895; see also supra, at 56–59. 61 Compare Warth v. Seldin, 422 U. S. 490, 499 (1975), and Elk Grove Unified School Dist. v. Newdow, 542 U. S. 1, 15, 17–18 (2004), with June Medical, 591 U. S., at ___ (ALITO, J., dissenting) (slip op., at 28), id., at ___–___ (GORSUCH, J., dissenting) (slip op., at 6–7) (collecting cases), and Whole Woman’s Health, 579 U. S., at 632, n. 1 (THOMAS, J., dissenting). 62 Compare id., at 598–606 (majority opinion), with id., at 645–666 (ALITO, J., dissenting). 63 Compare id., at 623–626 (majority opinion), with id., at 644–645 (ALITO, J., dissenting). 64 See Stenberg v. Carhart, 530 U. S. 914, 977–978 (2000) (Kennedy, J., dissenting); id., at 996–997 (THOMAS, J., dissenting). 65 See Hill v. Colorado, 530 U. S. 703, 741–742 (2000) (Scalia, J., dis-senting); id., at 765 (Kennedy, J., dissenting).

64 DOBBS v. JACKSON WOMEN’S HEALTH ORGANIZATION Opinion of the Court See Ramos, 590 U. S., at ___ (opinion of KAVANAUGH, J.) (slip op., at 15); Janus, 585 U. S., at ___–___ (slip op., at 34– 35). 1 Traditional reliance interests arise “where advance plan-ning of great precision is most obviously a necessity.” Ca-sey, 505 U. S., at 856 (joint opinion); see also Payne, 501 U. S., at 828. In Casey, the controlling opinion conceded that those traditional reliance interests were not implicated because getting an abortion is generally “unplanned activ-ity,” and “reproductive planning could take virtually imme-diate account of any sudden restoration of state authority to ban abortions.” 505 U. S., at 856. For these reasons, we agree with the Casey plurality that conventional, concrete reliance interests are not present here. 2 Unable to find reliance in the conventional sense, the con-trolling opinion in Casey perceived a more intangible form of reliance. It wrote that “people [had] organized intimate relationships and made choices that define their views of themselves and their places in society . . . in reliance on the availability of abortion in the event that contraception should fail” and that “[t]he ability of women to participate equally in the economic and social life of the Nation has been facilitated by their ability to control their reproductive lives.” Ibid. But this Court is ill-equipped to assess “gen-eralized assertions about the national psyche.” Id., at 957 (opinion of Rehnquist, C. J.). Casey’s notion of reliance thus finds little support in our cases, which instead emphasize very concrete reliance interests, like those that develop in “cases involving property and contract rights.” Payne, 501 U. S., at 828. When a concrete reliance interest is asserted, courts are equipped to evaluate the claim, but assessing the novel and

Cite as: 597 U. S. ____ (2022)65 Opinion of the Court intangible form of reliance endorsed by the Casey plurality is another matter. That form of reliance depends on an em-pirical question that is hard for anyone—and in particular, for a court—to assess, namely, the effect of the abortion right on society and in particular on the lives of women. The contending sides in this case make impassioned and conflicting arguments about the effects of the abortion right on the lives of women. Compare Brief for Petitioners 34– 36; Brief for Women Scholars et al. as Amici Curiae 13–20, 29–41, with Brief for Respondents 36–41; Brief for National Women’s Law Center et al. as Amici Curiae 15–32. The contending sides also make conflicting arguments about the status of the fetus. This Court has neither the authority nor the expertise to adjudicate those disputes, and the Ca-sey plurality’s speculations and weighing of the relative im-portance of the fetus and mother represent a departure from the “original constitutional proposition” that “courts do not substitute their social and economic beliefs for the judgment of legislative bodies.” Ferguson v. Skrupa, 372 U. S. 726, 729–730 (1963). Our decision returns the issue of abortion to those legis-lative bodies, and it allows women on both sides of the abor-tion issue to seek to affect the legislative process by influ-encing public opinion, lobbying legislators, voting, and running for office. Women are not without electoral or po-litical power. It is noteworthy that the percentage of women who register to vote and cast ballots is consistently higher than the percentage of men who do so.66 In the last election in November 2020, women, who make up around 51.5 percent of the population of Mississippi,67 constituted —————— 66 See Dept. of Commerce, U. S. Census Bureau (Census Bureau), An Analysis of the 2018 Congressional Election 6 (Dec. 2021) (Fig. 5) (show-ing that women made up over 50 percent of the voting population in every congressional election between 1978 and 2018). 67 Census Bureau, QuickFacts, Mississippi (July 1, 2021), https://www.

66 DOBBS v. JACKSON WOMEN’S HEALTH ORGANIZATION Opinion of the Court 55.5 percent of the voters who cast ballots.68 3 Unable to show concrete reliance on Roe and Casey them-selves, the Solicitor General suggests that overruling those decisions would “threaten the Court’s precedents holding that the Due Process Clause protects other rights.” Brief for United States 26 (citing Obergefell, 576 U. S. 644; Law-rence, 539 U. S. 558; Griswold, 381 U. S. 479). That is not correct for reasons we have already discussed. As even the Casey plurality recognized, “[a]bortion is a unique act” be-cause it terminates “life or potential life.” 505 U. S., at 852; see also Roe, 410 U. S., at 159 (abortion is “inherently dif-ferent from marital intimacy,” “marriage,” or “procrea-tion”). And to ensure that our decision is not misunderstood or mischaracterized, we emphasize that our decision con-cerns the constitutional right to abortion and no other right. Nothing in this opinion should be understood to cast doubt on precedents that do not concern abortion. IV Having shown that traditional stare decisis factors do not weigh in favor of retaining Roe or Casey, we must address one final argument that featured prominently in the Casey plurality opinion. The argument was cast in different terms, but stated simply, it was essentially as follows. The American people’s belief in the rule of law would be shaken if they lost respect for this Court as an institution that decides important cases based on principle, not “social and political pressures.” 505 U. S., at 865. There is a special danger that the public will —————— census.gov/quickfacts/MS. 68 Census Bureau, Voting and Registration in the Election of November 2020, Table 4b: Reported Voting and Registration, by Sex, Race and His-panic Origin, for States: November 2020, https://www.census.gov/data/ tables/time-series/demo/voting-and-registration/p20-585.html.

Cite as: 597 U. S. ____ (2022)67 Opinion of the Court perceive a decision as having been made for unprincipled reasons when the Court overrules a controversial “water-shed” decision, such as Roe. 505 U. S., at 866–867. A deci-sion overruling Roe would be perceived as having been made “under fire” and as a “surrender to political pressure,” 505 U. S., at 867, and therefore the preservation of public approval of the Court weighs heavily in favor of retaining Roe, see 505 U. S., at 869. This analysis starts out on the right foot but ultimately veers off course. The Casey plurality was certainly right that it is important for the public to perceive that our deci-sions are based on principle, and we should make every ef-fort to achieve that objective by issuing opinions that care-fully show how a proper understanding of the law leads to the results we reach. But we cannot exceed the scope of our authority under the Constitution, and we cannot allow our decisions to be affected by any extraneous influences such as concern about the public’s reaction to our work. Cf. Texas v. Johnson, 491 U. S. 397 (1989); Brown, 347 U. S. 483. That is true both when we initially decide a constitu-tional issue and when we consider whether to overrule a prior decision. As Chief Justice Rehnquist explained, “The Judicial Branch derives its legitimacy, not from following public opinion, but from deciding by its best lights whether legislative enactments of the popular branches of Govern-ment comport with the Constitution. The doctrine of stare decisis is an adjunct of this duty, and should be no more subject to the vagaries of public opinion than is the basic judicial task.” Casey, 505 U. S., at 963 (opinion concurring in judgment in part and dissenting in part). In suggesting otherwise, the Casey plurality went beyond this Court’s role in our constitutional system. The Casey plurality “call[ed] the contending sides of a na-tional controversy to end their national division,” and claimed the authority to impose a permanent settlement of the issue of a constitutional abortion right simply by saying

68 DOBBS v. JACKSON WOMEN’S HEALTH ORGANIZATION Opinion of the Court that the matter was closed. Id., at 867. That unprece-dented claim exceeded the power vested in us by the Con-stitution. As Alexander Hamilton famously put it, the Con-stitution gives the judiciary “neither Force nor Will.” The Federalist No. 78, p. 523 (J. Cooke ed. 1961). Our sole au-thority is to exercise “judgment”—which is to say, the au-thority to judge what the law means and how it should ap-ply to the case at hand. Ibid. The Court has no authority to decree that an erroneous precedent is permanently ex-empt from evaluation under traditional stare decisis princi-ples. A precedent of this Court is subject to the usual prin-ciples of stare decisis under which adherence to precedent is the norm but not an inexorable command. If the rule were otherwise, erroneous decisions like Plessy and Loch-ner would still be the law. That is not how stare decisis op-erates. The Casey plurality also misjudged the practical limits of this Court’s influence. Roe certainly did not succeed in end-ing division on the issue of abortion. On the contrary, Roe “inflamed” a national issue that has remained bitterly divi-sive for the past half century. Casey, 505 U. S., at 995 (opin-ion of Scalia, J.); see also R. Ginsburg, Speaking in a Judi-cial Voice, 67 N. Y. U. L. Rev. 1185, 1208 (1992) (Roe may have “halted a political process,” “prolonged divisiveness,” and “deferred stable settlement of the issue”). And for the past 30 years, Casey has done the same. Neither decision has ended debate over the issue of a constitutional right to obtain an abortion. Indeed, in this case, 26 States expressly ask us to overrule Roe and Casey and to return the issue of abortion to the people and their elected representatives. This Court’s inability to end de-bate on the issue should not have been surprising. This Court cannot bring about the permanent resolution of a rancorous national controversy simply by dictating a settle-ment and telling the people to move on. Whatever influence the Court may have on public attitudes must stem from the

Cite as: 597 U. S. ____ (2022)69 Opinion of the Court strength of our opinions, not an attempt to exercise “raw judicial power.” Roe, 410 U. S., at 222 (White, J., dissent-ing). We do not pretend to know how our political system or society will respond to today’s decision overruling Roe and Casey. And even if we could foresee what will happen, we would have no authority to let that knowledge influence our decision. We can only do our job, which is to interpret the law, apply longstanding principles of stare decisis, and de-cide this case accordingly. We therefore hold that the Constitution does not confer a right to abortion. Roe and Casey must be overruled, and the authority to regulate abortion must be returned to the peo-ple and their elected representatives. V A 1 The dissent argues that we have “abandon[ed]” stare de-cisis, post, at 30, but we have done no such thing, and it is the dissent’s understanding of stare decisis that breaks with tradition. The dissent’s foundational contention is that the Court should never (or perhaps almost never) over-rule an egregiously wrong constitutional precedent unless the Court can “poin[t] to major legal or factual changes un-dermining [the] decision’s original basis.” Post, at 37. To support this contention, the dissent claims that Brown v. Board of Education, 347 U. S. 483, and other landmark cases overruling prior precedents “responded to changed law and to changed facts and attitudes that had taken hold throughout society.” Post, at 43. The unmistakable impli-cation of this argument is that only the passage of time and new developments justified those decisions. Recognition that the cases they overruled were egregiously wrong on the day they were handed down was not enough. The Court has never adopted this strange new version of

70 DOBBS v. JACKSON WOMEN’S HEALTH ORGANIZATION Opinion of the Court stare decisis—and with good reason. Does the dissent really maintain that overruling Plessy was not justified until the country had experienced more than a half-century of state-sanctioned segregation and generations of Black school children had suffered all its effects? Post, at 44–45. Here is another example. On the dissent’s view, it must have been wrong for West Virginia Bd. of Ed. v. Barnette, 319 U. S. 624, to overrule Minersville School Dist. v. Gobi-tis, 310 U. S. 586, a bare three years after it was handed down. In both cases, children who were Jehovah’s Wit-nesses refused on religious grounds to salute the flag or re-cite the pledge of allegiance. The Barnette Court did not claim that its reexamination of the issue was prompted by any intervening legal or factual developments, so if the Court had followed the dissent’s new version of stare deci-sis, it would have been compelled to adhere to Gobitis and countenance continued First Amendment violations for some unspecified period. Precedents should be respected, but sometimes the Court errs, and occasionally the Court issues an important deci-sion that is egregiously wrong. When that happens, stare decisis is not a straitjacket. And indeed, the dissent even-tually admits that a decision could “be overruled just be-cause it is terribly wrong,” though the dissent does not ex-plain when that would be so. Post, at 45. 2 Even if the dissent were correct in arguing that an egre-giously wrong decision should (almost) never be overruled unless its mistake is later highlighted by “major legal or factual changes,” reexamination of Roe and Casey would be amply justified. We have already mentioned a number of post-Casey developments, see supra, at 33–34, 59–63, but the most profound change may be the failure of the Casey plurality’s call for “the contending sides” in the controversy about abortion “to end their national division,” 505 U. S., at

Cite as: 597 U. S. ____ (2022)71 Opinion of the Court 867. That has not happened, and there is no reason to think that another decision sticking with Roe would achieve what Casey could not. The dissent, however, is undeterred. It contends that the “very controversy surrounding Roe and Casey” is an im-portant stare decisis consideration that requires upholding those precedents. See post, at 55–57. The dissent charac-terizes Casey as a “precedent about precedent” that is per-manently shielded from further evaluation under tradi-tional stare decisis principles. See post, at 57. But as we have explained, Casey broke new ground when it treated the national controversy provoked by Roe as a ground for refusing to reconsider that decision, and no subsequent case has relied on that factor. Our decision today simply applies longstanding stare decisis factors instead of applying a ver-sion of the doctrine that seems to apply only in abortion cases. 3 Finally, the dissent suggests that our decision calls into question Griswold, Eisenstadt, Lawrence, and Obergefell. Post, at 4–5, 26–27, n. 8. But we have stated unequivocally that “[n]othing in this opinion should be understood to cast doubt on precedents that do not concern abortion.” Supra, at 66. We have also explained why that is so: rights regard-ing contraception and same -sex relationships are inher-ently different from the right to abortion because the latter (as we have stressed) uniquely involves what Roe and Casey termed “potential life.” Roe, 410 U. S., at 150 (emphasis de-leted); Casey, 505 U. S., at 852. Therefore, a right to abor-tion cannot be justified by a purported analogy to the rights recognized in those other cases or by “appeals to a broader right to autonomy.” Supra, at 32. It is hard to see how we could be clearer. Moreover, even putting aside that these cases are distinguishable, there is a further point that the dissent ignores: Each precedent is subject to its own stare

72 DOBBS v. JACKSON WOMEN’S HEALTH ORGANIZATION Opinion of the Court decisis analysis, and the factors that our doctrine instructs us to consider like reliance and workability are different for these cases than for our abortion jurisprudence. B 1 We now turn to the concurrence in the judgment, which reproves us for deciding whether Roe and Casey should be retained or overruled. That opinion (which for convenience we will call simply “the concurrence”) recommends a “more measured course,” which it defends based on what it claims is “a straightforward stare decisis analysis.” Post, at 1 (opinion of ROBERTS, C. J.). The concurrence would “leave for another day whether to reject any right to an abortion at all,” post, at 7, and would hold only that if the Constitu-tion protects any such right, the right ends once women have had “a reasonable opportunity” to obtain an abortion, post, at 1. The concurrence does not specify what period of time is sufficient to provide such an opportunity, but it would hold that 15 weeks, the period allowed under Missis-sippi’s law, is enough—at least “absent rare circum-stances.” Post, at 2, 10. There are serious problems with this approach, and it is revealing that nothing like it was recommended by either party. As we have recounted, both parties and the Solicitor General have urged us either to reaffirm or overrule Roe and Casey. See supra, at 4–5. And when the specific ap-proach advanced by the concurrence was broached at oral argument, both respondents and the Solicitor General em-phatically rejected it. Respondents’ counsel termed it “com-pletely unworkable” and “less principled and less workable than viability.” Tr. of Oral Arg. 54. The Solicitor General argued that abandoning the viability line would leave courts and others with “no continued guidance.” Id., at 101. What is more, the concurrence has not identified any of the

Cite as: 597 U. S. ____ (2022)73 Opinion of the Court more than 130 amicus briefs filed in this case that advo-cated its approach. The concurrence would do exactly what it criticizes Roe for doing: pulling “out of thin air” a test that “[n]o party or amicus asked the Court to adopt.” Post, at 3. 2 The concurrence’s most fundamental defect is its failure to offer any principled basis for its approach. The concur-rence would “discar[d]” “the rule from Roe and Casey that a woman’s right to terminate her pregnancy extends up to the point that the fetus is regarded as ‘viable’ outside the womb.” Post, at 2. But this rule was a critical component of the holdings in Roe and Casey, and stare decisis is “a doc-trine of preservation, not transformation,” Citizens United v. Federal Election Comm’n, 558 U. S. 310, 384 (2010) (ROBERTS, C. J., concurring). Therefore, a new rule that discards the viability rule cannot be defended on stare deci-sis grounds. The concurrence concedes that its approach would “not be available” if “the rationale of Roe and Casey were inextrica-bly entangled with and dependent upon the viability stand-ard.” Post, at 7. But the concurrence asserts that the via-bility line is separable from the constitutional right they recognized, and can therefore be “discarded” without dis-turbing any past precedent. Post, at 7–8. That is simply incorrect. Roe’s trimester rule was expressly tied to viability, see 410 U. S., at 163–164, and viability played a critical role in later abortion decisions. For example, in Planned Parenthood of Central Mo. v. Danforth, 428 U. S. 52, the Court reiterated Roe’s rule that a “State may regulate an abortion to protect the life of the fetus and even may pro-scribe abortion” at “the stage subsequent to viability.” 428 U. S., at 61 (emphasis added). The Court then rejected a challenge to Missouri’s definition of viability, holding that the State’s definition was consistent with Roe’s. 428 U. S.,

74 DOBBS v. JACKSON WOMEN’S HEALTH ORGANIZATION Opinion of the Court at 63–64. If viability was not an essential part of the rule adopted in Roe, the Court would have had no need to make that comparison. The holding in Colautti v. Franklin, 439 U. S. 379, is even more instructive. In that case, the Court noted that prior cases had “stressed viability” and reiterated that “[v]iabil-ity is the critical point” under Roe. 439 U. S., at 388–389. It then struck down Pennsylvania’s definition of viability, id., at 389–394, and it is hard to see how the Court could have done that if Roe’s discussion of viability was not part of its holding. When the Court reconsidered Roe in Casey, it left no doubt about the importance of the viability rule. It de-scribed the rule as Roe’s “central holding,” 505 U. S., at 860, and repeatedly stated that the right it reaffirmed was “the right of the woman to choose to have an abortion before vi-ability.” Id., at 846 (emphasis added). See id., at 871 (“The woman’s right to terminate her pregnancy before viability is the most central principle of Roe v. Wade. It is a rule of law and a component of liberty we cannot renounce” (em-phasis added)); id., at 872 (A “woman has a right to choose to terminate or continue her pregnancy before viability” (emphasis added)); id., at 879 (“[A] State may not prohibit any woman from making the ultimate decision to terminate her pregnancy before viability” (emphasis added)). Our subsequent cases have continued to recognize the centrality of the viability rule. See Whole Women’s Health, 579 U. S., at 589–590 (“[A] provision of law is constitution-ally invalid, if the ‘purpose or effect’ of the provision ‘is to place a substantial obstacle in the path of a woman seeking an abortion before the fetus attains viability’” (emphasis de-leted and added)); id., at 627 (“[W]e now use ‘viability’ as the relevant point at which a State may begin limiting women’s access to abortion for reasons unrelated to mater-nal health” (emphasis added)).

Cite as: 597 U. S. ____ (2022)75 Opinion of the Court Not only is the new rule proposed by the concurrence in-consistent with Casey’s unambiguous “language,” post, at 8, it is also contrary to the judgment in that case and later abortion cases. In Casey, the Court held that Pennsylva-nia’s spousal-notification provision was facially unconstitu-tional, not just that it was unconstitutional as applied to abortions sought prior to the time when a woman has had a reasonable opportunity to choose. See 505 U. S., at 887– 898. The same is true of Whole Women’s Health, which held that certain rules that required physicians performing abortions to have admitting privileges at a nearby hospital were facially unconstitutional because they placed “a sub-stantial obstacle in the path of women seeking a previabil-ity abortion.” 579 U. S., at 591 (emphasis added). For all these reasons, stare decisis cannot justify the new “reasonable opportunity” rule propounded by the concur-rence. If that rule is to become the law of the land, it must stand on its own, but the concurrence makes no attempt to show that this rule represents a correct interpretation of the Constitution. The concurrence does not claim that the right to a reasonable opportunity to obtain an abortion is “‘deeply rooted in this Nation’s history and tradition’” and “‘implicit in the concept of ordered liberty.’” Glucksberg, 521 U. S., at 720–721. Nor does it propound any other the-ory that could show that the Constitution supports its new rule. And if the Constitution protects a woman’s right to obtain an abortion, the opinion does not explain why that right should end after the point at which all “reasonable” women will have decided whether to seek an abortion. While the concurrence is moved by a desire for judicial min-imalism, “we cannot embrace a narrow ground of decision simply because it is narrow; it must also be right.” Citizens United, 558 U. S., at 375 (ROBERTS, C. J., concurring). For the reasons that we have explained, the concurrence’s ap-proach is not.

76 DOBBS v. JACKSON WOMEN’S HEALTH ORGANIZATION Opinion of the Court 3 The concurrence would “leave for another day whether to reject any right to an abortion at all,” post, at 7, but “an-other day” would not be long in coming. Some States have set deadlines for obtaining an abortion that are shorter than Mississippi’s. See, e.g., Memphis Center for Reproduc-tive Health v. Slatery, 14 F. 4th, at 414 (considering law with bans “at cascading intervals of two to three weeks” be-ginning at six weeks), reh’g en banc granted, 14 F. 4th 550 (CA6 2021). If we held only that Mississippi’s 15 -week rule is constitutional, we would soon be called upon to pass on the constitutionality of a panoply of laws with shorter dead-lines or no deadline at all. The “measured course” charted by the concurrence would be fraught with turmoil until the Court answered the question that the concurrence seeks to defer. Even if the Court ultimately adopted the new rule sug-gested by the concurrence, we would be faced with the dif-ficult problem of spelling out what it means. For example, if the period required to give women a “reasonable” oppor-tunity to obtain an abortion were pegged, as the concur-rence seems to suggest, at the point when a certain percent-age of women make that choice, see post, at 1–2, 9–10, we would have to identify the relevant percentage. It would also be necessary to explain what the concurrence means when it refers to “rare circumstances” that might justify an exception. Post, at 10. And if this new right aims to give women a reasonable opportunity to get an abortion, it would be necessary to decide whether factors other than promptness in deciding might have a bearing on whether such an opportunity was available. In sum, the concurrence’s quest for a middle way would only put off the day when we would be forced to confront the question we now decide. The turmoil wrought by Roe and Casey would be prolonged. It is far better—for this Court

Cite as: 597 U. S. ____ (2022)77 Opinion of the Court and the country—to face up to the real issue without fur-ther delay. VI We must now decide what standard will govern if state abortion regulations undergo constitutional challenge and whether the law before us satisfies the appropriate stand-ard. A Under our precedents, rational-basis review is the appro-priate standard for such challenges. As we have explained, procuring an abortion is not a fundamental constitutional right because such a right has no basis in the Constitution’s text or in our Nation’s history. See supra, at 8–39. It follows that the States may regulate abortion for legit-imate reasons, and when such regulations are challenged under the Constitution, courts cannot “substitute their so-cial and economic beliefs for the judgment of legislative bod-ies.” Ferguson, 372 U. S., at 729–730; see also Dandridge v. Williams, 397 U. S. 471, 484–486 (1970); United States v. Carolene Products Co., 304 U. S. 144, 152 (1938) . That re-spect for a legislature’s judgment applies even when the laws at issue concern matters of great social significance and moral substance. See, e.g., Board of Trustees of Univ. of Ala. v. Garrett, 531 U. S. 356, 365–368 (2001) (“treatment of the disabled”); Glucksberg, 521 U. S., at 728 (“assisted suicide”); San Antonio Independent School Dist. v. Rodri-guez, 411 U. S. 1, 32–35, 55 (1973) (“financing public edu-cation”). A law regulating abortion, like other health and welfare laws, is entitled to a “strong presumption of validity.” Hel-ler v. Doe, 509 U. S. 312, 319 (1993). It must be sustained if there is a rational basis on which the legislature could have thought that it would serve legitimate state interests. Id., at 320; FCC v. Beach Communications, Inc., 508 U. S.

78 DOBBS v. JACKSON WOMEN’S HEALTH ORGANIZATION Opinion of the Court 307, 313 (1993); New Orleans v. Dukes, 427 U. S. 297, 303 (1976) ( per curiam); Williamson v. Lee Optical of Okla., Inc., 348 U. S. 483, 491 (1955). These legitimate interests in-clude respect for and preservation of prenatal life at all stages of development, Gonzales, 550 U. S., at 157–158; the protection of maternal health and safety; the elimination of particularly gruesome or barbaric medical procedures; the preservation of the integrity of the medical profession; the mitigation of fetal pain; and the prevention of discrimina-tion on the basis of race, sex, or disability. See id., at 156– 157; Roe, 410 U. S., at 150; cf. Glucksberg, 521 U. S., at 728– 731 (identifying similar interests). B These legitimate interests justify Mississippi’s Gesta-tional Age Act. Except “in a medical emergency or in the case of a severe fetal abnormality,” the statute prohibits abortion “if the probable gestational age of the unborn hu-man being has been determined to be greater than fifteen (15) weeks.” Miss. Code Ann. §41–41–191(4)(b). The Mis-sissippi Legislature’s findings recount the stages of “human prenatal development” and assert the State’s interest in “protecting the life of the unborn.” §2(b)(i). The legislature also found that abortions performed after 15 weeks typi-cally use the dilation and evacuation procedure, and the legislature found the use of this procedure “for nonthera-peutic or elective reasons [to be] a barbaric practice, dan-gerous for the maternal patient, and demeaning to the med-ical profession.” §2(b)(i)(8); see also Gonzales, 550 U. S., at 135–143 (describing such procedures). These legitimate in-terests provide a rational basis for the Gestational Age Act, and it follows that respondents’ constitutional challenge must fail. VII We end this opinion where we began. Abortion presents

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a profound moral question. The Constitution does not pro-hibit the citizens of each State from regulating or prohibit-ing abortion. Roe and Casey arrogated that authority. We now overrule those decisions and return that authority to the people and their elected representatives.

The judgment of the Fifth Circuit is reversed, and the case is remanded for further proceedings consistent with this opinion.

It is so ordered.