On the Anniversary of Roe v. Wade, Celebrate Its Demise |
Fifty-three years ago, the U.S. Supreme Court handed down one of its most consequential and controversial decisions: Roe v. Wade.
That Jan. 22, 1973, decision would not make it to its 50th birthday. Its victims, an estimated 63 million of them, however, would never reach the age of 1.
As a result of the decision handed down on Jan. 22, 1973, abortion became legal in all 50 states. Doe v. Bolton, a decision handed down that same day, signaled that women could obtain an abortion for pretty much any reason, given how purposefully vague the health exceptions were.
Roe wasn’t merely wrongly decided due to its enormous ramifications and controversial nature, but also because it was not legally sound. The justices based their decision on a “penumbra,” or a feeling about what the Constitution says about the right to privacy. The court first used the penumbra style of reading the Constitution in the 1965 case Griswold v. Connecticut. The court........