”Aborterna försvinner inte – utan blir bara farligare”

Roe v. Wade, 410 U.S. 113 (1973), was a landmark decision of the U.S. Supreme Court in which the Court ruled that the Constitution of the United States generally protects a pregnant woman's liberty to choose to have an abortion. The decision, which struck down many U.S. federal and state abortion laws, has fueled an ongoing debate in the United States about whether, or to what extent, abortion should be legal, who should decide the legality of abortion, and what the role of moral and religious views in the political sphere should be. It also shaped debate concerning which methods the Supreme Court should use in constitutional adjudication. The case was brought by Norma McCorvey—known by the legal pseudonym "Jane Roe"—who in 1969 became pregnant with her third child. McCorvey wanted an abortion but lived in Texas, where abortion was illegal except when necessary to save the mother's life. Her attorneys, Sarah Weddington and Linda Coffee, filed a lawsuit on her behalf in U.S. federal court against her local district attorney, Henry Wade, alleging that Texas's abortion laws were unconstitutional. A three-judge panel of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Texas ruled in her favor and declared the relevant Texas abortion statutes unconstitutional. The parties appealed this ruling to the Supreme Court of the United States. On January 22, 1973, the Supreme Court issued a 7–2 decision holding that the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution protects a pregnant woman's right to an abortion. But the Court also held that the right to abortion is not absolute and must be balanced against the government's interests in protecting women's health and prenatal life. The Court resolved these competing interests by announcing a trimester timetable to govern all abortion regulations in the United States. During the first trimester, governments could not regulate abortion at all, except to require that abortions be performed by a licensed physician. During the second trimester, governments could regulate the abortion procedure, but only for the purpose of protecting maternal health and not for protecting fetal life. After viability (which includes the third trimester of pregnancy and the last few weeks of the second trimester), abortions could be regulated and even prohibited, but only if the laws provided exceptions for abortions necessary to save the "life" or "health" of the mother. The Court also classified the right to abortion as "fundamental", which required courts to evaluate challenged abortion laws under the "strict scrutiny" standard, the most stringent level of judicial review in the United States.The Supreme Court's decision in Roe has been among the most controversial in U.S. history. Anti-abortion politicians and activists sought for decades to overrule the decision. Despite criticism of Roe, the Supreme Court reaffirmed its “central holding” in its 1992 decision Planned Parenthood v. Casey, although Casey overruled Roe's trimester framework and abandoned Roe's "strict scrutiny" standard in favor of a more malleable “undue burden” test.The Roe/Casey regime began to weaken in 2021 when Texas devised a legal workaround that allowed it to successfully outlaw abortion at six weeks of pregnancy, despite the continued existence of Roe and Casey. Oklahoma later copied this tactic to ban abortion entirely while insulating its law from judicial review.On June 24, 2022, in Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization, the Supreme Court overturned both Roe and Casey by a vote of 6–3. The Dobbs decision had been anticipated since May 2 of that year, when a draft opinion in the case was leaked by the news media. which Chief Justice John Roberts confirmed as authentic the following day.