Roe v. Wade: Abortion Rights Reaffirmed Amid Restrictions

The Supreme Court reaffirmed a woman’s right to abortion while simultaneously dismantling the legal framework that protected it. In Planned Parenthood v. Casey, decided June 29, 1992, a fractured Court upheld the "essential holding" of Roe v. Wade by a 5-4 vote but replaced the trimester system with a new "undue burden" standard that gave states far more power to regulate and restrict the procedure. The case challenged five provisions of a Pennsylvania law that required informed consent with a 24-hour waiting period, parental consent for minors, spousal notification, reporting requirements for abortion providers, and a medical emergency exception. The Bush administration urged the Court to overturn Roe entirely, and many legal observers expected it would, given that eight of the nine justices had been appointed by Republican presidents. The surprise came from Justices Sandra Day O’Connor, Anthony Kennedy, and David Souter, who jointly authored a rare co-opinion that preserved Roe’s core while rewriting its application. Their opinion grounded abortion rights in the Fourteenth Amendment’s liberty clause rather than the right to privacy, and replaced Roe’s strict scrutiny standard with the more flexible undue burden test: a state regulation was constitutional unless its purpose or effect placed a substantial obstacle in the path of a woman seeking an abortion before fetal viability. Under this new standard, the Court upheld all of Pennsylvania’s restrictions except the spousal notification requirement. The undue burden test proved far more permissive than the trimester framework, and states spent the next three decades passing hundreds of regulations that the Casey standard allowed: mandatory waiting periods, ultrasound requirements, clinic building codes, and gestational limits. Casey preserved the formal right to abortion for thirty years until the Court overturned both Roe and Casey in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization in June 2022.