Roe v. Wade: The Battle over Abortion|5-Minute Videos|Prager…

Roe v. Wade: The Battle over Abortion|5-Minute Videos|PragerU
No contemporary U.S. Supreme Court choice has actually excited more passion than Roe v. Wade. Stephanie Barclay, Professor of Law at Georgetown Law School, analyzes the effect and implications of this controversial case.

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Transcript:.
Roe v. Wade: The Battle Over Abortion.
Presented by Stephanie Barclay.

Possibly no contemporary U.S. Supreme Court decision has actually aroused more enthusiasm than Roe v. Wade, the 1973 case that announced the constitutional right to abortion.

A judicial earthquake, it shook the nation to its social, constitutional and political core.

The aftershocks continue to this day.

Socially, it revolutionized how people thought of, talked about, and experienced abortion. In the words of UC Berkeley Professor Kristin Luker, “it changed whatever.”.

Politically, it generated two opposing movements: pro-choice and pro-life.

Constitutionally, it suggested that the Court had the power to produce rights that did not have any significant support in the text of the Constitution.

Roe worried a Texas lady called Norma McCorvey– then kept confidential under the pseudonym “Jane Roe.” McCorvey wished to have an abortion but was avoided from doing so due to the fact that of Texas’ abortion law.

In 1970, “Jane Roe” sued Dallas County District Attorney Henry Wade to overturn the Texas law. Her case, Roe v. Wade, reached the Supreme Court, and in January 1973, the Court ruled 7-to-2 in favor of Roe, declaring that Texas had broken Roe’s constitutional right to privacy.

That right had actually been loosely developed in previous court cases, most significantly Griswold v. Connecticut (1965 ). What the Court did in Roe was to expand the right to privacy to consist of the right to have an abortion.

The Court based its decision on the Fourteenth Amendment, ratified in 1868, primarily to ensure the rights of people who had actually recently been freed from slavery.

At the time of ratification, approximately three-quarters of the states had statutes criminalizing abortion. When Roe was chosen over a century later on, the majority of states still had statutes putting strict limitations on abortion, with lots of allowing exceptions in cases of rape, incest, or to conserve the life of the mother.

The Roe choice invalidated that entire legal framework.

To validate its thinking, the Court pointed out the provision in the Fourteenth Amendment specifying that no person will be denied of “home, life, or liberty, without due process of law …”.

But this raised a brand-new question, one specifically related to a lady’s pregnancy. Under the Fourteenth Amendment, is a coming kid an individual?

If the kid is an individual, does that child have the rights articulated in that very exact same Amendment, consisting of the right to life?

The court stated no. An unborn kid is not an individual.

Composing for the bulk, Justice Harry Blackmun reasoned that wherever the word “person” is discovered in the Constitution, it “has application only post-natally.” All of its references are to those already born. That fact “encourages us,” Blackmun wrote, “that the word ‘person,’ as used in the Fourteenth Amendment, does not consist of the coming.”.

This raised another question. At what point in a pregnancy does a coming child end up being a “person”?

The Court successfully answered that question, too.

It decreed that until the unborn kid had reached the point of “practicality”– the beginning of the 3rd trimester, when the kid can endure outside the womb– the state can’t safeguard the unborn child’s “potential life.”.

However, in an internal memo to his colleagues, Blackmun admitted that this trimester viability timeline he had actually developed was “arbitrary.”.

… access the full transcript here https://l.prageru.com/3Tk0D8S.

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PragerU
No contemporary U.S. Supreme Court choice has actually excited more passion than Roe v. Wade. A judicial earthquake, it shook the nation to its social, constitutional and political core. Stephanie Barclay, Professor of Law at Georgetown Law School, takes a look at the effect and ramifications of this controversial case.

That reality “encourages us,” Blackmun composed, “that the word ‘individual,’ as utilized in the Fourteenth Amendment, does not consist of the coming.”.