Roe Vs Wade Research Paper

Antunes !1
Lucas Antunes
U.S. Government POS-2041-10734
Tyler Branz
November 15th, 2013
Roe vs. Wade
The landmark Supreme Court decision of 1973, Roe v. Wade made laws prohibiting abortion, except in the last trimester, unconstitutional based on the 14th amendment 's implied right of a woman 's privacy in decision about her body. Abortion is a complicated issue plagued with both moral and legal considerations. Central to the moral implication of abortion is the issue of viability, more specifically the determination of when life begins. There are several issues that arise in an attempt to determine the rights of either party, be it the mother or the fetus. Whether or not abortion constitutes murder, and the circumstances under which
It is important to state the facts prior to the Roe V. Wade Court Case - involving Jane
Roe, the the pseudonym assumed by a woman named Norma L. McCorvey, and the Texas’ State laws. In Texas, State law prohibited the termination of a pregnancy by artificial means (surgery) except when the life of the mother was in danger. In June 1969, Norma L. McCorvey, a Texas resident, discovered she was pregnant with her third child. She returned to Dallas, Texas, and tried to get an abortion, without success.
In 1970, after she gave birth, McCorvey lawyers filed suit in a U.S. District Court in
Texas using “Jane Roe” as a pseudonym to keep their client’s privacy . The defendant in the case was Dallas County District Attorney Henry Wade, representing the State of Texas. The whole

Antunes !2 case was built around privacy as a “fundamental right,” Roe v. Wade reached the Supreme Court on appeal in 1970, challenging the Texas statute.
The Constitutional Issues involved were many. Like mentioned, it involved the right of privacy as implied by Amendments 1, 3, 4, 5, 9, and 14 versus the police power of the States.
Questions were raised: Did States have a compelling and overriding interest in regulating
Were fetuses “persons” with rights to be protected by the
Constitution?
Some of the oral arguments in favor of Roe in the court case were as follow: “The court declared the Texas abortion law to the unconstitutional for two reasons: First, that the law was impermissibly vague, and, second, that it violated a woman’s right to continue or terminate a pregnancy. (…) Jane Roe, the pregnant woman, had gone to several Dallas physicians seeking an abortion, but had been refused care because of the Texas law. (…) In this case, there has never been established that the fetus is a person or that it’s entitled to the Fourteenth Amendment rights or the protection of the constitution. (…) It would be inconsistent to decide that, after birth, various classifications of persons would be subject to the death penalty or not but, here, we have a person, the woman, entitled to fundamental constitutional rights as opposed to the fetus prior to birth where there is no establishment of any kind of federal constitutional rights” (ROE v.
WADE, Oyez). The Arguments for Roe were basically that under the Bill of Rights, a woman has the right to terminate her pregnancy. In no case in its history has the Court declared that a fetus