PEN TO POWER · THE TOP 10 CASES · EXHIBIT 01
The woman. The Texas law. The constitutional decision that lasted 49 years.
Roe v. Wade · 410 U.S. 113 · 7–2 decision · Opinion by Justice Harry Blackmun
The original Roe holding was overruled in 2022. Dates describe legal history, not current nationwide abortion rules.
THE STORY BEHIND THE DECISION
Before Roe became a national argument, it was a lawsuit brought by a woman whose circumstances collided with a Texas criminal statute. Follow the person, the legal barrier, the constitutional argument, the decision, and its reversal.
THE ROE STORY
Norma McCorvey was a young woman in Dallas who became pregnant in 1969. Under the pseudonym Jane Roe, she challenged Texas abortion restrictions with attorneys Linda Coffee and Sarah Weddington. McCorvey gave birth before the Supreme Court ruled; the child was placed for adoption.
THE ROE STORY
Texas criminal statutes generally prohibited abortion, apart from a narrow exception to save the pregnant woman’s life. Laws differed across states. Geography and money affected the practical options available to someone seeking a procedure.
THE ROE STORY
Roe challenged Texas laws that exposed abortion providers to criminal penalties. The legal dispute asked whether state regulation could prohibit the procedure when a pregnant woman asserted a constitutionally protected liberty.
THE ROE STORY
The Fourteenth Amendment, ratified in 1868, forbids states to deprive people of liberty without due process of law. It does not expressly mention abortion. Roe drew on earlier privacy decisions, including Griswold v. Connecticut (1965), to interpret protected liberty more broadly.
THE ROE STORY
Roe filed suit in 1970. A three-judge federal court found the Texas provisions unconstitutional but declined an injunction. The Supreme Court heard argument in 1971, reargument in 1972, and issued its decision on January 22, 1973.
THE ROE STORY
In a 7–2 decision, Justice Harry Blackmun wrote that constitutional privacy encompassed a qualified right to terminate a pregnancy. The Court established a trimester-based framework. Justices Byron White and William Rehnquist dissented, disputing the constitutional basis for the Court’s intervention.
THE ROE STORY
Roe constrained state abortion prohibitions but did not end litigation or political conflict. McCorvey later became publicly associated with the anti-abortion movement; later accounts of her views remain contested and must be attributed carefully.
THE ROE STORY
Planned Parenthood v. Casey (1992) preserved the central pre-viability protection while replacing Roe’s trimester approach with an undue-burden standard. Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization (2022) overruled Roe and Casey. Dobbs did not itself create a nationwide abortion ban.
READ THE RECORD
Examine the judicial opinions and oral-argument materials. Other trial documents and historical statutory sources remain identified as pending in the research record below.
THE FIRST QUESTION IN EVERY VAULT CASE
Why does the record you are about to read exist? We begin with the person, the real-world circumstance, the government law or action that created the barrier, the need for legal assistance, and the constitutional question that followed.
Roe’s opening question: How did Norma McCorvey’s pregnancy, Texas criminal abortion law, and the legal risk faced by physicians become a federal constitutional challenge under the Fourteenth Amendment?
Norma McCorvey, identified in the litigation as Jane Roe.
A pregnancy and a desire to obtain an abortion.
Texas criminal statutes restricted abortion and exposed providers to prosecution.
A constitutional challenge required attorneys, a plaintiff and federal jurisdiction.
Roe sought declaratory and injunctive relief against enforcement.
Whether the Fourteenth Amendment limited Texas’s power to enforce those statutes.
Before Roe became a constitutional symbol, it was a lawsuit challenging Texas criminal statutes. This section establishes the actual chain of events and separates contemporaneous records from accounts given years later.
This is where the finished record will answer the questions other case summaries skip: when McCorvey learned she was pregnant, what medical or personal options she pursued, whom she contacted, what she was told, and which source establishes each event.
Research fields reserved: pregnancy chronology · physician contact · attempted abortion access · adoption discussion · referrals · conflicting later accounts.
The finished section will reproduce the historical Texas statutes actually challenged, identify their penalties and exceptions, explain who enforced them, and preserve the version in force when the complaint was filed.
This section will document how McCorvey came into contact with Coffee and Weddington, why she became the named plaintiff, what relief counsel sought, and what the available records do—and do not—prove about that process.
Complaint, parties, jurisdiction, standing, claims, requested declaration, requested injunction and the defendant’s response will appear together rather than being scattered across unrelated pages.
Pregnancy, attempted options, attorney contact and preparation of the constitutional challenge.
Pleadings, motions, evidence, decision and relief.
Jurisdictional filings, first oral argument, reargument, conference and opinions.
Casey, later abortion decisions, Dobbs and current legal status.
The final page will reproduce the parties’ questions from their filings, then place the Court’s answers beside pinpoint citations to the decision.
Fourteenth Amendment due process, liberty and the privacy doctrine developed in earlier cases. Each provision and precedent will be connected to its own Vault record.
Historical statutes, lower-court record, Supreme Court briefs, oral arguments, majority opinion, concurrences and dissents—kept as separate documents and arranged chronologically.
Rule before Roe → rule announced in Roe → modification in Casey → overruling in Dobbs. Later cases and legislation will be presented in chronological order.
Roe v. Wade was overruled by Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization in 2022. The completed page will separate Roe’s historical importance from its present precedential force.
The future case researcher will answer only from records indexed to this case and will display the documents used to produce every answer.
Every assertion in the final summary will map to a human-readable and machine-readable source entry.