Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization

Summary

Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization arose from Mississippi's Gestational Age Act of 2018, which generally prohibited abortion after the fifteenth week of pregnancy, with exceptions for medical emergencies and severe fetal abnormality. Jackson Women's Health Organization, a clinic in Jackson, and one of its doctors sued Thomas E. Dobbs, the State Health Officer, and other officials the day the Act was signed. The District Court granted summary judgment and enjoined the law because it reached before viability, and the Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit affirmed. The Court granted review on whether all prohibitions before viability are unconstitutional. Mississippi argued that Roe v. Wade and Planned Parenthood v. Casey were wrongly decided and should be overruled, so that each State could regulate abortion as its citizens chose, and that its law satisfied rational-basis review. The clinic and the United States, appearing as amicus, argued that upholding the law would amount to overruling Roe and Casey, that no half-measure was available, and that half a century of precedent and reliance required the Court to reaffirm both decisions. The Court reversed by a vote of 6–3, and by 5–4 overruled Roe and Casey. Justice Alito, for himself and Justices Thomas, Gorsuch, Kavanaugh and Barrett, held that the Constitution makes no reference to abortion and that the Due Process Clause protects an unenumerated right only if it is deeply rooted in the nation's history and tradition and implicit in ordered liberty. Reviewing the common law and state statutes, the opinion found that when the Fourteenth Amendment was adopted three quarters of the States made abortion a crime at all stages. It distinguished the privacy precedents because abortion, it said, uniquely involves what the law calls unborn human life. Weighing five factors, namely the nature of the error, the quality of the reasoning, workability, effects on other areas of law and reliance, it concluded that stare decisis did not require keeping Roe and Casey, and it returned the question to the people's elected representatives. Justice Kavanaugh, concurring, wrote that the Constitution is neutral on abortion and that the Court must be scrupulously neutral as well. Chief Justice Roberts concurred only in the judgment: he would have discarded the viability line and upheld the law while leaving the underlying right in place, on the principle that a court should decide no more than necessary. Justices Breyer, Sotomayor and Kagan, dissenting jointly, argued that Roe and Casey struck a balance protecting women's liberty and equality alongside the State's interests, that the Fourteenth Amendment's general guarantees were meant to apply to new circumstances, that the right is woven together with precedents on contraception and marriage, and that nothing had changed since Casey except the Court's membership. The library text gives excerpts from the majority opinion, the Kavanaugh concurrence, the Chief Justice's opinion and the joint dissent, without Justice Thomas's concurrence or the notes. Since June 2022 legislatures, state courts and, in several States, voters have taken up the question, and the decision remains debated.

Top Lessons

• Reading the Fourteenth Amendment: specific history or general principle?

  The majority asks whether a right was recognized in American law when the Fourteenth Amendment was ratified in 1868, and finds that it was not. The dissent argues that the Amendment's framers wrote in general terms so that later generations could apply its principles to new conditions. The case is a clear example of two serious theories of constitutional interpretation meeting head on.

• When should precedent give way?

  Both sides agree that stare decisis is important but not absolute. The majority lists five factors and counts Roe among the decisions, like Plessy, that the Court was right to overrule. The dissent calls Casey a precedent about precedent and argues that a change in the Court's membership is no reason to depart from it.

• The narrowest ground

  Chief Justice Roberts would have decided only the question the Court agreed to hear: whether every prohibition before viability is invalid. His principle that a court should decide no more than necessary is an old one, and the majority answers that a middle course would only prolong uncertainty.

• After the Court speaks: who decides?

  The majority and Kavanaugh emphasize that the decision returns the question to legislatures and voters, where citizens may persuade one another. The dissent replies that leaving a matter to the States is itself a choice about rights. Students can examine how each opinion understands the relation between constitutional rights and democratic self-government.

Verified Quotes

Medical Lens

The excerpted opinions argue over constitutional interpretation, legal history and precedent; the record discusses the Mississippi statute only as law and includes no medical content.