Planned Parenthood of Southeastern Pennsylvania v. Casey

Summary

Planned Parenthood of Southeastern Pennsylvania v. Casey tested five provisions of Pennsylvania's Abortion Control Act of 1982, as amended in 1988 and 1989. The Act required informed consent and a twenty-four-hour wait, one parent's consent for a minor with a judicial bypass, a signed statement by a married woman that she had notified her husband, and reporting by facilities, with exceptions for a defined medical emergency. Before the provisions took effect, five clinics and a physician sued Governor Robert P. Casey and other officials. The District Court held all five provisions unconstitutional; the Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit upheld all but the spousal-notice rule. The question became whether Roe v. Wade should be reaffirmed, modified or overruled, and what standard should govern. The petitioners asked the Court to reaffirm Roe in full and apply strict scrutiny. Pennsylvania, supported by the United States as amicus curiae, argued that Roe should be overruled and that the Act should stand because it rationally served the State's interests in maternal health, informed choice and unborn life. The Court's answer came chiefly in a joint opinion by Justices O'Connor, Kennedy and Souter. Joined in key parts by Justices Blackmun and Stevens, it held by a vote of 5–4 that the essential holding of Roe should be retained. The joint opinion grounded the right in the liberty of the Due Process Clause, which courts must interpret by reasoned judgment rather than by the practices of 1868. It then applied the doctrine of stare decisis, asking whether Roe had proved unworkable, whether people had relied on it, whether later law had left it behind, and whether its factual premises had changed, and it found none of these grounds for overruling. It contrasted Roe with the overrulings of the Lochner line and of Plessy, and warned that yielding to pressure would damage the Court's legitimacy. In a part joined only by its three authors, it replaced Roe's trimester framework with a test asking whether a law places an undue burden on the woman's decision before viability. Applying that test, the Court upheld the consent, waiting-period, parental-consent and most reporting provisions and struck down spousal notification. Chief Justice Rehnquist, joined by Justices White, Scalia and Thomas, would have overruled Roe and upheld the whole Act, calling the joint opinion's view of precedent newly minted and its result an unjustified compromise. Justice Scalia, with the same three, argued that the Constitution says nothing about the matter and that the nation's long traditions permitted its regulation, and he criticized the undue-burden test as standardless. The library text gives excerpts of the joint opinion (Parts I through the opening of Part IV), of the Chief Justice's opinion and of Justice Scalia's, without the separate opinions of Blackmun and Stevens or the opinions' notes. Later cases such as Whole Woman's Health v. Hellerstedt (2016) applied the new standard. In 2022 Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization overruled Casey and Roe, and the decision remains debated as a study in stare decisis.

Top Lessons

• Four tests for keeping a precedent

  Part III-A turns the doctrine of stare decisis into a set of questions about workability, reliance, doctrinal change and changed facts. Students can apply these questions to any precedent and see that both the joint opinion and the Chief Justice accept that precedent matters, while disagreeing about what it requires here.

• Reasoned judgment or tradition?

  The joint opinion holds that the liberty of the Fourteenth Amendment is not limited to rights named in the Bill of Rights or protected in 1868, and that judges must use reasoned judgment within the tradition of earlier cases. Scalia replies that such judgment has no fixed boundary and that text and long-standing tradition are the only reliable limits on judges.

• The legitimacy of a court

  The joint opinion argues that a court without purse or sword depends on public confidence in its principled character, and that overruling a divisive decision under pressure would spend that confidence. Its critics reply that the Court's legitimacy depends on faithful interpretation, not on constancy for its own sake.

• A new test and its critics

  The undue-burden standard asks whether a regulation places a substantial obstacle in the woman's path before viability. Its authors offered it as a way to honour both the woman's liberty and the State's interests; Scalia and the Chief Justice argued that it gives judges no principled way to decide which burdens are undue.

Verified Quotes

Medical Lens

The excerpted opinions concern the doctrine of precedent, the meaning of liberty and the Court's legitimacy; the record treats the Pennsylvania provisions only as legal requirements and includes no medical content.