Roe v. Wade

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• SOURCE: Boston Review
  10/6/2021
  

  Reframing Abortion as a Public Good

  by Judith Levine

  "States have a compelling interest—a profound obligation—to defend the right to abortion. Abortion is a public good. Why haven’t we linked abortion to the commonweal?"

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• SOURCE: New York Times
  9/12/2021
  

  Texas Allows Abortion to Save a Woman's Life. Right?

  American hospitals by the 1950s formed "therapeutic abortion committees" to rule whether individual women needed abortions to protect their lives. Those committees' decisions reflected religious morality, class and racial prejudice, and other subjective perceptions of a patient's worthiness. 

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• SOURCE: Made By History at the Washington Post
  9/3/2021
  

  Americans Sought Safer Abortions in Mexico Before Roe, Too

  by Lina-Maria Murillo

  "No matter what antiabortion crusaders try, pregnant people will always find ways to have abortions — and networks that go beyond borders have long helped them navigate treatment options."

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• 9/2/2021
  

  Historians on the Supreme Court's Acceptance of Texas's Abortion Ban

  by HNN Staff

  The Supreme Court declined to block the implementation of a law that effectively bans abortion in the state while deputizing private citizens to enforce the ban as a trick to evade judicial review. 

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• SOURCE: New York Times
  8/26/2021
  

  Texas Republicans Have Cleared the Path to End Roe v. Wade

  by Mary Ziegler

  A Texas appeals court decision may lead to a Supreme Court case that will test whether the current justices can accommodate a public respect for precedent with a political preference for outlawing abortion. 

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• SOURCE: The Atlantic
  5/20/2021
  

  The Abortion Fight Has Never Been About Just Roe v. Wade

  by Mary Ziegler

  "The abortion debate has never been about just Roe—and it’s never been about letting a popular majority have a say. What’s new is that this argument now meets a receptive Supreme Court for the first time in more than a generation."

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• SOURCE: The New Yorker
  9/25/2020
  

  The Case to End the Supreme Court as We Know It

  by Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor

  The Supreme Court has historically supported democratic and egalitarian change only when forced by social movements. People must stop looking to the power invested in the court and start looking for the power latent in themselves. 

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• SOURCE: Washington Post
  5/19/2020
  

  The Woman Behind Roe V. Wade Got Paid To Embrace Antiabortion Movement, New Documentary Reveals

  “I was the big fish. I think it was a mutual thing. I took their money, and they’d put me out in front of the cameras and tell me what to say. That’s what I’d say,” she says in “AKA Jane Roe.”

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• SOURCE: Daily Beast
  5/19/2020
  

  Jane Roe’s Deathbed Confession: Anti-Abortion Conversion ‘All an Act’ Paid for by the Christian Right

  A new documentary includes Norma McCorvey's revelation that anti-abortion organizations paid her to pose insincerely as a born-again anti-abortion crusader in the 1990s.

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• SOURCE: The Atlantic
  3/8/2020
  

  My Abortion Before Roe v. Wade

  by Elizabeth Stone

  Roe v. Wade is in peril, flinging me back to a terrifying time in my own life, one I never expected women today would have to face.

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• SOURCE: The Washington Post
  1/22/20
  

  What Antiabortion Advocates Get Wrong About The Women Who Secured The Right to Vote

  by Reva Siegel and Stacie Taranto

  The most famous suffragists largely weren’t antiabortion and wanted women to have more control over their bodies.

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• SOURCE: NPR
  5/20/19
  

  What Abortion Was Like In The U.S. Before Roe V. Wade

  NPR's Mary Louise Kelly talks with Karissa Haugeberg, assistant professor of history at Tulane University, about what it was like to get an abortion before Roe v. Wade.

• SOURCE: Salon
  3-30-13
  

  Michael J. Gerhardt: How Jimmy Carter Imperiled Roe v. Wade

  Michael J. Gerhardt is Samuel Ashe Distinguished Professor in Constitutional Law & Director, Center for Law and Government at the University of North Carolina Law School.Jimmy Carter had significant impact on judicial selection in several ways. The first involved the Supreme Court. The fact that he had no Supreme Court appointments made it easier for President Reagan to build directly upon the four appointments made by President Nixon to thwart Warren Court decisions expanding minority and criminal defendants’ rights at the expense of state sovereignty.An obvious target for Reagan was the Supreme Court’s 1973 decision in Roe v. Wade. Initially, there was no Republican backlash to the opinion. Indeed, the initial, public response to Roe was largely silence. When, for instance, the Senate held confirmation hearings on President Ford’s nomina­tion of John Paul Stevens to replace the retiring William O. Douglas, not a single senator asked Stevens about  Roe. Yet, by the time Reagan was campaigning for the presidency, the Republican platform had called for overruling Roe; and as president, Reagan made Roe a principal example of the Court’s liberalism and pledged to appoint justices who would overturn Roe, among other cases. The question is what had happened in the meantime.

• SOURCE: NYT
  3-23-13
  

  Shadow of Roe v. Wade looms over ruling on gay marriage

  WASHINGTON — When the Supreme Court hears a pair of cases on same-sex marriage on Tuesday and Wednesday, the justices will be working in the shadow of a 40-year-old decision on another subject entirely: Roe v. Wade, the 1973 ruling that established a constitutional right to abortion.Judges, lawyers and scholars have drawn varying lessons from that decision, with some saying that it was needlessly rash and created a culture war.Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, a liberal and a champion of women’s rights, has long harbored doubts about the ruling.“It’s not that the judgment was wrong, but it moved too far, too fast,” she said last year at Columbia Law School....

• SOURCE: Dissent
  1-23-13
  

  Ruth Rosen: Roe v. Wade and Beyond

  Ruth Rosen, a former columnist for the Los Angeles Times and the San Francisco Chronicle, is Professor Emerita of History at UC-Davis and a visiting scholar at the Center for the Study of Right-Wing Movements at UC-Berkeley. Her most recent book is The World Split Open: How the Modern Women’s Movement Changed America.On the day that Roe v. Wade was handed down, I felt a mixture of elation and panic. A new future loomed in which unwanted pregnancies would no longer send women to quacks, rushing them to hospitals with raging infections and perhaps to their deaths. I breathed a sigh of relief, knowing that many lives would be saved.At the same time, I knew that this historic decision had started the culture wars, even though I didn’t have the language to explain my thoughts. As a young historian, I realized that the Supreme Court had given us abortion rights and what the Court gave, the Court could take away. Even more, I understood that we had not received this right through congressional legislation, which would have reflected a greater consensus among Americans. But I also knew that there had not been enough national conversation for legislation that would have legalized abortion, so a Court decision was the only way, at that time, that we could have gained reproductive rights.

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• Five Myths about Roe v. Wade

  by Marc Stein

  Supreme Court Building. Credit: Wiki Commons.Originally posted on the UNC Press Blog.On January 22, 1973, the U.S. Supreme Court announced its decision in Roe v. Wade, the abortion rights case that culminated in one of the most controversial legal rulings in the country’s history. Forty years later, numerous myths continue to circulate about the contents and meanings of Roe. Here are five of the most significant:Myth #1: Roe endorsed abortion on demand.