Abortion :: essays research papers fc

In Roe et al. v. Wade District Attorney of Dallas County (1973), one of the almost controversial cases in recent history, the U.S. Supreme Court struck dispirited all state laws that limit a womans right to an abortion during the first gear three months of pregnancy. Justices Rehnquist and White dissented.Mr. Justice Blackmun delivered the opinion of the Court....This Texas federal appeal and its gallium companion, Doe v. Bolton, post, p. 179, state constitutional challenges to state criminal abortion legislation. The Texas statutes on a lower floor attack here be typical of those that cede been in strength in many States for approximately a century. The Georgia statutes, in contrast, have a modern cast and ar a legislative result that, to an extent at least, obviously reflects the sees of recent attitudinal change, of advancing medical intimacy and techniques, and of new thinking about an old issue.We forthwith acknowledge our sense of the sensitive and emotional natu re of the abortion controversy, of the vigourous opposing views, even among physicians, and of the mystifying and seemingly absolute convictions that the subject inspires. Ones philosophy, ones experiences, ones exposure to the raw edges of human existence, ones phantasmal training, ones attitudes toward life and family and their values, and the moral standards one establishes and seeks to observe, are all likely to influence and to color ones thinking and conclusions about abortion....The Texas statutes that concern us here are Arts. 1191-1194 and 1196 of the States Penal Code. These make it a crime to "procure an abortion," as in that defined, or to attempt one, except with respect to "an abortion procured or seek by medical advice for the purpose of saving the life of the mother." Similar statutes are in existence in a majority of the States.Texas first enacted a criminal abortion statute in 1854. Texas Laws 1854, c. 49, Sec. 1, set forth in 3 H. Gammel, Laws o f Texas 1502 (1898). This was soon modified into language that has remained substantially unchanged to the present time....Jane Roe, a single woman who was residing in Dallas County, Texas, instituted this federal action in March 1970 against the District Attorney of the county. She sought a declaratory design that the Texas criminal abortion statutes were unconstitutional on their face, and an injunction restraining the defendant from enforcing the statutes.Roe asseverate that she was unmarried and pregnant that she wished to terminate her pregnancy