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  • Essay / Roe V. Wade – a landmark case impacting abortion laws

    The argument over whether to call abortion good or bad is very complicated in that where the fetus is considered a person, scientifically. The Supreme Court's Roe v. Wade case was a landmark decision proving that a state law prohibiting abortion, except when the mother's life is in danger, was unconstitutional. Abortion remains one of the most challenging and provocative conceptions in society today as it addresses the question of the extent to which the 14th Amendment can be applied to one's own body. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on “Why Violent Video Games Should Not Be Banned”? Get the original essayLife in the days when abortion was still a criminal act still contained massive numbers of women who resisted the law. In the 1950s and 1960s, just before Roe v. Wade in 1973, medical and law enforcement experts estimated that between 1 and 2 million girls and women underwent obscure abortions each year. To stop women from having unsafe abortions that could endanger their lives, along with a personal story helping her legendary journey to help these women with the same lives and others would start with Norma McCorvey (or known as name of Jane Roe for this case). Although it is important to obtain the legal information that was present before the case to paint a picture of what women had to live with at the time. The legal position before Roe v. Wade was that abortion was illegal in 30 states and legal in certain circumstances in 20 states. Different trimesters and different circumstances like rape, incest, disability, whether it could threaten the mother's life, etc., were taken into consideration. Doctors remained the loudest voice in the anti-abortion debate, and they took their anti-feminist agenda to state legislatures across the country, advocating not only anti-abortion laws, but also anti-birth control laws. . Jane Roe was the main accuser of the entire abortion rights movement. Due to the length of time it took for the case to go to court, the decision did not arrive in time for Norma McCorvey to have an abortion. She gave birth to her child, who she put up for adoption. The case began in 1970 when Jane Roe filed a federal suit against Henry Wade, the district attorney of Dallas County, Texas, where Roe lived. The Court upheld its decision with a dominant 7-2 vote for Roe on January 22, 1973. The question of whether a woman actually had her right to privacy was subject to the majority's decision and called into question the uniqueness of the Constitution and what rights were applied. The Fourteenth Amendment was used by the justices to answer this question, which prohibits states from “depriving any person of…liberty…without due process of law,” protecting a fundamental right to privacy. The justices concluded that "the word 'person,' as used in the Fourteenth Amendment, does not include the unborn child." A woman's right to abortion was part of this major right to privacy and was guaranteed by the Constitution. In his dissenting opinion, Justice Rehnquist argued that the framers of the Fourteenth Amendment did not intend to protect a right to privacy, a right that they did not recognize, and that they certainly did not not intend to protect a woman's decision to have an abortion. He further argued that the only right to privacy is that which is protected by.