Roe V Wade

Roe v. Wade is the Supreme Court’s case number 410 U.S. 113. It was appealed from the United States District court for the Northern district of Texas. Norma McCorvey used the alias Jane Roe. She was an unmarried pregnant woman and was suing because she wanted an abortion and the legal privacy to do so. District attorney was the defendant of Dallas County, Texas Henry B. Wade. Lawyers for the case were Sarah Weddington and Linda Coffee. Defendant lawyers John Tolle, Jay Floyd, and Robert Flowers presented the case against Jane Roe. This case was argued on December 13, 1971 and was decided on January 22, 1973.

The case of Roe v. Wade was mostly concerned with the Ninth Amendment and the Fourteenth Amendment. The Ninth Amendment stated that “certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people,” protecting a person’s right to privacy. The Fourteenth Amendment stated the Due Process Clause forbids a state and its local governments to act in any unfair or arbitrary way. This argued that the protection of life granted by the Fourteenth Amendment could not apply to a fetus because a fetus was not a person in the eye of the law. Roe also argued that her decision to obtain an abortion should be protected by the right of privacy (see notes).

Jane Roe a twenty-one year old woman became pregnant in the summer of 1969. Roe did not have a easy life, she was raped as a teenager, she married at the age of sixteen and her husband later abused her. Her first child was raised by her mother, her second child was raised by the father and during the trial she was pregnant with her third child who was later given up for adoption. Roe’s pregnancy did not threaten her life, but she was a poor single woman and did not want to raise a child she could not support. At the time of the case Roe did not have the money to travel to another state where abortions were legal. Since Texas law prohibited abortion Roe began searching for someone to perform one...