Roe’s Trimester Framework
In March 1970, Jane Roe , an unmarried pregnant woman, filed lawsuit against Texas on the grounds that its ‘criminal abortion statutes’ were unconstitutional. Brought to the Supreme Court in 1972, Roe V. Wade declared allowing abortion only to save the mother 's life unconstitutional by interpreting the ‘right to privacy’ as being inclusive to a woman’s decision to have an abortion- a victory for Roe. The seven justice majority who contributed to Roe’s legalisation of abortion framed the decision with three considerations: ‘the rights of the pregnant woman, the rights of the state to promote interest in maternal health, and the right of the state to promote its interest in the potentiality of human life.’ The first trimester of pregnancy constitutes the …show more content…
In essence, the ‘sides’ of the abortion debate have been largely defined by how each perceives why anti-abortion laws were established. Such as, those opposing abortion have criticised Blackmun’s conclusion on the historical prioritisation of maternal life, arguing that the very notion of quickening suggests a history of concern for fetal life. Roe supporters have championed Mean’s interpretation that anti-abortion laws were originally meant to be pro-woman, protecting them from dangerous infections, prior to antibiotic discovery, thus rendering them useless. Although doubtful of this pro-women agenda, James C. Mohr used Means’s ‘basic insight’ into the entanglement between abortion policy and the history of medicine in the United States to substantiate his ground breaking work on the history of anti-abortion physicians. This interpretation, in which the goal of male physicians to better establish their professional authority was done at the expense of women’s bodily autonomy, has been particularly emphasized in feminist
In March 1970, Jane Roe , an unmarried pregnant woman, filed lawsuit against Texas on the grounds that its ‘criminal abortion statutes’ were unconstitutional. Brought to the Supreme Court in 1972, Roe V. Wade declared allowing abortion only to save the mother 's life unconstitutional by interpreting the ‘right to privacy’ as being inclusive to a woman’s decision to have an abortion- a victory for Roe. The seven justice majority who contributed to Roe’s legalisation of abortion framed the decision with three considerations: ‘the rights of the pregnant woman, the rights of the state to promote interest in maternal health, and the right of the state to promote its interest in the potentiality of human life.’ The first trimester of pregnancy constitutes the …show more content…
In essence, the ‘sides’ of the abortion debate have been largely defined by how each perceives why anti-abortion laws were established. Such as, those opposing abortion have criticised Blackmun’s conclusion on the historical prioritisation of maternal life, arguing that the very notion of quickening suggests a history of concern for fetal life. Roe supporters have championed Mean’s interpretation that anti-abortion laws were originally meant to be pro-woman, protecting them from dangerous infections, prior to antibiotic discovery, thus rendering them useless. Although doubtful of this pro-women agenda, James C. Mohr used Means’s ‘basic insight’ into the entanglement between abortion policy and the history of medicine in the United States to substantiate his ground breaking work on the history of anti-abortion physicians. This interpretation, in which the goal of male physicians to better establish their professional authority was done at the expense of women’s bodily autonomy, has been particularly emphasized in feminist