A Mississippi abortion clinic and one of its physicians challenged a Mississippi state law, called the Gestational Age Act (“GAA”), which made it illegal for women to obtain abortions after 15 weeks of pregnancy. The plaintiffs sought a temporary restraining order to prevent the GAA’s enforcement during the trial, which was granted. The district court, and later the Fifth Circuit, found that the GAA was unconstitutional pursuant to Roe v. Wade, in which the Supreme Court held that restricting abortions before the independent viability of the fetus was unconstitutional. In Dobbs, the Supreme Court overruled the precedent established in Roe v. Wade and affirmed in Planned Parenthood of Southeastern Pennsylvania v. Casey that the fundamental right to privacy created the right to an abortion, and that the right to abortion was protected by much of the Constitution, including the Fourteenth Amendment’s Due Process Clause which protected liberty.
In this case, the Supreme Court held that abortion is not protected by the right to privacy because it involves moral issues about the definition of life. The Court also found that the Fourteenth Amendment’s protection of liberty did not cover abortion rights because it was not “deeply rooted” in U.S. tradition and history. Writing for the majority, Justice Alito used a textual and historical analysis to argue that abortion was not a historical or constitutional right subject to legal protections. Justice Thomas concurred with the Court’s decision, arguing that the due process clause only granted individuals the right to a procedural process before any form of government intervention, and had no further substantive value. Justice Thomas further proposed that similar Supreme Court decisions concerning contraception, same-sex marriage, and same-sex intimacy, should all be similarly revisited because those decisions hinged on substantive due process. Thus, the Court held that the decision over the right to abortion should be returned to the individual states, many of which had criminalized abortion until Roe, and none had the right enshrined in their state constitution. The dissenting justices stated that Roe created a balance between state rights and the rights of pregnant people by allowing states to regulate abortion procedures and ban abortions after viability with exceptions to protect the life and health of the pregnant individual. By overturning Roe, they argued, the Court disregarded the importance of precedent, undermined the Court’s legitimacy, cast pregnant people as second-class citizens, and allowed states to “force a woman to give birth.”