142 S.Ct. 2228

Supreme Court of the United States.

Thomas E. DOBBS, State Health Officer of the Mississippi Department of Health, et al., Petitioners

v.

JACKSON WOMEN’S HEALTH ORGANIZATION, et al.

No. 19-1392

|

Argued December 1, 2021

|

Decided June 24, 2022

*2234Syllabus^*

Mississippi’s Gestational Age Act provides that “[e]xcept in a medical emergency or in the case of a severe fetal abnormality, a person shall not intentionally or knowingly perform ... or induce an abortion of an unborn human being if the probable gestational age of the unborn human being has been determined to be greater than fifteen (15) weeks.” Miss. Code Ann. § 41–41–191. Respondents—Jackson Women’s Health Organization, an abortion clinic, and one of its doctors—challenged the Act in Federal District Court, alleging that it violated this Court’s precedents establishing a constitutional right to abortion, in particular Roe v. Wade, 410 U.S. 113, 93 S.Ct. 705, 35 L.Ed.2d 147, and Planned Parenthood of Southeastern Pa. v. Casey, 505 U.S. 833, 112 S.Ct. 2791, 120 L.Ed.2d 674. The District Court granted summary judgment in favor of respondents and permanently enjoined enforcement of the Act, reasoning that Mississippi’s 15-week restriction on abortion violates this Court’s cases forbidding States to ban abortion pre-viability. The Fifth Circuit affirmed. Before this Court, petitioners defend the Act on the grounds that Roe and Casey were wrongly decided and that the Act is constitutional because it satisfies rational-basis review.

Held: The Constitution does not confer a right to abortion; Roe and Casey are overruled; and the authority to regulate abortion is returned to the people and their elected representatives. Pp. 2244 – 2285.

(a) The critical question is whether the Constitution, properly understood, confers a right to obtain an abortion. Casey’s controlling opinion skipped over that question and reaffirmed Roe solely on the basis of stare decisis. A proper application of stare decisis, however, requires an assessment of the strength of the grounds on which Roe was based. The Court therefore turns to the question that the Casey plurality did not consider. Pp. 2244 – 2258.

(1) First, the Court reviews the standard that the Court’s cases have used to determine whether the Fourteenth Amendment’s reference to “liberty” protects *2235 a particular right. The Constitution makes no express reference to a right to obtain an abortion, but several constitutional provisions have been offered as potential homes for an implicit constitutional right. Roe held that the abortion right is part of a right to privacy that springs from the First, Fourth, Fifth, Ninth, and Fourteenth Amendments. See 410 U.S. at 152–153, 93 S.Ct. 705. The Casey Court grounded its decision solely on the theory that the right to obtain an abortion is part of the “liberty” protected by the Fourteenth Amendment’s Due Process Clause. Others have suggested that support can be found in the Fourteenth Amendment’s Equal Protection Clause, but that theory is squarely foreclosed by the Court’s precedents, which establish that a State’s regulation of abortion is not a sex-based classification and is thus not subject to the heightened scrutiny that applies to such classifications. See Geduldig v. Aiello, 417 U.S. 484, 496, n. 20, 94 S.Ct. 2485, 41 L.Ed.2d 256; Bray v. Alexandria Women’s Health Clinic, 506 U.S. 263, 273–274, 113 S.Ct. 753, 122 L.Ed.2d 34. Rather, regulations and prohibitions of abortion are governed by the same standard of review as other health and safety measures. Pp. 2244 – 2246.

(2) Next, the Court examines whether the right to obtain an abortion is rooted in the Nation’s history and tradition and whether it is an essential component of “ordered liberty.” The Court finds that the right to abortion is not deeply rooted in the Nation’s history and tradition. The underlying theory on which Casey rested—that the Fourteenth Amendment’s Due Process Clause provides substantive, as well as procedural, protection for “liberty”—has long been controversial. The Court’s decisions have held that the Due Process Clause protects two categories of substantive rights—those rights guaranteed by the first eight Amendments to the Constitution and those rights deemed fundamental that are not mentioned anywhere in the Constitution. In deciding whether a right falls into either of these categories, the question is whether the right is “deeply rooted in [our] history and tradition” and whether it is essential to this Nation’s “scheme of ordered liberty.” Timbs v.Indiana, 586 U.S. ––––, ––––, 139 S.Ct. 682, 686, 203 L.Ed.2d 11 (internal quotation marks omitted). The term “liberty” alone provides little guidance. Thus, historical inquiries are essential whenever the Court is asked to recognize a new component of the “liberty” interest protected by the Due Process Clause. In interpreting what is meant by “liberty,” the Court must guard against the natural human tendency to confuse what the Fourteenth Amendment protects with the Court’s own ardent views about the liberty that Americans should enjoy. For this reason, the Court has been “reluctant” to recognize rights that are not mentioned in the Constitution. Collins v. Harker Heights, 503 U.S. 115, 125, 112 S.Ct. 1061, 117 L.Ed.2d 261.

Guided by the history and tradition that map the essential components of the Nation’s concept of ordered liberty, the Court finds the Fourteenth Amendment clearly does not protect the right to an abortion. Until the latter part of the 20th century, there was no support in American law for a constitutional right to obtain an abortion. No state constitutional provision had recognized such a right. Until a few years before Roe, no federal or state court had recognized such a right. Nor had any scholarly treatise. Indeed, abortion had long been a crime in every single State. At common law, abortion was criminal in at least some stages of pregnancy and was regarded as unlawful and could have very serious consequences at all stages. American law followed the common law until a wave of statutory restrictions in the 1800s *2236 expanded criminal liability for abortions. By the time the Fourteenth Amendment was adopted, three-quarters of the States had made abortion a crime at any stage of pregnancy. This consensus endured until the day Roe was decided. Roe either ignored or misstated this history, and Casey declined to reconsider Roe’s faulty historical analysis.

Respondents’ argument that this history does not matter flies in the face of the standard the Court has applied in determining whether an asserted right that is nowhere mentioned in the Constitution is nevertheless protected by the Fourteenth Amendment. The Solicitor General repeats Roe’s claim that it is “doubtful ... abortion was ever firmly established as a common-law crime even with respect to the destruction of a quick fetus,” 410 U.S. at 136, 93 S.Ct. 705, but the great common-law authorities—Bracton, Coke, Hale, and Blackstone—all wrote that a post-quickening abortion was a crime. Moreover, many authorities asserted that even a pre-quickening abortion was “unlawful” and that, as a result, an abortionist was guilty of murder if the woman died from the attempt. The Solicitor General suggests that history supports an abortion right because of the common law’s failure to criminalize abortion before quickening, but the insistence on quickening was not universal, see Mills v. Commonwealth, 13 Pa. 631, 633; State v. Slagle, 83 N.C. 630, 632, and regardless, the fact that many States in the late 18th and early 19th century did not criminalize pre-quickening abortions does not mean that anyone thought the States lacked the authority to do so.

Instead of seriously pressing the argument that the abortion right itself has deep roots, supporters of Roe and Casey contend that the abortion right is an integral part of a broader entrenched right. Roe termed this a right to privacy, 410 U.S. at 154, 93 S.Ct. 705, and Casey described it as the freedom to make “intimate and personal choices” that are “central to personal dignity and autonomy,” 505 U.S. at 851, 112 S.Ct. 2791. Ordered liberty sets limits and defines the boundary between competing interests. Roe and Casey each struck a particular balance between the interests of a woman who wants an abortion and the interests of what they termed “potential life.” Roe, 410 U.S. at 150, 93 S.Ct. 705; Casey, 505 U.S. at 852, 112 S.Ct. 2791. But the people of the various States may evaluate those interests differently. The Nation’s historical understanding of ordered liberty does not prevent the people’s elected representatives from deciding how abortion should be regulated. Pp. 2245 – 2257.

(3) Finally, the Court considers whether a right to obtain an abortion is part of a broader entrenched right that is supported by other precedents. The Court concludes the right to obtain an abortion cannot be justified as a component of such a right. Attempts to justify abortion through appeals to a broader right to autonomy and to define one’s “concept of existence” prove too much. Casey, 505 U.S. at 851, 112 S.Ct. 2791. Those criteria, at a high level of generality, could license fundamental rights to illicit drug use, prostitution, and the like. What sharply distinguishes the abortion right from the rights recognized in the cases on which Roe and Casey rely is something that both those decisions acknowledged: Abortion is different because it destroys what Roe termed “potential life” and what the law challenged in this case calls an “unborn human being.” None of the other decisions cited by Roe and Casey involved the critical moral question posed by abortion. Accordingly, those cases do not support the right to obtain an abortion, and the Court’s conclusion that the Constitution does not confer *2237 such a right does not undermine them in any way. Pp. 2256 – 2258.

[Stare decisis analysis omitted – nature of the court’s error, quality of the reasoning, workability, effect on other areas of law, and reliance interests.  This section of the majority opinion also addresses the potential impact of Dobbs on “other rights under the Due Process Clause.”  Justice Alito writes, “The Court emphasizes that this decision concerns the constitutional right to abortion and no other right. Nothing in this opinion should be understood to cast doubt on precedents that do not concern abortion.”] 

***

(d) Under the Court’s precedents, rational-basis review is the appropriate standard to apply when state abortion regulations undergo constitutional challenge. Given that procuring an abortion is not a fundamental constitutional right, it follows that the States may regulate abortion for legitimate reasons, and when such regulations are challenged under the Constitution, courts cannot “substitute their social and economic beliefs for the judgment of legislative bodies.” Ferguson, 372 U.S. at 729–730, 83 S.Ct. 1028. That applies even when the laws at issue concern matters of great social significance and moral substance. A law regulating abortion, like other health and welfare laws, is entitled to a “strong presumption of validity.” Heller v. Doe, 509 U.S. 312, 319, 113 S.Ct. 2637, 125 L.Ed.2d 257. It must be sustained if there is a rational basis on which the legislature could have thought that it would serve legitimate state interests. Id., at 320, 113 S.Ct. 2637.

Mississippi’s Gestational Age Act is supported by the Mississippi Legislature’s specific findings, which include the State’s asserted interest in “protecting the life of the unborn.” § 2(b)(i). These legitimate interests provide a rational basis for the Gestational Age Act, and it follows that respondents’ constitutional challenge must fail. Pp. 2283 – 2284.

(e) Abortion presents a profound moral question. The Constitution does not prohibit the citizens of each State from regulating or prohibiting abortion. Roe and Casey arrogated that authority. The Court overrules those decisions and returns that authority to the people and their elected representatives. Pp. 2284 – 2285.

945 F.3d 265, reversed and remanded.

ALITO, J., delivered the opinion of the Court, in which THOMAS, GORSUCH, KAVANAUGH, and BARRETT, JJ., joined. THOMAS, J., and KAVANAUGH, J., filed concurring opinions. ROBERTS, C. J., filed an opinion concurring in the judgment. BREYER, SOTOMAYOR, and KAGAN, JJ., filed a dissenting opinion.

***

Opinion

Justice ALITO delivered the opinion of the Court.

*2240 Abortion presents a profound moral issue on which Americans hold sharply conflicting views. Some believe fervently that a human person comes into being at conception and that abortion ends an innocent life. Others feel just as strongly that any regulation of abortion invades a woman’s right to control her own body and prevents women from achieving full equality. Still others in a third group think that abortion should be allowed under some but not all circumstances, and those within this group hold a variety of views about the particular restrictions that should be imposed.

For the first 185 years after the adoption of the Constitution, each State was permitted to address this issue in accordance with the views of its citizens. Then, in 1973, this Court decided Roe v. Wade, 410 U.S. 113, 93 S.Ct. 705, 35 L.Ed.2d 147. Even though the Constitution makes no mention of abortion, the Court held that it confers a broad right to obtain one. It did not claim that American law or the common law had ever recognized such a right, and its survey of history ranged from the constitutionally irrelevant (e.g., its discussion of abortion in antiquity) to the plainly incorrect (e.g., its assertion that abortion was probably never a crime under the common law). After cataloging a wealth of other information having no bearing on the meaning of the Constitution, the opinion concluded with a numbered set of rules much like those that might be found in a statute enacted by a legislature.

*2241 Under this scheme, each trimester of pregnancy was regulated differently, but the most critical line was drawn at roughly the end of the second trimester, which, at the time, corresponded to the point at which a fetus was thought to achieve “viability,” i.e., the ability to survive outside the womb. Although the Court acknowledged that States had a legitimate interest in protecting “potential life,”¹ it found that this interest could not justify any restriction on pre-viability abortions. The Court did not explain the basis for this line, and even abortion supporters have found it hard to defend Roe’s reasoning. One prominent constitutional scholar wrote that he “would vote for a statute very much like the one the Court end[ed] up drafting” if he were “a legislator,” but his assessment of Roe was memorable and brutal: Roe was “not constitutional law” at all and gave “almost no sense of an obligation to try to be.”²

At the time of Roe, 30 States still prohibited abortion at all stages. In the years prior to that decision, about a third of the States had liberalized their laws, but Roe abruptly ended that political process. It imposed the same highly restrictive regime on the entire Nation, and it effectively struck down the abortion laws of every single State.³ As Justice Byron White aptly put it in his dissent, the decision represented the “exercise of raw judicial power,” 410 U.S. 179, 222, 93 S.Ct. 762, 35 L.Ed.2d 147 (1973), and it sparked a national controversy that has embittered our political culture for a half century.⁴

Eventually, in Planned Parenthood of Southeastern Pa. v. Casey, 505 U.S. 833, 112 S.Ct. 2791, 120 L.Ed.2d 674 (1992), the Court revisited Roe, but the Members of the Court split three ways. Two Justices expressed no desire to change Roe in any way.⁵ Four others wanted to overrule the decision in its entirety.⁶ And the three remaining Justices, who jointly signed the controlling opinion, took a third position.⁷ Their opinion did not endorse Roe’s reasoning, and it even hinted that one or more of its authors might have “reservations” about whether the Constitution protects a right to abortion.⁸ But the opinion concluded that stare decisis, which calls for prior decisions to be followed in most instances, required adherence to what it called Roe’s “central holding”—that a State may not constitutionally protect fetal life before “viability”—even if that holding was wrong.⁹ Anything less, the opinion claimed, would undermine respect for this Court and the rule of law.

*2242 Paradoxically, the judgment in Casey did a fair amount of overruling. Several important abortion decisions were overruled in toto, and Roe itself was overruled in part.¹⁰Casey threw out Roe’s trimester scheme and substituted a new rule of uncertain origin under which States were forbidden to adopt any regulation that imposed an “undue burden” on a woman’s right to have an abortion.¹¹ The decision provided no clear guidance about the difference between a “due” and an “undue” burden. But the three Justices who authored the controlling opinion “call[ed] the contending sides of a national controversy to end their national division” by treating the Court’s decision as the final settlement of the question of the constitutional right to abortion.¹²

As has become increasingly apparent in the intervening years, Casey did not achieve that goal. Americans continue to hold passionate and widely divergent views on abortion, and state legislatures have acted accordingly. Some have recently enacted laws allowing abortion, with few restrictions, at all stages of pregnancy. Others have tightly restricted abortion beginning well before viability. And in this case, 26 States have expressly asked this Court to overrule Roe and Casey and allow the States to regulate or prohibit pre-viability abortions.

Before us now is one such state law. The State of Mississippi asks us to uphold the constitutionality of a law that generally prohibits an abortion after the 15th week of pregnancy—several weeks before the point at which a fetus is now regarded as “viable” outside the womb. In defending this law, the State’s primary argument is that we should reconsider and overrule Roe and Casey and once again allow each State to regulate abortion as its citizens wish. On the other side, respondents and the Solicitor General ask us to reaffirm Roe and Casey, and they contend that the Mississippi law cannot stand if we do so. Allowing Mississippi to prohibit abortions after 15 weeks of pregnancy, they argue, “would be no different than overruling Casey and Roe entirely.” Brief for Respondents 43. They contend that “no half-measures” are available and that we must either reaffirm or overrule Roe and Casey. Brief for Respondents 50.

We hold that Roe and Casey must be overruled. The Constitution makes no reference to abortion, and no such right is implicitly protected by any constitutional provision, including the one on which the defenders of Roe and Casey now chiefly rely—the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. That provision has been held to guarantee some rights that are not mentioned in the Constitution, but any such right must be “deeply rooted in this Nation’s history and tradition” and “implicit in the concept of ordered liberty.” Washington v. Glucksberg, 521 U.S. 702, 721, 117 S.Ct. 2258, 138 L.Ed.2d 772 (1997) (internal quotation marks omitted).

The right to abortion does not fall within this category. Until the latter part of the 20th century, such a right was entirely unknown in American law. Indeed, when the Fourteenth Amendment was adopted, three quarters of the States made abortion *2243 a crime at all stages of pregnancy. The abortion right is also critically different from any other right that this Court has held to fall within the Fourteenth Amendment’s protection of “liberty.” Roe’s defenders characterize the abortion right as similar to the rights recognized in past decisions involving matters such as intimate sexual relations, contraception, and marriage, but abortion is fundamentally different, as both Roe and Casey acknowledged, because it destroys what those decisions called “fetal life” and what the law now before us describes as an “unborn human being.”¹³

***

It is time to heed the Constitution and return the issue of abortion to the people’s elected representatives. “The permissibility of abortion, and the limitations, upon it, are to be resolved like most important questions in our democracy: by citizens trying to persuade one another and then voting.” Casey, 505 U.S. at 979, 112 S.Ct. 2791 (Scalia, J., concurring in judgment in part and dissenting in part). That is what the Constitution and the rule of law demand.

I

The law at issue in this case, Mississippi’s Gestational Age Act, see Miss. Code Ann. § 41–41–191 (2018), contains this central provision: “Except in a medical emergency or in the case of a severe fetal abnormality, a person shall not intentionally or knowingly perform ... or induce an abortion of an unborn human being if the probable gestational age of the unborn human being has been determined to be greater than fifteen (15) weeks.” § 4(b).¹⁴

To support this Act, the legislature made a series of factual findings. It began by noting that, at the time of enactment, only six countries besides the United States “permit[ted] nontherapeutic or elective abortion-on-demand after the twentieth week of gestation.”¹⁵ § 2(a). The legislature then found that at 5 or 6 weeks’ gestational age an “unborn human being’s heart begins beating”; at 8 weeks the “unborn human being begins to move about in the womb”; at 9 weeks “all basic physiological functions are present”; at 10 weeks “vital organs begin to function,” and “[h]air, fingernails, and toenails ... begin *2244 to form”; at 11 weeks “an unborn human being’s diaphragm is developing,” and he or she may “move about freely in the womb”; and at 12 weeks the “unborn human being” has “taken on ‘the human form’ in all relevant respects.” § 2(b)(i) (quoting Gonzales v. Carhart, 550 U.S. 124, 160, 127 S.Ct. 1610, 167 L.Ed.2d 480 (2007)). It found that most abortions after 15 weeks employ “dilation and evacuation procedures which involve the use of surgical instruments to crush and tear the unborn child,” and it concluded that the “intentional commitment of such acts for nontherapeutic or elective reasons is a barbaric practice, dangerous for the maternal patient, and demeaning to the medical profession.” § 2(b)(i)(8).

Respondents are an abortion clinic, Jackson Women’s Health Organization, and one of its doctors. On the day the Gestational Age Act was enacted, respondents filed suit in Federal District Court against various Mississippi officials, alleging that the Act violated this Court’s precedents establishing a constitutional right to abortion. The District Court granted summary judgment in favor of respondents and permanently enjoined enforcement of the Act, reasoning that “viability marks the earliest point at which the State’s interest in fetal life is constitutionally adequate to justify a legislative ban on nontherapeutic abortions” and that 15 weeks’ gestational age is “prior to viability.” Jackson Women’s Health Org. v. Currier, 349 F.Supp.3d 536, 539–540 (S.D. Miss. 2019) (internal quotation marks omitted). The Fifth Circuit affirmed. 945 F.3d 265 (2019).

We granted certiorari, 593 U.S. ––––, 141 S.Ct. 2619, 209 L.Ed.2d 748 (2021), to resolve the question whether “all pre-viability prohibitions on elective abortions are unconstitutional,” Pet. for Cert. i. Petitioners’ primary defense of the Mississippi Gestational Age Act is that Roe and Casey were wrongly decided and that “the Act is constitutional because it satisfies rational-basis review.” Brief for Petitioners 49. Respondents answer that allowing Mississippi to ban pre-viability abortions “would be no different than overruling Casey and Roe entirely.” Brief for Respondents 43. They tell us that “no half-measures” are available: We must either reaffirm or overrule Roe and Casey. Brief for Respondents 50.

II

We begin by considering the critical question whether the Constitution, properly understood, confers a right to obtain an abortion...We…address that question in three steps. First, we explain the standard that our cases have used in determining whether the Fourteenth Amendment’s reference to “liberty” protects a particular right. Second, we examine whether the right at issue in this case is rooted in our Nation’s history and tradition and whether it is an essential component of what we have described as “ordered liberty.” Finally, we consider whether a right to obtain an abortion is part of a broader entrenched right that is supported by other precedents.

A

1

Constitutional analysis must begin with “the language of the instrument,” *2245Gibbons v. Ogden, 9 Wheat. 1, 186–189, 6 L.Ed. 23 (1824), which offers a “fixed standard” for ascertaining what our founding document means, 1 J. Story, Commentaries on the Constitution of the United States § 399, p. 383 (1833). The Constitution makes no express reference to a right to obtain an abortion, and therefore those who claim that it protects such a right must show that the right is somehow implicit in the constitutional text.

Roe, however, was remarkably loose in its treatment of the constitutional text. It held that the abortion right, which is not mentioned in the Constitution, is part of a right to privacy, which is also not mentioned. See 410 U.S. at 152–153, 93 S.Ct. 705. And that privacy right, Roe observed, had been found to spring from no fewer than five different constitutional provisions—the First, Fourth, Fifth, Ninth, and Fourteenth Amendments. Id., at 152, 93 S.Ct. 705.

The Court’s discussion left open at least three ways in which some combination of these provisions could protect the abortion right. One possibility was that the right was “founded ... in the Ninth Amendment’s reservation of rights to the people.” Id., at 153, 93 S.Ct. 705. Another was that the right was rooted in the First, Fourth, or Fifth Amendment, or in some combination of those provisions, and that this right had been “incorporated” into the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment just as many other Bill of Rights provisions had by then been incorporated. Ibid; see also McDonald v. Chicago, 561 U.S. 742, 763–766, 130 S.Ct. 3020, 177 L.Ed.2d 894 (2010) (majority opinion) (discussing incorporation). And a third path was that the First, Fourth, and Fifth Amendments played no role and that the right was simply a component of the “liberty” protected by the Fourteenth Amendment’s Due Process Clause. Roe, 410 U.S. at 153, 93 S.Ct. 705. Roe expressed the “feel[ing]” that the Fourteenth Amendment was the provision that did the work, but its message seemed to be that the abortion right could be found somewhere in the Constitution and that specifying its exact location was not of paramount importance.¹⁶ The Casey Court…grounded its decision solely on the theory that the right to obtain an abortion is part of the “liberty” protected by the Fourteenth Amendment’s Due Process Clause.***

2

The underlying theory on which [the] argument… that the Fourteenth Amendment’s Due Process Clause provides substantive, as well as procedural, protection for “liberty”[rests] —has long been controversial. But our decisions have held that the Due Process Clause protects two categories of substantive rights.

The first consists of rights guaranteed by the first eight Amendments. Those Amendments originally applied only to the Federal Government,…but this Court has held that the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment “incorporates” the great majority of those rights and thus makes them equally applicable to the States…The second category—which is the one in question here—comprises a select list of fundamental rights that are not mentioned anywhere in the Constitution.

In deciding whether a right falls into either of these categories, the Court has long asked whether the right is “deeply rooted in [our] history and tradition” and whether it is essential to our Nation’s “scheme of ordered liberty.” …And in conducting this inquiry, we have engaged in a careful analysis of the history of the right at issue.

[Alito discusses Justice Ginsburg’s opinion for the Court in Timbs and Justice –‘s opinion in McDonald as examples of proper Fourteenth Amendment due process [/and incorporation?] analysis where the rights involved are specifically enumerated in the Bill of Rights – first category, supra.] Regarding the second category of cases, Alito contends “it would be anomalous if similar historical support were not required when a putative right is not mentioned anywhere in the Constitution..[A] fundamental right must be “objectively, deeply rooted in this Nation’s history and tradition,” id., at 720–721, 117 S.Ct. 2258.

Historical inquiries of this nature are essential whenever we are asked to recognize a new component of the “liberty” protected by the Due Process Clause because the term “liberty” alone provides little guidance… ²¹

In interpreting what is meant by the Fourteenth Amendment’s reference to “liberty,” we must guard against the natural human tendency to confuse what that Amendment protects with our own ardent views about the liberty that Americans should enjoy. That is why the Court has long been “reluctant” to recognize rights that are not mentioned in the Constitution…Substantive due process has at times been a treacherous field for this Court,”and it has sometimes led the Court to usurp authority that the Constitution entrusts to the people’s elected representatives…

On occasion, when the Court has ignored the “[a]ppropriate limits” imposed by “ ‘respect for the teachings of history,’ ” Moore, 431 U.S. at 503, 97 S.Ct. 1932 (plurality opinion), it has fallen into the freewheeling judicial policymaking that characterized discredited decisions such as Lochner v. New York, 198 U.S. 45, 25 S.Ct. 539, 49 L.Ed. 937 (1905). The Court must not fall prey to such an unprincipled approach. Instead, guided by the history and tradition that map the essential components of our Nation’s concept of ordered liberty, we must ask what the Fourteenth Amendment means by the term “liberty.” When we engage in that inquiry in the present case, the clear answer is that the Fourteenth Amendment does not protect the right to an abortion.²²

B

1

Until the latter part of the 20th century, there was no support in American law for a constitutional right to obtain an abortion. No state constitutional provision had recognized such a right. Until a few years before Roe was handed down, no federal or state court had recognized such a right. Nor had any scholarly treatise of which we are aware. And although law review articles are not reticent about advocating new rights, the earliest article proposing a constitutional right to abortion that has come to our attention was published only a few years before Roe.²³

Not only was there no support for such a constitutional right until shortly before Roe, but abortion had long been a crime in every single State. At common law, abortion was criminal in at least some stages of pregnancy and was regarded as unlawful and could have very serious consequences at all stages. American law followed the common law until a wave of statutory restrictions in the 1800s expanded criminal liability for abortions. By the time of the adoption of the Fourteenth Amendment, three-quarters of the States had made abortion a crime at any stage of pregnancy, *2249 and the remaining States would soon follow.

Roe either ignored or misstated this history, and Casey declined to reconsider Roe’s faulty historical analysis. It is therefore important to set the record straight.

[Section 2 historical accounting of regulation of abortion/pregnancy based on “quickening” which tracks or is reflected in Roe’s trimester framework and viability line; cites to Blackstone, Bracton, Coke, Hale, etc. to support) *2251 In sum, although common-law authorities differed on the severity of punishment for abortions committed at different points in pregnancy, none endorsed the practice. Moreover, we are aware of no common-law case or authority, and the parties have not pointed to any, that remotely suggests a positive right to procure an abortion at any stage of pregnancy…

d

The inescapable conclusion is that a right to abortion is not deeply rooted in the Nation’s history and traditions. On the contrary, an unbroken tradition of prohibiting abortion on pain of criminal punishment *2254 persisted from the earliest days of the common law until 1973. The Court in Roe could have said of abortion exactly what Glucksberg said of assisted suicide: “Attitudes toward [abortion] have changed since Bracton, but our laws have consistently condemned, and continue to prohibit, [that practice].” 521 U.S., at 719, 117 S.Ct. 2258.

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*2257 C

1

Instead of seriously pressing the argument that the abortion right itself has deep roots, supporters of Roe and Casey contend that the abortion right is an integral part of a broader entrenched right. Roe termed this a right to privacy, 410 U.S. at 154, 93 S.Ct. 705, and Casey described it as the freedom to make “intimate and personal choices” that are “central to personal dignity and autonomy,” 505 U.S. at 851, 112 S.Ct. 2791. Casey elaborated: “At the heart of liberty is the right to define one’s own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life.” Ibid.

The Court did not claim that this broadly framed right is absolute, and no such claim would be plausible. While individuals are certainly free to think and to say what they wish about “existence,” “meaning,” the “universe,” and “the mystery of human life,” they are not always free to act in accordance with those thoughts. License to act on the basis of such beliefs may correspond to one of the many understandings of “liberty,” but it is certainly not “ordered liberty.”

Ordered liberty sets limits and defines the boundary between competing interests. Roe and Casey each struck a particular balance between the interests of a woman who wants an abortion and the interests of what they termed “potential life.” Roe, 410 U.S. at 150, 93 S.Ct. 705 (emphasis deleted); Casey, 505 U.S. at 852, 112 S.Ct. 2791. But the people of the various States may evaluate those interests differently. In some States, voters may believe that the abortion right should be even more extensive than the right that Roe and Casey recognized. Voters in other States may wish to impose tight restrictions based on their belief that abortion destroys an “unborn human being.” Miss. Code Ann. § 41–41–191(4)(b). Our Nation’s historical understanding of ordered liberty does not prevent the people’s elected representatives from deciding how abortion should be regulated.

Nor does the right to obtain an abortion have a sound basis in precedent. Casey relied on cases involving the right to marry a person of a different race, Loving v. Virginia, 388 U.S. 1, 87 S.Ct. 1817, 18 L.Ed.2d 1010 (1967); the right to marry while in prison, Turner v. Safley, 482 U.S. 78, 107 S.Ct. 2254, 96 L.Ed.2d 64 (1987); the right to obtain contraceptives, Griswold v. Connecticut, 381 U.S. 479, 85 S.Ct. 1678, 14 L.Ed.2d 510 (1965), Eisenstadt v. Baird, 405 U.S. 438, 92 S.Ct. 1029, 31 L.Ed.2d 349 (1972), Carey v. Population Services Int’l, 431 U.S. 678, 97 S.Ct. 2010, 52 L.Ed.2d 675 (1977); the right to reside with relatives, Moore v. East Cleveland, 431 U.S. 494, 97 S.Ct. 1932, 52 L.Ed.2d 531 (1977); the right to make decisions about the education of one’s children, Pierce v. Society of Sisters, 268 U.S. 510, 45 S.Ct. 571, 69 L.Ed. 1070 (1925), Meyer v. Nebraska, 262 U.S. 390, 43 S.Ct. 625, 67 L.Ed. 1042 (1923); the right not to be sterilized without consent, Skinner v. Oklahoma ex rel. Williamson, 316 U.S. 535, 62 S.Ct. 1110, 86 L.Ed. 1655 (1942); and the right in certain circumstances not to undergo involuntary surgery, forced administration of drugs, or other substantially similar procedures, Winston v. Lee, 470 U.S. 753, 105 S.Ct. 1611, 84 L.Ed.2d 662 (1985), Washington v. Harper, 494 U.S. 210, 110 S.Ct. 1028, 108 L.Ed.2d 178 (1990), *2258Rochin v. California, 342 U.S. 165, 72 S.Ct. 205, 96 L.Ed. 183 (1952). Respondents and the Solicitor General also rely on post-Casey decisions like Lawrence v. Texas, 539 U.S. 558, 123 S.Ct. 2472, 156 L.Ed.2d 508 (2003) (right to engage in private, consensual sexual acts), and Obergefell v. Hodges, 576 U.S. 644, 135 S.Ct. 2584, 192 L.Ed.2d 609 (2015) (right to marry a person of the same sex). See Brief for Respondents 18; Brief for United States 23–24.

These attempts to justify abortion through appeals to a broader right to autonomy and to define one’s “concept of existence” prove too much. Casey, 505 U.S. at 851, 112 S.Ct. 2791. Those criteria, at a high level of generality, could license fundamental rights to illicit drug use, prostitution, and the like. See Compassion in Dying v. Washington, 85 F.3d 1440, 1444 (CA9 1996) (O’Scannlain, J., dissenting from denial of rehearing en banc). None of these rights has any claim to being deeply rooted in history. Id., at 1440, 1445.

What sharply distinguishes the abortion right from the rights recognized in the cases on which Roe and Casey rely is something that both those decisions acknowledged: Abortion destroys what those decisions call “potential life” and what the law at issue in this case regards as the life of an “unborn human being.” See Roe, 410 U.S. at 159, 93 S.Ct. 705 (abortion is “inherently different”); Casey, 505 U.S. at 852, 112 S.Ct. 2791 (abortion is “a unique act”). None of the other decisions cited by Roe and Casey involved the critical moral question posed by abortion. They are therefore inapposite. They do not support the right to obtain an abortion, and by the same token, our conclusion that the Constitution does not confer such a right does not undermine them in any way.

2

In drawing this critical distinction between the abortion right and other rights, it is not necessary to dispute Casey’s claim (which we accept for the sake of argument) that “the specific practices of States at the time of the adoption of the Fourteenth Amendment” do not “mar[k] the outer limits of the substantive sphere of liberty which the Fourteenth Amendment protects.” 505 U.S. at 848, 112 S.Ct. 2791. Abortion is nothing new. It has been addressed by lawmakers for centuries, and the fundamental moral question that it poses is ageless.

Defenders of Roe and Casey do not claim that any new scientific learning calls for a different answer to the underlying moral question, but they do contend that changes in society require the recognition of a constitutional right to obtain an abortion. Without the availability of abortion, they maintain, people will be inhibited from exercising their freedom to choose the types of relationships they desire, and women will be unable to compete with men in the workplace and in other endeavors.

Americans who believe that abortion should be restricted press countervailing arguments about modern developments. They note that attitudes about the pregnancy of unmarried women have changed drastically; that federal and state laws ban discrimination on the basis of pregnancy;⁴² that leave for pregnancy and childbirth are *2259 now guaranteed by law in many cases;⁴³ that the costs of medical care associated with pregnancy are covered by insurance or government assistance;⁴⁴ that States have increasingly adopted “safe haven” laws, which generally allow women to drop off babies anonymously;⁴⁵ and that a woman who puts her newborn up for adoption today has little reason to fear that the baby will not find a suitable home.⁴⁶ They also claim that many people now have a new appreciation of fetal life and that when prospective parents who want to have a child view a sonogram, they typically have no doubt that what they see is their daughter or son.

Both sides make important policy arguments, but supporters of Roe and Casey must show that this Court has the authority to weigh those arguments and decide how abortion may be regulated in the States. They have failed to make that showing, and we thus return the power to weigh those arguments to the people and their elected representatives.

D

1

The dissent is very candid that it cannot show that a constitutional right to abortion has any foundation, let alone a “ ‘deeply rooted’ ” one, “ ‘in this Nation’s history and tradition.’ ” Glucksberg, 521 U.S., at 721, 117 S.Ct. 2258; see post, at 2323 – 2324 (joint opinion of BREYER, SOTOMAYOR, and KAGAN, JJ.). ***We have held that the “established method of substantive-due-process analysis” requires that an unenumerated right be “ ‘deeply rooted in this Nation’s history and tradition’ ” before it can be recognized as a component of the “liberty” protected in the Due Process Clause. Glucksberg, 521 U.S., at 721, 117 S.Ct. 2258; cf. Timbs, 586 U.S., at ––––, 139 S.Ct., at 689-90. But…the dissent…fails to seriously engage with [this Court’s] important precedent—which it cannot possibly satisfy.[

The dissent attempts to obscure this failure by misrepresenting our application of Glucksberg. The dissent suggests that we have focused only on “the legal status of abortion in the 19th century,” post, at 2331, but our review of this Nation’s tradition extends well past that period. As explained, for more than a century after 1868—including “another half-century” after women gained the constitutional right to vote in 1920, see post, at 2324 – 2325; Amdt. 19—it was firmly established that laws prohibiting abortion like the Texas law at issue in Roe were permissible exercises of state regulatory authority. And today, another half century later, more than half of the States have asked us to overrule Roe and Casey. The dissent cannot establish that a right to abortion has ever been part of this Nation’s tradition.

2

Because the dissent cannot argue that the abortion right is rooted in this Nation’s history and tradition, it contends that the “constitutional tradition” is “not captured whole at a single moment,” and that its “meaning gains content from the long sweep of our history and from successive judicial precedents.” Post, at 2326 (internal quotation marks omitted). This vague formulation imposes no clear restraints on what Justice White called the “exercise of raw judicial power,” Roe, 410 U.S. at 222, 93 S.Ct. 762 (dissenting opinion), and while the dissent claims that its standard “does not mean anything goes,” post, at 2326, any real restraints are hard to discern.

***

*2261 [W]ithout support in history or relevant precedent, Roe’s reasoning cannot be defended even under the dissent’s proposed test, and the dissent is forced to rely solely on the fact that a constitutional right to abortion was recognized in Roe and later decisions that accepted Roe’s interpretation. Under the doctrine of stare decisis, those precedents are entitled to careful and respectful consideration…But as the Court has reiterated time and time again, adherence to precedent is not “ ‘an inexorable command.’ ” Kimble v. Marvel Entertainment, LLC, 576 U.S. 446, 455, 135 S.Ct. 2401, 192 L.Ed.2d 463 (2015). There are occasions when past decisions should be overruled, and…this is one of them.

3

The most striking feature of the dissent is the absence of any serious discussion of the legitimacy of the States’ interest in protecting fetal life. This is evident in the analogy that the dissent draws between the abortion right and the rights recognized in Griswold (contraception), Eisenstadt (same), Lawrence (sexual conduct with member of the same sex), and Obergefell (same-sex marriage)…[T]he dissent’s analogy is objectionable…The exercise of the rights at issue in Griswold, Eisenstadt, Lawrence, and Obergefell does not destroy a “potential life,” but an abortion has that effect….

The dissent has much to say about the effects of pregnancy on women, the burdens of motherhood, and the difficulties faced by poor women. These are important concerns. However, the dissent evinces no similar regard for a State’s interest in protecting prenatal life. The dissent repeatedly praises the “balance,” post, at 2317 – 2318, 2319 – 2320, 2320 – 2321, 2322, 2323, that the viability line strikes between a woman’s liberty interest and the State’s interest in prenatal life. But…the viability line makes no sense. It was not adequately justified in Roe, and the dissent does not even try to defend it today...

Our opinion is not based on any view about if and when prenatal life is entitled to any of the rights enjoyed after birth. The dissent, by contrast, would impose on the people a particular theory about when the rights of personhood begin. According to the dissent, the Constitution requires the States to regard a fetus as lacking even the most basic human right—to live—at least until an arbitrary point in a pregnancy has passed. Nothing in the Constitution or in our Nation’s legal traditions authorizes the Court to adopt that “ ‘theory of life.’ ” Post, at 2320 – 2321.

III

[stare decisis omitted; separation of powers; federalism/states’ rights/police power]

1

a

E

Reliance interests. We last consider whether overruling Roe and Casey will upend substantial reliance interests. See Ramos, 590 U.S., at ––––, 140 S.Ct., at 1418-1419 (opinion of KAVANAUGH, J.); Janus, 585 U.S., at –––– – ––––, 138 S.Ct., at 2478-2479.

1

Traditional reliance interests arise “where advance planning of great precision is most obviously a necessity.” Casey, 505 U.S. at 856, 112 S.Ct. 2791 (joint opinion); see also Payne, 501 U.S. at 828, 111 S.Ct. 2597. In Casey, the controlling opinion conceded that those traditional reliance interests were not implicated because getting an abortion is generally “unplanned activity,” and “reproductive planning could take virtually immediate account of any sudden restoration of state authority to ban abortions.” 505 U.S. at 856, 112 S.Ct. 2791. For these reasons, we agree with the Casey plurality that conventional, concrete reliance interests are not present here.

2

Unable to find reliance in the conventional sense, the controlling opinion in Casey perceived a more intangible form of reliance. It wrote that “people [had] organized intimate relationships and made choices that define their views of themselves and their places in society ... in reliance on the availability of abortion in the event that contraception should fail” and that “[t]he ability of women to participate equally in the economic and social life of the Nation has been facilitated by their ability to control their reproductive lives.” Ibid. But this Court is ill-equipped to assess “generalized assertions about the national psyche.” Id., at 957, 112 S.Ct. 2791 (opinion of Rehnquist, C. J.). Casey’s notion of reliance thus finds little support in our cases, which instead emphasize very concrete reliance interests, like those that develop in “cases involving property and contract rights.” Payne, 501 U.S. at 828, 111 S.Ct. 2597.

*2277 When a concrete reliance interest is asserted, courts are equipped to evaluate the claim, but assessing the novel and intangible form of reliance endorsed by the Casey plurality is another matter. That form of reliance depends on an empirical question that is hard for anyone—and in particular, for a court—to assess, namely, the effect of the abortion right on society and in particular on the lives of women. The contending sides in this case make impassioned and conflicting arguments about the effects of the abortion right on the lives of women. Compare Brief for Petitioners 34–36; Brief for Women Scholars et al. as Amici Curiae 13–20, 29–41, with Brief for Respondents 36–41; Brief for National Women’s Law Center et al. as Amici Curiae 15–32. The contending sides also make conflicting arguments about the status of the fetus. This Court has neither the authority nor the expertise to adjudicate those disputes, and the Casey plurality’s speculations and weighing of the relative importance of the fetus and mother represent a departure from the “original constitutional proposition” that “courts do not substitute their social and economic beliefs for the judgment of legislative bodies.” Ferguson v. Skrupa, 372 U.S. 726, 729–730, 83 S.Ct. 1028, 10 L.Ed.2d 93 (1963).

Our decision returns the issue of abortion to those legislative bodies, and it allows women on both sides of the abortion issue to seek to affect the legislative process by influencing public opinion, lobbying legislators, voting, and running for office. Women are not without electoral or political power. It is noteworthy that the percentage of women who register to vote and cast ballots is consistently higher than the percentage of men who do so.⁶⁶ In the last election in November 2020, women, who make up around 51.5 percent of the population of Mississippi,⁶⁷ constituted 55.5 percent of the voters who cast ballots.⁶⁸

3

Unable to show concrete reliance on Roe and Casey themselves, the Solicitor General suggests that overruling those decisions would “threaten the Court’s precedents holding that the Due Process Clause protects other rights.” Brief for United States 26 (citing Obergefell, 576 U.S. 644, 135 S.Ct. 2584, 192 L.Ed.2d 609; Lawrence, 539 U.S. 558, 123 S.Ct. 2472, 156 L.Ed.2d 508; Griswold, 381 U.S. 479, 85 S.Ct. 1678, 14 L.Ed.2d 510). That is not correct for reasons we have already discussed. As even the Casey plurality recognized, “[a]bortion is a unique act” because it terminates “life or potential life.” 505 U.S. at 852, 112 S.Ct. 2791; see also Roe, 410 U.S. at 159, 93 S.Ct. 705 (abortion is “inherently different from marital intimacy,” “marriage,” or “procreation”). And to ensure that our decision is not misunderstood or mischaracterized, we emphasize that our decision concerns the constitutional right to abortion and no other right. Nothing in this opinion should be understood to cast *2278 doubt on precedents that do not concern abortion.

IV

Belief in or effect on belief in rule of law section omitted

***

We do not pretend to know how our political system or society will respond to today’s decision overruling Roe and Casey. And even if we could foresee what will happen, we would have no authority to let that knowledge influence our decision. We can only do our job, which is to interpret the law, apply longstanding principles of stare decisis, and decide this case accordingly.

We therefore hold that the Constitution does not confer a right to abortion. Roe and Casey must be overruled, and the authority to regulate abortion must be returned to the people and their elected representatives.

***

3

Finally, the dissent suggests that our decision calls into question Griswold, Eisenstadt, Lawrence, and Obergefell. Post, at 2318 – 2319, 2332, n. 8. But we have stated unequivocally that “[n]othing in this opinion should be understood to cast doubt on precedents that do not concern abortion.” Supra, at 2277 – 2278. We have also explained why that is so: rights regarding contraception and same-sex relationships are inherently different from the right to abortion because the latter (as we have stressed) uniquely involves what Roe and Casey termed “potential life.” Roe, 410 U.S. at 150, 93 S.Ct. 705 (emphasis deleted); Casey, 505 U.S. at 852, 112 S.Ct. 2791. Therefore, a right to abortion cannot be justified by a purported analogy to the rights recognized in those other cases or by “appeals to a broader right to autonomy.” Supra, at 2258. It is hard to see how we could be clearer. Moreover, even putting aside that these cases are distinguishable, *2281 there is a further point that the dissent ignores: Each precedent is subject to its own stare decisis analysis, and the factors that our doctrine instructs us to consider like reliance and workability are different for these cases than for our abortion jurisprudence.

B

1

We now turn to the concurrence in the judgment, which reproves us for deciding whether Roe and Casey should be retained or overruled. That opinion (which for convenience we will call simply “the concurrence”) recommends a “more measured course,” which it defends based on what it claims is “a straightforward stare decisis analysis.” Post, at 2310 (opinion of ROBERTS, C. J.). The concurrence would “leave for another day whether to reject any right to an abortion at all,” post, at 2314, and would hold only that if the Constitution protects any such right, the right ends once women have had “a reasonable opportunity” to obtain an abortion, post, at 2310. The concurrence does not specify what period of time is sufficient to provide such an opportunity, but it would hold that 15 weeks, the period allowed under Mississippi’s law, is enough—at least “absent rare circumstances.” Post, at 2310 – 2311, 2315 – 2316.

***

[T]he concurrence’s quest for a middle way would only put off the day when we would be forced to confront the question we now decide. The turmoil wrought by Roe and Casey would be prolonged. It is far better—for this Court and the country—to face up to the real issue without further delay…

***

*2285 The judgment of the Fifth Circuit is reversed, and the case is remanded for further proceedings consistent with this opinion.

It is so ordered.

Justice THOMAS, concurring.

I join the opinion of the Court because it correctly holds that there is no constitutional right to abortion. Respondents invoke one source for that right: the Fourteenth Amendment’s guarantee that no State shall “deprive any person of life, liberty, or property without due process of law.” The Court well explains why, under our substantive due process precedents, the purported right to abortion is not a form of “liberty” protected by the Due Process Clause. Such a right is neither “deeply rooted in this Nation’s history and tradition” nor “implicit in the concept of ordered liberty.” Washingtonv.Glucksberg, 521 U.S. 702, 721, 117 S.Ct. 2258, 138 L.Ed.2d 772 (1997) (internal quotation marks omitted). “[T]he idea that the Framers of the Fourteenth Amendment understood the Due Process Clause to protect a right to abortion is farcical.” June Medical Services L. L.C.v.Russo, 591 U.S. ––––, ––––, 140 S.Ct. 2103, 2151, 207 L.Ed.2d 566 (2020) (THOMAS, J., dissenting).

I write separately to emphasize a second, more fundamental reason why there is no abortion guarantee lurking in the Due Process Clause. Considerable historical evidence indicates that “due process of law” merely required executive and judicial actors to comply with legislative enactments and the common law when depriving a person of life, liberty, or property. See, e.g.,Johnson v. United States, 576 U.S. 591, 623, 135 S.Ct. 2551, 192 L.Ed.2d 569 (2015) (THOMAS, J., concurring in judgment). Other sources, by contrast, suggest that “due process of law” prohibited legislatures “from authorizing the deprivation of a person’s life, liberty, or property without providing him the customary procedures to which freemen were entitled by the old law of England.” United Statesv.Vaello Madero, 596 U.S. ––––, ––––, 142 S.Ct. 1539, 1545, ––– L.Ed.2d –––– (2022) (THOMAS, J., concurring) (internal quotation*2301 marks omitted). Either way, the Due Process Clause at most guarantees process. It does not, as the Court’s substantive due process cases suppose, “forbi[d] the government to infringe certain ‘fundamental’ liberty interests at all, no matter what process is provided.” Reno v. Flores, 507 U.S. 292, 302, 113 S.Ct. 1439, 123 L.Ed.2d 1 (1993); see also, e.g.,Collins v. Harker Heights, 503 U.S. 115, 125, 112 S.Ct. 1061, 117 L.Ed.2d 261 (1992).

As I have previously explained, “substantive due process” is an oxymoron that “lack[s] any basis in the Constitution.” Johnson, 576 U.S. at 607–608, 135 S.Ct. 2551 (opinion of THOMAS, J.); see also, e.g.,Vaello Madero, 596 U.S., at ––––, 142 S.Ct., at 1545 (THOMAS, J., concurring) (“[T]ext and history provide little support for modern substantive due process doctrine”). “The notion that a constitutional provision that guarantees only ‘process’ before a person is deprived of life, liberty, or property could define the substance of those rights strains credulity for even the most casual user of words.” McDonald v. Chicago, 561 U.S. 742, 811, 130 S.Ct. 3020, 177 L.Ed.2d 894 (2010) (THOMAS, J., concurring in part and concurring in judgment); see also United States v. Carlton, 512 U.S. 26, 40, 114 S.Ct. 2018, 129 L.Ed.2d 22 (1994) (Scalia, J., concurring in judgment). The resolution of this case is thus straightforward. Because the Due Process Clause does not secure any substantive rights, it does not secure a right to abortion.

The Court today declines to disturb substantive due process jurisprudence generally or the doctrine’s application in other, specific contexts. Cases like Griswold v. Connecticut, 381 U.S. 479, 85 S.Ct. 1678, 14 L.Ed.2d 510 (1965) (right of married persons to obtain contraceptives)^*; Lawrence v. Texas, 539 U.S. 558, 123 S.Ct. 2472, 156 L.Ed.2d 508 (2003) (right to engage in private, consensual sexual acts); and Obergefell v. Hodges, 576 U.S. 644, 135 S.Ct. 2584, 192 L.Ed.2d 609 (2015) (right to same-sex marriage), are not at issue. The Court’s abortion cases are unique, see ante, at 2257 – 2258, 2277 – 2278, 2280 – 2281, and no party has asked us to decide “whether our entire Fourteenth Amendment jurisprudence must be preserved or revised,” McDonald, 561 U.S. at 813, 130 S.Ct. 3020 (opinion of THOMAS, J.). Thus, I agree that “[n]othing in [the Court’s] opinion should be understood to cast doubt on precedents that do not concern abortion.” Ante, at 2277 – 2278.

For that reason, in future cases, we should reconsider all of this Court’s substantive due process precedents, including Griswold, Lawrence, and Obergefell. Because any substantive due process decision is “demonstrably erroneous,” Ramos v.Louisiana, 590 U.S. ––––, ––––, 140 S.Ct. 1390, 1424, 206 L.Ed.2d 583 (2020) (THOMAS, J., concurring in judgment), we have a duty to “correct the error” established in those precedents, Gamble v. United States, 587 U.S. ––––, ––––, 139 S.Ct. 1960, 1984-1985, 204 L.Ed.2d 322 (2019) (THOMAS, J., concurring). After overruling these demonstrably erroneous decisions, the question would remain whether other constitutional provisions *2302 guarantee the myriad rights that our substantive due process cases have generated. For example, we could consider whether any of the rights announced in this Court’s substantive due process cases are “privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States” protected by the Fourteenth Amendment. Amdt. 14, § 1; see McDonald, 561 U.S. at 806, 130 S.Ct. 3020 (opinion of THOMAS, J.). To answer that question, we would need to decide important antecedent questions, including whether the Privileges or Immunities Clause protects any rights that are not enumerated in the Constitution and, if so, how to identify those rights. See id., at 854, 130 S.Ct. 3020. That said, even if the Clause does protect unenumerated rights, the Court conclusively demonstrates that abortion is not one of them under any plausible interpretive approach. See ante, at 2248, n. 22.

Moreover, apart from being a demonstrably incorrect reading of the Due Process Clause, the “legal fiction” of substantive due process is “particularly dangerous.” McDonald, 561 U.S. at 811, 130 S.Ct. 3020 (opinion of THOMAS, J.); accord, Obergefell, 576 U.S. at 722, 135 S.Ct. 2584 (THOMAS, J., dissenting). At least three dangers favor jettisoning the doctrine entirely.

First, “substantive due process exalts judges at the expense of the People from whom they derive their authority.” Ibid. Because the Due Process Clause “speaks only to ‘process,’ the Court has long struggled to define what substantive rights it protects.” Timbs v.Indiana, 586 U.S. ––––, ––––, 139 S.Ct. 682, 692, 203 L.Ed.2d 11 (2019) (THOMAS, J., concurring in judgment) (internal quotation marks omitted). In practice, the Court’s approach for identifying those “fundamental” rights “unquestionably involves policymaking rather than neutral legal analysis.” Carlton, 512 U.S. at 41–42, 114 S.Ct. 2018 (opinion of Scalia, J.); see also McDonald, 561 U.S. at 812, 130 S.Ct. 3020 (opinion of THOMAS, J.) (substantive due process is “a jurisprudence devoid of a guiding principle”). The Court divines new rights in line with “its own, extraconstitutional value preferences” and nullifies state laws that do not align with the judicially created guarantees. Thornburgh v. American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, 476 U.S. 747, 794, 106 S.Ct. 2169, 90 L.Ed.2d 779 (1986) (White, J., dissenting).

Nowhere is this exaltation of judicial policymaking clearer than this Court’s abortion jurisprudence. In Roe v. Wade, 410 U.S. 113, 93 S.Ct. 705, 35 L.Ed.2d 147 (1973), the Court divined a right to abortion because it “fe[lt]” that “the Fourteenth Amendment’s concept of personal liberty” included a “right of privacy” that “is broad enough to encompass a woman’s decision whether or not to terminate her pregnancy.” Id., at 153, 93 S.Ct. 705. In Planned Parenthood of Southeastern Pa. v. Casey, 505 U.S. 833, 112 S.Ct. 2791, 120 L.Ed.2d 674 (1992), the Court likewise identified an abortion guarantee in “the liberty protected by the Fourteenth Amendment,” but, rather than a “right of privacy,” it invoked an ethereal “right to define one’s own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life.” Id., at 851, 112 S.Ct. 2791. As the Court’s preferred manifestation of “liberty” changed, so, too, did the test used to protect it, as Roe’s author lamented. See Casey, 505 U.S. at 930, 112 S.Ct. 2791 (Blackmun, J., concurring in part and dissenting in part) (“[T]he Roe framework is far more administrable, and far less manipulable, than the ‘undue burden’ standard”).

Now, in this case, the nature of the purported “liberty” supporting the abortion right has shifted yet again. Respondents *2303 and the United States propose no fewer than three different interests that supposedly spring from the Due Process Clause. They include “bodily integrity,” “personal autonomy in matters of family, medical care, and faith,” Brief for Respondents 21, and “women’s equal citizenship,” Brief for United States as Amicus Curiae 24. That 50 years have passed since Roe and abortion advocates still cannot coherently articulate the right (or rights) at stake proves the obvious: The right to abortion is ultimately a policy goal in desperate search of a constitutional justification.

Second, substantive due process distorts other areas of constitutional law. For example, once this Court identifies a “fundamental” right for one class of individuals, it invokes the Equal Protection Clause to demand exacting scrutiny of statutes that deny the right to others. See, e.g.,Eisenstadt v. Baird, 405 U.S. 438, 453–454, 92 S.Ct. 1029, 31 L.Ed.2d 349 (1972) (relying on Griswold to invalidate a state statute prohibiting distribution of contraceptives to unmarried persons). Statutory classifications implicating certain “nonfundamental” rights, meanwhile, receive only cursory review. See, e.g.,Armour v. Indianapolis, 566 U.S. 673, 680, 132 S.Ct. 2073, 182 L.Ed.2d 998 (2012). Similarly, this Court deems unconstitutionally “vague” or “overbroad” those laws that impinge on its preferred rights, while letting slide those laws that implicate supposedly lesser values. See, e.g., Johnson, 576 U.S. at 618–621, 135 S.Ct. 2551 (opinion of THOMAS, J.); United States v.Sineneng-Smith, 590 U.S. ––––, –––– – ––––, 140 S.Ct. 1575, 1584-1585, 206 L.Ed.2d 866 (2020) (THOMAS, J., concurring). “In fact, our vagueness doctrine served as the basis for the first draft of the majority opinion in Roe v.Wade,” and it since has been “deployed ... to nullify even mild regulations of the abortion industry.” Johnson, 576 U.S. at 620–621, 135 S.Ct. 2551 (opinion of THOMAS, J.). Therefore, regardless of the doctrinal context, the Court often “demand[s] extra justifications for encroachments” on “preferred rights” while “relax[ing] purportedly higher standards of review for lesspreferred rights.” Whole Woman’s Health v. Hellerstedt, 579 U.S. 582, 640–642, 136 S.Ct. 2292, 195 L.Ed.2d 665 (2016) (THOMAS, J., dissenting). Substantive due process is the core inspiration for many of the Court’s constitutionally unmoored policy judgments.

Third, substantive due process is often wielded to “disastrous ends.” Gamble, 587 U.S., at ––––, 139 S.Ct., at 1989 (THOMAS, J., concurring). For instance, in Dred Scott v. Sandford, 19 How. 393, 60 U.S. 393, 15 L.Ed. 691 (1857), the Court invoked a species of substantive due process to announce that Congress was powerless to emancipate slaves brought into the federal territories. See id., at 452. While Dred Scott “was overruled on the battlefields of the Civil War and by constitutional amendment after Appomattox,” Obergefell, 576 U.S. at 696, 135 S.Ct. 2584 (ROBERTS, C. J., dissenting), that overruling was “[p]urchased at the price of immeasurable human suffering,” Adarand Constructors, Inc. v.Peña, 515 U.S. 200, 240, 115 S.Ct. 2097, 132 L.Ed.2d 158 (1995) (THOMAS, J., concurring in part and concurring in judgment). Now today, the Court rightly overrules Roe and Casey—two of this Court’s “most notoriously incorrect” substantive due process decisions, Timbs, 586 U.S., at ––––, 139 S.Ct., at 686-687 (opinion of THOMAS, J.)—after more than 63 million abortions have been performed, see National Right to Life Committee, Abortion Statistics (Jan. 2022), https://www.nrlc.org/uploads/factsheets/FS01AbortionintheUS.pdf. The harm caused by *2304 this Court’s forays into substantive due process remains immeasurable.

* * *

Because the Court properly applies our substantive due process precedents to reject the fabrication of a constitutional right to abortion, and because this case does not present the opportunity to reject substantive due process entirely, I join the Court’s opinion. But, in future cases, we should “follow the text of the Constitution, which sets forth certain substantive rights that cannot be taken away, and adds, beyond that, a right to due process when life, liberty, or property is to be taken away.” Carlton, 512 U.S. at 42, 114 S.Ct. 2018 (opinion of Scalia, J.). Substantive due process conflicts with that textual command and has harmed our country in many ways. Accordingly, we should eliminate it from our jurisprudence at the earliest opportunity.

Justice KAVANAUGH, concurring.

I write separately to explain my additional views about…the future implications of today’s decision.

***

III

After today’s decision, the nine Members of this Court will no longer decide the basic legality of pre-viability abortion for all 330 million Americans. That issue will be resolved by the people and their representatives in the democratic process in the States or Congress. But the parties’ arguments have raised other related questions…

First is the question of how this decision will affect other precedents involving issues such as contraception and marriage—in particular, the decisions in Griswold v. Connecticut, 381 U.S. 479, 85 S.Ct. 1678, 14 L.Ed.2d 510 (1965); Eisenstadt v. Baird, 405 U.S. 438, 92 S.Ct. 1029, 31 L.Ed.2d 349 (1972); Loving v. Virginia, 388 U.S. 1, 87 S.Ct. 1817, 18 L.Ed.2d 1010 (1967); and Obergefell v. Hodges, 576 U.S. 644, 135 S.Ct. 2584, 192 L.Ed.2d 609 (2015). I emphasize what the Court today states: Overruling Roe does not mean the overruling of those precedents, and does not threaten or cast doubt on those precedents.

Second, as I see it, some of the other abortion-related legal questions raised by today’s decision are not especially difficult as a constitutional matter. For example, may a State bar a resident of that State from traveling to another State to obtain an abortion? In my view, the answer is no based on the constitutional right to interstate travel. May a State retroactively impose liability or punishment for an abortion that occurred before today’s decision takes effect? In my view, the answer is no based on the Due Process Clause or the Ex Post Facto Clause. Cf. Bouie v. City of Columbia, 378 U.S. 347, 84 S.Ct. 1697, 12 L.Ed.2d 894 (1964).

Other abortion-related legal questions may emerge in the future. But this Court will no longer decide the fundamental question of whether abortion must be allowed throughout the United States through 6 weeks, or 12 weeks, or 15 weeks, or 24 weeks, or some other line. The Court will no longer decide how to evaluate the interests of the pregnant woman and the interests in protecting fetal life throughout pregnancy. Instead, those difficult moral and policy questions will be decided, as the Constitution dictates, by the people and their elected representatives through the constitutional processes of democratic self-government.

***

Justice Roberts Concurring in judgment (omitted)

Justice BREYER, Justice SOTOMAYOR, and Justice KAGAN, dissenting.

For half a century, Roe v. Wade, 410 U.S. 113, 93 S.Ct. 705, 35 L.Ed.2d 147 (1973), and Planned Parenthood of Southeastern Pa. v. Casey, 505 U.S. 833, 112 S.Ct. 2791, 120 L.Ed.2d 674 (1992), have protected the liberty and equality of women. Roe held, and Casey reaffirmed, that the Constitution safeguards a woman’s right to decide for herself whether to bear a child. Roe held, and Casey reaffirmed, that in the first stages of pregnancy, the government could not make that choice for women. The government could not control a woman’s body or the course of a woman’s life: It could not determine what the woman’s future would be. See Casey, 505 U.S. at 853, 112 S.Ct. 2791; Gonzales v. Carhart, 550 U.S. 124, 171–172, 127 S.Ct. 1610, 167 L.Ed.2d 480 (2007) (Ginsburg, J., dissenting). Respecting a woman as an autonomous being, and granting her full equality, meant giving her substantial choice over this most personal and most consequential of all life decisions.

Roe and Casey well understood the difficulty and divisiveness of the abortion issue. The Court knew that Americans hold profoundly different views about the “moral[ity]” of “terminating a pregnancy, even in its earliest stage.” Casey, 505 U.S. at 850, 112 S.Ct. 2791. And the Court recognized that “the State has legitimate interests from the outset of the pregnancy in protecting” the “life of the fetus that may become a child.” Id., at 846, 112 S.Ct. 2791. So the Court struck a balance, as it often does when values and goals compete. It held that the State could prohibit abortions after fetal viability, so long as the ban contained exceptions to safeguard a woman’s life or health. It held that even before viability, the State could regulate the abortion procedure in multiple and meaningful ways. But until the viability line was crossed, the Court held, a State could not impose a “substantial obstacle” on a woman’s “right to elect the procedure” as she (not the government) thought proper, in light of all the circumstances and complexities of her own life. Ibid.

Today, the Court discards that balance. It says that from the very moment of fertilization, a woman has no rights to speak of. A State can force her to bring a pregnancy to term, even at the steepest personal and familial costs. An abortion restriction, the majority holds, is permissible whenever rational, the lowest level of scrutiny known to the law. And because, as the Court has often stated, protecting fetal life is rational, States will feel free to enact all manner of restrictions. The Mississippi law at issue here bars abortions after the 15th week of pregnancy. Under the majority’s ruling, though, another State’s law could do so after ten weeks, or five or three or one—or, again, from the moment *2318 of fertilization. States have already passed such laws, in anticipation of today’s ruling. More will follow. Some States have enacted laws extending to all forms of abortion procedure, including taking medication in one’s own home. They have passed laws without any exceptions for when the woman is the victim of rape or incest. Under those laws, a woman will have to bear her rapist’s child or a young girl her father’s—no matter if doing so will destroy her life. So too, after today’s ruling, some States may compel women to carry to term a fetus with severe physical anomalies—for example, one afflicted with Tay-Sachs disease, sure to die within a few years of birth. States may even argue that a prohibition on abortion need make no provision for protecting a woman from risk of death or physical harm. Across a vast array of circumstances, a State will be able to impose its moral choice on a woman and coerce her to give birth to a child.

Enforcement of all these draconian restrictions will also be left largely to the States’ devices. A State can of course impose criminal penalties on abortion providers, including lengthy prison sentences. But some States will not stop there. Perhaps, in the wake of today’s decision, a state law will criminalize the woman’s conduct too, incarcerating or fining her for daring to seek or obtain an abortion. And as Texas has recently shown, a State can turn neighbor against neighbor, enlisting fellow citizens in the effort to root out anyone who tries to get an abortion, or to assist another in doing so.

The majority tries to hide the geographically expansive effects of its holding. Today’s decision, the majority says, permits “each State” to address abortion as it pleases. Ante, at 2284 – 2285, 112 S.Ct. 2791. That is cold comfort, of course, for the poor woman who cannot get the money to fly to a distant State for a procedure. Above all others, women lacking financial resources will suffer from today’s decision. In any event, interstate restrictions will also soon be in the offing. After this decision, some States may block women from traveling out of State to obtain abortions, or even from receiving abortion medications from out of State. Some may criminalize efforts, including the provision of information or funding, to help women gain access to other States’ abortion services. Most threatening of all, no language in today’s decision stops the Federal Government from prohibiting abortions nationwide, once again from the moment of conception and without exceptions for rape or incest. If that happens, “the views of [an individual State’s] citizens” will not matter. Ante, at 2240, 112 S.Ct. 2791. The challenge for a woman will be to finance a trip not to “New York [or] California” but to Toronto. Ante, at 2305 – 2306, 112 S.Ct. 2791 (KAVANAUGH, J., concurring).

Whatever the exact scope of the coming laws, one result of today’s decision is certain: the curtailment of women’s rights, and of their status as free and equal citizens. Yesterday, the Constitution guaranteed that a woman confronted with an unplanned pregnancy could (within reasonable limits) make her own decision about whether to bear a child, with all the life-transforming consequences that act involves. And in thus safeguarding each woman’s reproductive freedom, the Constitution also protected “[t]he ability of women to participate equally in [this Nation’s] economic and social life.” Casey, 505 U.S. at 856, 112 S.Ct. 2791. But no longer. As of today, this Court holds, a State can always force a woman to give birth, prohibiting even the earliest abortions. A State can thus transform what, when freely undertaken, is a wonder into what, when forced, may be a nightmare. Some women, especially women of means, will find ways around the State’s assertion of power. Others—those without money or childcare or *2319 the ability to take time off from work—will not be so fortunate. Maybe they will try an unsafe method of abortion, and come to physical harm, or even die. Maybe they will undergo pregnancy and have a child, but at significant personal or familial cost. At the least, they will incur the cost of losing control of their lives. The Constitution will, today’s majority holds, provide no shield, despite its guarantees of liberty and equality for all.

And no one should be confident that this majority is done with its work. The right Roe and Casey recognized does not stand alone. To the contrary, the Court has linked it for decades to other settled freedoms involving bodily integrity, familial relationships, and procreation. Most obviously, the right to terminate a pregnancy arose straight out of the right to purchase and use contraception. See Griswold v. Connecticut, 381 U.S. 479, 85 S.Ct. 1678, 14 L.Ed.2d 510 (1965); Eisenstadt v. Baird, 405 U.S. 438, 92 S.Ct. 1029, 31 L.Ed.2d 349 (1972). In turn, those rights led, more recently, to rights of same-sex intimacy and marriage. See Lawrence v. Texas, 539 U.S. 558, 123 S.Ct. 2472, 156 L.Ed.2d 508 (2003); Obergefell v. Hodges, 576 U.S. 644, 135 S.Ct. 2584, 192 L.Ed.2d 609 (2015). They are all part of the same constitutional fabric, protecting autonomous decisionmaking over the most personal of life decisions. The majority (or to be more accurate, most of it) is eager to tell us today that nothing it does “cast[s] doubt on precedents that do not concern abortion.” Ante, at 2277 – 2278, 135 S.Ct. 2584; cf. ante, at 2301 – 2302, 135 S.Ct. 2584 (THOMAS, J., concurring) (advocating the overruling of Griswold, Lawrence, and Obergefell). But how could that be? The lone rationale for what the majority does today is that the right to elect an abortion is not “deeply rooted in history”: Not until Roe, the majority argues, did people think abortion fell within the Constitution’s guarantee of liberty. Ante, at 2257 – 2258, 135 S.Ct. 2584. The same could be said, though, of most of the rights the majority claims it is not tampering with. The majority could write just as long an opinion showing, for example, that until the mid-20th century, “there was no support in American law for a constitutional right to obtain [contraceptives].” Ante, at 2248. So one of two things must be true. Either the majority does not really believe in its own reasoning. Or if it does, all rights that have no history stretching back to the mid-19th century are insecure. Either the mass of the majority’s opinion is hypocrisy, or additional constitutional rights are under threat. It is one or the other.

One piece of evidence on that score seems especially salient: The majority’s cavalier approach to overturning this Court’s precedents. Stare decisis is the Latin phrase for a foundation stone of the rule of law: that things decided should stay decided unless there is a very good reason for change. It is a doctrine of judicial modesty and humility. Those qualities are not evident in today’s opinion. The majority has no good reason for the upheaval in law and society it sets off. Roe and Casey have been the law of the land for decades, shaping women’s expectations of their choices when an unplanned pregnancy occurs. Women have relied on the availability of abortion both in structuring their relationships and in planning their lives. The legal framework Roe and Casey developed to balance the competing interests in this sphere has proved workable in courts across the country. No recent developments, in either law or fact, have eroded or cast doubt on those precedents. Nothing, in short, has changed. Indeed, the Court in Casey already found all of that to be true. Casey is a precedent about precedent. It reviewed the same arguments made here in support of overruling Roe, and it found that doing so was not warranted. The *2320 Court reverses course today for one reason and one reason only: because the composition of this Court has changed. Stare decisis, this Court has often said, “contributes to the actual and perceived integrity of the judicial process” by ensuring that decisions are “founded in the law rather than in the proclivities of individuals.” Payne v. Tennessee, 501 U.S. 808, 827, 111 S.Ct. 2597, 115 L.Ed.2d 720 (1991); Vasquez v. Hillery, 474 U.S. 254, 265, 106 S.Ct. 617, 88 L.Ed.2d 598 (1986). Today, the proclivities of individuals rule. The Court departs from its obligation to faithfully and impartially apply the law. We dissent.

I

We start with Roe and Casey, and with their deep connections to a broad swath of this Court’s precedents. To hear the majority tell the tale, Roe and Casey are aberrations: They came from nowhere, went nowhere—and so are easy to excise from this Nation’s constitutional law. That is not true. After describing the decisions themselves, we explain how they are rooted in—and themselves led to—other rights giving individuals control over their bodies and their most personal and intimate associations. The majority does not wish to talk about these matters for obvious reasons; to do so would both ground Roe and Casey in this Court’s precedents and reveal the broad implications of today’s decision. But the facts will not so handily disappear. Roe and Casey were from the beginning, and are even more now, embedded in core constitutional concepts of individual freedom, and of the equal rights of citizens to decide on the shape of their lives. Those legal concepts, one might even say, have gone far toward defining what it means to be an American. For in this Nation, we do not believe that a government controlling all private choices is compatible with a free people. So we do not (as the majority insists today) place everything within “the reach of majorities and [government] officials.” West Virginia Bd. of Ed. v. Barnette, 319 U.S. 624, 638, 63 S.Ct. 1178, 87 L.Ed. 1628 (1943). We believe in a Constitution that puts some issues off limits to majority rule. Even in the face of public opposition, we uphold the right of individuals—yes, including women—to make their own choices and chart their own futures. Or at least, we did once.

A

Some half-century ago, Roe struck down a state law making it a crime to perform an abortion unless its purpose was to save a woman’s life. The Roe Court knew it was treading on difficult and disputed ground. It understood that different people’s “experiences,” “values,” and “religious training” and beliefs led to “opposing views” about abortion. 410 U.S. at 116, 93 S.Ct. 705. But by a 7-to-2 vote, the Court held that in the earlier stages of pregnancy, that contested and contestable choice must belong to a woman, in consultation with her family and doctor. The Court explained that a long line of precedents, “founded in the Fourteenth Amendment’s concept of personal liberty,” protected individual decisionmaking related to “marriage, procreation, contraception, family relationships, and child rearing and education.” Id., at 152–153, 93 S.Ct. 705 (citations omitted). For the same reasons, the Court held, the Constitution must protect “a woman’s decision whether or not to terminate her pregnancy.” Id., at 153, 93 S.Ct. 705. The Court recognized the myriad ways bearing a child can alter the “life and future” of a woman and other members of her family. Ibid. A State could not, “by adopting one theory of life,” override all “rights of the pregnant woman.” Id., at 162, 93 S.Ct. 705.

*2321 At the same time, though, the Court recognized “valid interest[s]” of the State “in regulating the abortion decision.” Id., at 153, 93 S.Ct. 705. The Court noted in particular “important interests” in “protecting potential life,” “maintaining medical standards,” and “safeguarding [the] health” of the woman. Id., at 154, 93 S.Ct. 705. No “absolut[ist]” account of the woman’s right could wipe away those significant state claims. Ibid.

The Court therefore struck a balance, turning on the stage of the pregnancy at which the abortion would occur. The Court explained that early on, a woman’s choice must prevail, but that “at some point the state interests” become “dominant.” Id., at 155, 93 S.Ct. 705. It then set some guideposts. In the first trimester of pregnancy, the State could not interfere at all with the decision to terminate a pregnancy. At any time after that point, the State could regulate to protect the pregnant woman’s health, such as by insisting that abortion providers and facilities meet safety requirements. And after the fetus’s viability—the point when the fetus “has the capability of meaningful life outside the mother’s womb”—the State could ban abortions, except when necessary to preserve the woman’s life or health. Id., at 163–164, 93 S.Ct. 705.

In the 20 years between Roe and Casey, the Court expressly reaffirmed Roe on two occasions, and applied it on many more. Recognizing that “arguments [against Roe] continue to be made,” we responded that the doctrine of stare decisis “demands respect in a society governed by the rule of law.” Akron v. Akron Center for Reproductive Health, Inc., 462 U.S. 416, 419–420, 103 S.Ct. 2481, 76 L.Ed.2d 687 (1983). And we avowed that the “vitality” of “constitutional principles cannot be allowed to yield simply because of disagreement with them.” Thornburgh v. American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, 476 U.S. 747, 759, 106 S.Ct. 2169, 90 L.Ed.2d 779 (1986). So the Court, over and over, enforced the constitutional principles Roe had declared. See, e.g., Ohio v. Akron Center for Reproductive Health, 497 U.S. 502, 110 S.Ct. 2972, 111 L.Ed.2d 405 (1990); Hodgson v. Minnesota, 497 U.S. 417, 110 S.Ct. 2926, 111 L.Ed.2d 344 (1990); Simopoulos v. Virginia, 462 U.S. 506, 103 S.Ct. 2532, 76 L.Ed.2d 755 (1983); Planned Parenthood Assn. of Kansas City, Mo., Inc. v. Ashcroft, 462 U.S. 476, 103 S.Ct. 2517, 76 L.Ed.2d 733 (1983); H. L. v. Matheson, 450 U.S. 398, 101 S.Ct. 1164, 67 L.Ed.2d 388 (1981); Bellotti v. Baird, 443 U.S. 622, 99 S.Ct. 3035, 61 L.Ed.2d 797 (1979); Planned Parenthood of Central Mo. v. Danforth, 428 U.S. 52, 96 S.Ct. 2831, 49 L.Ed.2d 788 (1976).

Then, in Casey, the Court considered the matter anew, and again upheld Roe’s core precepts. Casey is in significant measure a precedent about the doctrine of precedent—until today, one of the Court’s most important. But we leave for later that aspect of the Court’s decision. The key thing now is the substantive aspect of the Court’s considered conclusion that “the essential holding of Roev.Wade should be retained and once again reaffirmed.” 505 U.S. at 846, 112 S.Ct. 2791.

Central to that conclusion was a full-throated restatement of a woman’s right to choose. Like Roe, Casey grounded that right in the Fourteenth Amendment’s guarantee of “liberty.” That guarantee encompasses realms of conduct not specifically referenced in the Constitution: “Marriage is mentioned nowhere” in that document, yet the Court was “no doubt correct” to protect the freedom to marry “against state interference.” 505 U.S. at 847–848, 112 S.Ct. 2791. And the guarantee of liberty encompasses conduct today that was not protected at the time of the *2322 Fourteenth Amendment. See id., at 848, 112 S.Ct. 2791. “It is settled now,” the Court said—though it was not always so—that “the Constitution places limits on a State’s right to interfere with a person’s most basic decisions about family and parenthood, as well as bodily integrity.” Id., at 849, 112 S.Ct. 2791 (citations omitted); see id., at 851, 112 S.Ct. 2791 (similarly describing the constitutional protection given to “personal decisions relating to marriage, procreation, contraception, [and] family relationships”). Especially important in this web of precedents protecting an individual’s most “personal choices” were those guaranteeing the right to contraception. Ibid.; see id., at 852–853, 112 S.Ct. 2791. In those cases, the Court had recognized “the right of the individual” to make the vastly consequential “decision whether to bear” a child. Id., at 851, 112 S.Ct. 2791 (emphasis deleted). So too, Casey reasoned, the liberty clause protects the decision of a woman confronting an unplanned pregnancy. Her decision about abortion was central, in the same way, to her capacity to chart her life’s course. See id., at 853, 112 S.Ct. 2791.

In reaffirming the right Roe recognized, the Court took full account of the diversity of views on abortion, and the importance of various competing state interests. Some Americans, the Court stated, “deem [abortion] nothing short of an act of violence against innocent human life.” 505 U.S. at 852, 112 S.Ct. 2791. And each State has an interest in “the protection of potential life”—as Roe itself had recognized. 505 U.S. at 871, 112 S.Ct. 2791 (plurality opinion). On the one hand, that interest was not conclusive. The State could not “resolve” the “moral and spiritual” questions raised by abortion in “such a definitive way that a woman lacks all choice in the matter.” Id., at 850, 112 S.Ct. 2791 (majority opinion). It could not force her to bear the “pain” and “physical constraints” of “carr[ying] a child to full term” when she would have chosen an early abortion. Id., at 852, 112 S.Ct. 2791. But on the other hand, the State had, as Roe had held, an exceptionally significant interest in disallowing abortions in the later phase of a pregnancy. And it had an ever-present interest in “ensur[ing] that the woman’s choice is informed” and in presenting the case for “choos[ing] childbirth over abortion.” 505 U.S. at 878, 112 S.Ct. 2791 (plurality opinion).

So Casey again struck a balance, differing from Roe’s in only incremental ways. It retained Roe’s “central holding” that the State could bar abortion only after viability. 505 U.S. at 860, 112 S.Ct. 2791 (majority opinion). The viability line, Casey thought, was “more workable” than any other in marking the place where the woman’s liberty interest gave way to a State’s efforts to preserve potential life. Id., at 870, 112 S.Ct. 2791 (plurality opinion). At that point, a “second life” was capable of “independent existence.” Ibid. If the woman even by then had not acted, she lacked adequate grounds to object to “the State’s intervention on [the developing child’s] behalf.” Ibid. At the same time, Casey decided, based on two decades of experience, that the Roe framework did not give States sufficient ability to regulate abortion prior to viability. In that period, Casey now made clear, the State could regulate not only to protect the woman’s health but also to “promot[e] prenatal life.” 505 U.S. at 873, 112 S.Ct. 2791 (plurality opinion). In particular, the State could ensure informed choice and could try to promote childbirth. See id., at 877–878, 112 S.Ct. 2791. But the State still could not place an “undue burden”—or “substantial obstacle”—“in the path of a woman seeking an abortion.” Id., at 878, 112 S.Ct. 2791. Prior to viability, the woman, consistent with the constitutional “meaning of *2323 liberty,” must “retain the ultimate control over her destiny and her body.” Id., at 869, 112 S.Ct. 2791.

We make one initial point about this analysis in light of the majority’s insistence that Roe and Casey, and we in defending them, are dismissive of a “State’s interest in protecting prenatal life.” Ante, at 2261. Nothing could get those decisions more wrong. As just described, Roe and Casey invoked powerful state interests in that protection, operative at every stage of the pregnancy and overriding the woman’s liberty after viability. The strength of those state interests is exactly why the Court allowed greater restrictions on the abortion right than on other rights deriving from the Fourteenth Amendment.¹ But what Roe and Casey also recognized—which today’s majority does not—is that a woman’s freedom and equality are likewise involved. That fact—the presence of countervailing interests—is what made the abortion question hard, and what necessitated balancing. The majority scoffs at that idea, castigating us for “repeatedly prais[ing] the ‘balance’ ” the two cases arrived at (with the word “balance” in scare quotes). Ante, at 2261. To the majority “balance” is a dirty word, as moderation is a foreign concept. The majority would allow States to ban abortion from conception onward because it does not think forced childbirth at all implicates a woman’s rights to equality and freedom. Today’s Court, that is, does not think there is anything of constitutional significance attached to a woman’s control of her body and the path of her life. Roe and Casey thought that one-sided view misguided. In some sense, that is the difference in a nutshell between our precedents and the majority opinion. The constitutional regime we have lived in for the last 50 years recognized competing interests, and sought a balance between them. The constitutional regime we enter today erases the woman’s interest and recognizes only the State’s (or the Federal Government’s).

B

The majority makes this change based on a single question: Did the reproductive right recognized in Roe and Casey exist in “1868, the year when the Fourteenth Amendment was ratified”? Ante, at 2252 – 2253. The majority says (and with this much we agree) that the answer to this question is no: In 1868, there was no nationwide right to end a pregnancy, and no thought that the Fourteenth Amendment provided one.

Of course, the majority opinion refers as well to some later and earlier history. On the one side of 1868, it goes back as far as the 13th (the 13th!) century. See ante, at 2249, 142 S.Ct. 2111. But that turns out to be wheel-spinning. First, it is not clear what relevance *2324 such early history should have, even to the majority. See New York State Rifle & Pistol Assn., Inc. v.Bruen, 597 U.S. ––––, ––––, 142 S.Ct. 2111, 2136, ––– L.Ed.2d –––– (2022) (“Historical evidence that long predates [ratification] may not illuminate the scope of the right”). If the early history obviously supported abortion rights, the majority would no doubt say that only the views of the Fourteenth Amendment’s ratifiers are germane. See ibid. (It is “better not to go too far back into antiquity,” except if olden “law survived to become our Founders’ law”). Second—and embarrassingly for the majority—early law in fact does provide some support for abortion rights. Common-law authorities did not treat abortion as a crime before “quickening”—the point when the fetus moved in the womb.² And early American law followed the common-law rule.³ So the criminal law of that early time might be taken as roughly consonant with Roe’s and Casey’s different treatment of early and late abortions. Better, then, to move forward in time. On the other side of 1868, the majority occasionally notes that many States barred abortion up to the time of Roe. See ante, at 2253, 2260, 142 S.Ct. 2111. That is convenient for the majority, but it is window dressing. As the same majority (plus one) just informed us, “post-ratification adoption or acceptance of laws that are inconsistent with the original meaning of the constitutional text obviously cannot overcome or alter that text.” New York State Rifle & Pistol Assn., Inc., 597 U.S., at –––– – ––––, 142 S.Ct., at 2137. Had the pre-Roe liberalization of abortion laws occurred more quickly and more widely in the 20th century, the majority would say (once again) that only the ratifiers’ views are germane.

The majority’s core legal postulate, then, is that we in the 21st century must read the Fourteenth Amendment just as its ratifiers did. And that is indeed what the majority emphasizes over and over again. See ante, at 2267 (“[T]he most important historical fact [is] how the States regulated abortion when the Fourteenth Amendment was adopted”); see also ante, at 2242 – 2243, 2248 – 2249, and n. 24, 23, 25, 28. If the ratifiers did not understand something as central to freedom, then neither can we. Or said more particularly: If those people did not understand reproductive rights as part of the guarantee of liberty conferred in the Fourteenth Amendment, then those rights do not exist.

As an initial matter, note a mistake in the just preceding sentence. We referred there to the “people” who ratified the Fourteenth Amendment: What rights did those “people” have in their heads at the time? But, of course, “people” did not ratify the Fourteenth Amendment. Men did. So it is perhaps not so surprising that the ratifiers were not perfectly attuned to the importance of reproductive rights for women’s liberty, or for their capacity to participate as equal members of our Nation. Indeed, the ratifiers—both in 1868 and when the original Constitution was approved in 1788—did not understand women as full members of the community *2325 embraced by the phrase “We the People.” In 1868, the first wave of American feminists were explicitly told—of course by men—that it was not their time to seek constitutional protections. (Women would not get even the vote for another half-century.) To be sure, most women in 1868 also had a foreshortened view of their rights: If most men could not then imagine giving women control over their bodies, most women could not imagine having that kind of autonomy. But that takes away nothing from the core point. Those responsible for the original Constitution, including the Fourteenth Amendment, did not perceive women as equals, and did not recognize women’s rights. When the majority says that we must read our foundational charter as viewed at the time of ratification (except that we may also check it against the Dark Ages), it consigns women to second-class citizenship.

Casey itself understood this point, as will become clear. See infra, at 2252 – 2253. It recollected with dismay a decision this Court issued just five years after the Fourteenth Amendment’s ratification, approving a State’s decision to deny a law license to a woman and suggesting as well that a woman had no legal status apart from her husband. See 505 U.S. at 896–897, 112 S.Ct. 2791 (majority opinion) (citing Bradwell v. State, 16 Wall. 130, 83 U.S. 130, 21 L.Ed. 442 (1873)). “There was a time,” Casey explained, when the Constitution did not protect “men and women alike.” 505 U.S. at 896, 112 S.Ct. 2791. But times had changed. A woman’s place in society had changed, and constitutional law had changed along with it. The relegation of women to inferior status in either the public sphere or the family was “no longer consistent with our understanding” of the Constitution. Id., at 897, 112 S.Ct. 2791. Now, “[t]he Constitution protects all individuals, male or female,” from “the abuse of governmental power” or “unjustified state interference.” Id., at 896, 898, 112 S.Ct. 2791.

So how is it that, as Casey said, our Constitution, read now, grants rights to women, though it did not in 1868? How is it that our Constitution subjects discrimination against them to heightened judicial scrutiny? How is it that our Constitution, through the Fourteenth Amendment’s liberty clause, guarantees access to contraception (also not legally protected in 1868) so that women can decide for themselves whether and when to bear a child? How is it that until today, that same constitutional clause protected a woman’s right, in the event contraception failed, to end a pregnancy in its earlier stages?

The answer is that this Court has rejected the majority’s pinched view of how to read our Constitution. “The Founders,” we recently wrote, “knew they were writing a document designed to apply to ever-changing circumstances over centuries.” NLRB v. Noel Canning, 573 U.S. 513, 533–534, 134 S.Ct. 2550, 189 L.Ed.2d 538 (2014). Or in the words of the great Chief Justice John Marshall, our Constitution is “intended to endure for ages to come,” and must adapt itself to a future “seen dimly,” if at all. McCulloch v. Maryland, 4 Wheat. 316, 415, 4 L.Ed. 579 (1819). That is indeed why our Constitution is written as it is. The Framers (both in 1788 and 1868) understood that the world changes. So they did not define rights by reference to the specific practices existing at the time. Instead, the Framers defined rights in general terms, to permit future evolution in their scope and meaning. And over the course of our history, this Court has taken up the Framers’ invitation. It has kept true to the Framers’ principles by applying them in new ways, responsive to new societal understandings and conditions.

*2326 Nowhere has that approach been more prevalent than in construing the majestic but open-ended words of the Fourteenth Amendment—the guarantees of “liberty” and “equality” for all. And nowhere has that approach produced prouder moments, for this country and the Court. Consider an example Obergefell used a few years ago. The Court there confronted a claim, based on Washington v. Glucksberg, 521 U.S. 702, 117 S.Ct. 2258, 138 L.Ed.2d 772 (1997), that the Fourteenth Amendment “must be defined in a most circumscribed manner, with central reference to specific historical practices”—exactly the view today’s majority follows. Obergefell, 576 U.S. at 671, 135 S.Ct. 2584. And the Court specifically rejected that view.⁴ In doing so, the Court reflected on what the proposed, historically circumscribed approach would have meant for interracial marriage. See ibid. The Fourteenth Amendment’s ratifiers did not think it gave black and white people a right to marry each other. To the contrary, contemporaneous practice deemed that act quite as unprotected as abortion. Yet the Court in Loving v. Virginia, 388 U.S. 1, 87 S.Ct. 1817, 18 L.Ed.2d 1010 (1967), read the Fourteenth Amendment to embrace the Lovings’ union. If, Obergefell explained, “rights were defined by who exercised them in the past, then received practices could serve as their own continued justification”—even when they conflict with “liberty” and “equality” as later and more broadly understood. 576 U.S. at 671, 135 S.Ct. 2584. The Constitution does not freeze for all time the original view of what those rights guarantee, or how they apply.

That does not mean anything goes. The majority wishes people to think there are but two alternatives: (1) accept the original applications of the Fourteenth Amendment and no others, or (2) surrender to judges’ “own ardent views,” ungrounded in law, about the “liberty that Americans should enjoy.” Ante, at 2247, 135 S.Ct. 2584. At least, that idea is what the majority sometimes tries to convey. At other times, the majority (or, rather, most of it) tries to assure the public that it has no designs on rights (for example, to contraception) that arose only in the back half of the 20th century—in other words, that it is happy to pick and choose, in accord with individual preferences. See ante, at 2257 – 2258, 2277 – 2278, 2280 – 2281; ante, at 2309, 135 S.Ct. 2584 (KAVANAUGH, J., concurring); but see ante, at 2301 – 2302, 135 S.Ct. 2584 (THOMAS, J., concurring). But that is a matter we discuss later. See infra, at 2330 – 2333, 135 S.Ct. 2584. For now, our point is different: It is that applications of liberty and equality can evolve while remaining grounded in constitutional principles, constitutional history, and constitutional precedents. The second Justice Harlan discussed how to strike the right balance when he explained why he would have invalidated a State’s ban on contraceptive use. Judges, he said, are not “free to roam where unguided speculation might take them.” Poe v. Ullman, 367 U.S. 497, 542, 81 S.Ct. 1752, 6 L.Ed.2d 989 (1961) (dissenting opinion). Yet they also must recognize that the constitutional “tradition” of this country is not captured whole at a single moment. Ibid. Rather, its meaning gains content from the long sweep of our history and from successive judicial precedents—each looking to the last and each seeking to apply the Constitution’s most fundamental commitments to new conditions. *2327 That is why Americans, to go back to Obergefell’s example, have a right to marry across racial lines. And it is why, to go back to Justice Harlan’s case, Americans have a right to use contraceptives so they can choose for themselves whether to have children.

All that is what Casey understood. Casey explicitly rejected the present majority’s method. “[T]he specific practices of States at the time of the adoption of the Fourteenth Amendment,” Casey stated, do not “mark[ ] the outer limits of the substantive sphere of liberty which the Fourteenth Amendment protects.” 505 U.S. at 848, 112 S.Ct. 2791.⁵ To hold otherwise—as the majority does today—“would be inconsistent with our law.” Id., at 847, 112 S.Ct. 2791. Why? Because the Court has “vindicated [the] principle” over and over that (no matter the sentiment in 1868) “there is a realm of personal liberty which the government may not enter”—especially relating to “bodily integrity” and “family life.” Id., at 847, 849, 851. Casey described in detail the Court’s contraception cases. See id., at 848–849, 851–853, 112 S.Ct. 2791. It noted decisions protecting the right to marry, including to someone of another race. See id., at 847–848, 112 S.Ct. 2791 (“[I]nterracial marriage was illegal in most States in the 19th century, but the Court was no doubt correct in finding it to be an aspect of liberty protected against state interference”). In reviewing decades and decades of constitutional law, Casey could draw but one conclusion: Whatever was true in 1868, “[i]t is settled now, as it was when the Court heard arguments in Roe v. Wade, that the Constitution places limits on a State’s right to interfere with a person’s most basic decisions about family and parenthood.” Id., at 849, 112 S.Ct. 2791.

And that conclusion still held good, until the Court’s intervention here. It was settled at the time of Roe, settled at the time of Casey, and settled yesterday that the Constitution places limits on a State’s power to assert control over an individual’s body and most personal decisionmaking. A multitude of decisions supporting that principle led to Roe’s recognition and Casey’s reaffirmation of the right to choose; and Roe and Casey in turn supported additional protections for intimate and familial relations. The majority has embarrassingly little to say about those precedents. It (literally) rattles them off in a single paragraph; and it implies that they have nothing to do with each other, or with the right to terminate an early pregnancy. See ante, at 2257 – 2258, 112 S.Ct. 2791 (asserting that recognizing a relationship among them, as addressing aspects of personal autonomy, would ineluctably “license fundamental rights” to illegal “drug use [and] prostitution”). But that is flat wrong. The Court’s precedents about bodily autonomy, sexual and familial relations, and procreation are all interwoven—all part of the fabric of our constitutional law, and because that is so, of our lives. Especially women’s lives, where they safeguard a right to self-determination.

*2328 And eliminating that right, we need to say before further describing our precedents, is not taking a “neutral” position, as Justice KAVANAUGH tries to argue. Ante, at 2304 – 2305, 2306, 2307 – 2308, 2309 – 2310 (concurring opinion). His idea is that neutrality lies in giving the abortion issue to the States, where some can go one way and some another. But would he say that the Court is being “scrupulously neutral” if it allowed New York and California to ban all the guns they want? Ante, at 2305, 112 S.Ct. 2791. If the Court allowed some States to use unanimous juries and others not? If the Court told the States: Decide for yourselves whether to put restrictions on church attendance? We could go on—and in fact we will. Suppose Justice KAVANAUGH were to say (in line with the majority opinion) that the rights we just listed are more textually or historically grounded than the right to choose. What, then, of the right to contraception or same-sex marriage? Would it be “scrupulously neutral” for the Court to eliminate those rights too? The point of all these examples is that when it comes to rights, the Court does not act “neutrally” when it leaves everything up to the States. Rather, the Court acts neutrally when it protects the right against all comers. And to apply that point to the case here: When the Court decimates a right women have held for 50 years, the Court is not being “scrupulously neutral.” It is instead taking sides: against women who wish to exercise the right, and for States (like Mississippi) that want to bar them from doing so. Justice KAVANAUGH cannot obscure that point by appropriating the rhetoric of even-handedness. His position just is what it is: A brook-no-compromise refusal to recognize a woman’s right to choose, from the first day of a pregnancy. And that position, as we will now show, cannot be squared with this Court’s longstanding view that women indeed have rights (whatever the state of the world in 1868) to make the most personal and consequential decisions about their bodies and their lives.

Consider first, then, the line of this Court’s cases protecting “bodily integrity.” Casey, 505 U.S. at 849, 112 S.Ct. 2791. “No right,” in this Court’s time-honored view, “is held more sacred, or is more carefully guarded,” than “the right of every individual to the possession and control of his own person.” Union Pacific R. Co. v. Botsford, 141 U.S. 250, 251, 11 S.Ct. 1000, 35 L.Ed. 734 (1891); see Cruzan v. Director, Mo. Dept. of Health, 497 U.S. 261, 269, 110 S.Ct. 2841, 111 L.Ed.2d 224 (1990) (Every adult “has a right to determine what shall be done with his own body”). Or to put it more simply: Everyone, including women, owns their own bodies. So the Court has restricted the power of government to interfere with a person’s medical decisions or compel her to undergo medical procedures or treatments. See, e.g., Winston v. Lee, 470 U.S. 753, 766–767, 105 S.Ct. 1611, 84 L.Ed.2d 662 (1985) (forced surgery); Rochin v. California, 342 U.S. 165, 166, 173–174, 72 S.Ct. 205, 96 L.Ed. 183 (1952) (forced stomach pumping); Washington v. Harper, 494 U.S. 210, 229, 236, 110 S.Ct. 1028, 108 L.Ed.2d 178 (1990) (forced administration of antipsychotic drugs).

Casey recognized the “doctrinal affinity” between those precedents and Roe. 505 U.S. at 857, 112 S.Ct. 2791. And that doctrinal affinity is born of a factual likeness. There are few greater incursions on a body than forcing a woman to complete a pregnancy and give birth. For every woman, those experiences involve all manner of physical changes, medical treatments (including the possibility of a cesarean section), and medical risk. Just as one example, an American woman is 14 times more likely to die by carrying a pregnancy to term than by having an abortion. See *2329Whole Woman’s Health v. Hellerstedt, 579 U.S. 582, 618, 136 S.Ct. 2292, 195 L.Ed.2d 665 (2016). That women happily undergo those burdens and hazards of their own accord does not lessen how far a State impinges on a woman’s body when it compels her to bring a pregnancy to term. And for some women, as Roe recognized, abortions are medically necessary to prevent harm. See 410 U.S. at 153, 93 S.Ct. 705. The majority does not say—which is itself ominous—whether a State may prevent a woman from obtaining an abortion when she and her doctor have determined it is a needed medical treatment.

So too, Roe and Casey fit neatly into a long line of decisions protecting from government intrusion a wealth of private choices about family matters, child rearing, intimate relationships, and procreation. See Casey, 505 U.S. at 851, 857, 112 S.Ct. 2791; Roe, 410 U.S. at 152–153, 93 S.Ct. 705; see also ante, at 2257 – 2258, 93 S.Ct. 705 (listing the myriad decisions of this kind that Casey relied on). Those cases safeguard particular choices about whom to marry; whom to have sex with; what family members to live with; how to raise children—and crucially, whether and when to have children. In varied cases, the Court explained that those choices—“the most intimate and personal” a person can make—reflect fundamental aspects of personal identity; they define the very “attributes of personhood.” Casey, 505 U.S. at 851, 112 S.Ct. 2791. And they inevitably shape the nature and future course of a person’s life (and often the lives of those closest to her). So, the Court held, those choices belong to the individual, and not the government. That is the essence of what liberty requires.

And liberty may require it, this Court has repeatedly said, even when those living in 1868 would not have recognized the claim—because they would not have seen the person making it as a full-fledged member of the community. Throughout our history, the sphere of protected liberty has expanded, bringing in individuals formerly excluded. In that way, the constitutional values of liberty and equality go hand in hand; they do not inhabit the hermetically sealed containers the majority portrays. Compare Obergefell, 576 U.S. at 672–675, 135 S.Ct. 2584, with ante, at 2245 – 2246, 135 S.Ct. 2584. So before Roe and Casey, the Court expanded in successive cases those who could claim the right to marry—though their relationships would have been outside the law’s protection in the mid-19th century. See, e.g., Loving, 388 U.S. 1, 87 S.Ct. 1817, 18 L.Ed.2d 1010 (interracial couples); Turner v. Safley, 482 U.S. 78, 107 S.Ct. 2254, 96 L.Ed.2d 64 (1987) (prisoners); see also, e.g., Stanley v. Illinois, 405 U.S. 645, 651–652, 92 S.Ct. 1208, 31 L.Ed.2d 551 (1972) (offering constitutional protection to untraditional “family unit[s]”). And after Roe and Casey, of course, the Court continued in that vein. With a critical stop to hold that the Fourteenth Amendment protected same-sex intimacy, the Court resolved that the Amendment also conferred on same-sex couples the right to marry. See Lawrence, 539 U.S. 558, 123 S.Ct. 2472, 156 L.Ed.2d 508; Obergefell, 576 U.S. 644, 135 S.Ct. 2584, 192 L.Ed.2d 609. In considering that question, the Court held, “[h]istory and tradition,” especially as reflected in the course of our precedent, “guide and discipline [the] inquiry.” Id., at 664, 135 S.Ct. 2584. But the sentiments of 1868 alone do not and cannot “rule the present.” Ibid.

Casey similarly recognized the need to extend the constitutional sphere of liberty to a previously excluded group. The Court then understood, as the majority today does not, that the men who ratified the Fourteenth Amendment and wrote the state laws of the time did not view women as full and equal citizens. See supra, at 2248. A woman then, Casey wrote, “had no *2330 legal existence separate from her husband.” 505 U.S. at 897, 112 S.Ct. 2791. Women were seen only “as the center of home and family life,” without “full and independent legal status under the Constitution.” Ibid. But that could not be true any longer: The State could not now insist on the historically dominant “vision of the woman’s role.” Id., at 852, 112 S.Ct. 2791. And equal citizenship, Casey realized, was inescapably connected to reproductive rights. “The ability of women to participate equally” in the “life of the Nation”—in all its economic, social, political, and legal aspects—“has been facilitated by their ability to control their reproductive lives.” Id., at 856, 112 S.Ct. 2791. Without the ability to decide whether and when to have children, women could not—in the way men took for granted—determine how they would live their lives, and how they would contribute to the society around them.

For much that reason, Casey made clear that the precedents Roe most closely tracked were those involving contraception. Over the course of three cases, the Court had held that a right to use and gain access to contraception was part of the Fourteenth Amendment’s guarantee of liberty. See Griswold, 381 U.S. 479, 85 S.Ct. 1678, 14 L.Ed.2d 510; Eisenstadt, 405 U.S. 438, 92 S.Ct. 1029, 31 L.Ed.2d 349; Carey v. Population Services Int’l, 431 U.S. 678, 97 S.Ct. 2010, 52 L.Ed.2d 675 (1977). That clause, we explained, necessarily conferred a right “to be free from unwarranted governmental intrusion into matters so fundamentally affecting a person as the decision whether to bear or beget a child.” Eisenstadt, 405 U.S. at 453, 92 S.Ct. 1029; see Carey, 431 U.S. at 684–685, 97 S.Ct. 2010. Casey saw Roe as of a piece: In “critical respects the abortion decision is of the same character.” 505 U.S. at 852, 112 S.Ct. 2791. “[R]easonable people,” the Court noted, could also oppose contraception; and indeed, they could believe that “some forms of contraception” similarly implicate a concern with “potential life.” Id., at 853, 859, 112 S.Ct. 2791. Yet the views of others could not automatically prevail against a woman’s right to control her own body and make her own choice about whether to bear, and probably to raise, a child. When an unplanned pregnancy is involved—because either contraception or abortion is outlawed—“the liberty of the woman is at stake in a sense unique to the human condition.” Id., at 852, 112 S.Ct. 2791. No State could undertake to resolve the moral questions raised “in such a definitive way” as to deprive a woman of all choice. Id., at 850, 112 S.Ct. 2791.

Faced with all these connections between Roe/Casey and judicial decisions recognizing other constitutional rights, the majority tells everyone not to worry. It can (so it says) neatly extract the right to choose from the constitutional edifice without affecting any associated rights. (Think of someone telling you that the Jenga tower simply will not collapse.) Today’s decision, the majority first says, “does not undermine” the decisions cited by Roe and Casey—the ones involving “marriage, procreation, contraception, [and] family relationships”—“in any way.” Ante, at 2257 – 2258; Casey, 505 U.S. at 851, 112 S.Ct. 2791. Note that this first assurance does not extend to rights recognized after Roe and Casey, and partly based on them—in particular, rights to same-sex intimacy and marriage. See supra, at 2329 – 2330.⁶ On *2331 its later tries, though, the majority includes those too: “Nothing in this opinion should be understood to cast doubt on precedents that do not concern abortion.” Ante, at 2277 – 2278, 112 S.Ct. 2791; see ante, at 2280 – 2281, 112 S.Ct. 2791. That right is unique, the majority asserts, “because [abortion] terminates life or potential life.” Ante, at 2277, 112 S.Ct. 2791 (internal quotation marks omitted); see ante, at 2257 – 2258, 2280 – 2281. So the majority depicts today’s decision as “a restricted railroad ticket, good for this day and train only.” Smith v. Allwright, 321 U.S. 649, 669, 64 S.Ct. 757, 88 L.Ed. 987 (1944) (Roberts, J., dissenting). Should the audience for these too-much-repeated protestations be duly satisfied? We think not.

The first problem with the majority’s account comes from Justice THOMAS’s concurrence—which makes clear he is not with the program. In saying that nothing in today’s opinion casts doubt on non-abortion precedents, Justice THOMAS explains, he means only that they are not at issue in this very case. See ante, at 2303 – 2304 (“[T]his case does not present the opportunity to reject” those precedents). But he lets us know what he wants to do when they are. “[I]n future cases,” he says, “we should reconsider all of this Court’s substantive due process precedents, including Griswold, Lawrence, and Obergefell.” Ante, at 2301; see also supra, at 2253 – 2254, and n. 6. And when we reconsider them? Then “we have a duty” to “overrul[e] these demonstrably erroneous decisions.” Ante, at 2301. So at least one Justice is planning to use the ticket of today’s decision again and again and again.

Even placing the concurrence to the side, the assurance in today’s opinion still does not work. Or at least that is so if the majority is serious about its sole reason for overturning Roe and Casey: the legal status of abortion in the 19th century. Except in the places quoted above, the state interest in protecting fetal life plays no part in the majority’s analysis. To the contrary, the majority takes pride in not expressing a view “about the status of the fetus.” Ante, at 2277; see ante, at 2257 – 2258 (aligning itself with Roe’s and Casey’s stance of not deciding whether life or potential life is involved); ante, at 2261 – 2262 (similar). The majority’s departure from Roe and Casey rests instead—and only—on whether a woman’s decision to end a pregnancy involves any Fourteenth Amendment liberty interest (against which Roe and Casey balanced the state interest in preserving fetal life).⁷ According to the majority, no liberty interest is present—because (and only because) the law offered no protection to the woman’s choice in the *2332 19th century. But here is the rub. The law also did not then (and would not for ages) protect a wealth of other things. It did not protect the rights recognized in Lawrence and Obergefell to same-sex intimacy and marriage. It did not protect the right recognized in Loving to marry across racial lines. It did not protect the right recognized in Griswold to contraceptive use. For that matter, it did not protect the right recognized in Skinner v. Oklahoma ex rel. Williamson, 316 U.S. 535, 62 S.Ct. 1110, 86 L.Ed. 1655 (1942), not to be sterilized without consent. So if the majority is right in its legal analysis, all those decisions were wrong, and all those matters properly belong to the States too—whatever the particular state interests involved. And if that is true, it is impossible to understand (as a matter of logic and principle) how the majority can say that its opinion today does not threaten—does not even “undermine”—any number of other constitutional rights. Ante, at 2257 – 2258.⁸

Nor does it even help just to take the majority at its word. Assume the majority is sincere in saying, for whatever reason, that it will go so far and no further. Scout’s honor. Still, the future significance of today’s opinion will be decided in the future. And law often has a way of evolving without regard to original intentions—a way of actually following where logic leads, rather than tolerating hard-to-explain lines. Rights can expand in that way. Dissenting in Lawrence, Justice Scalia explained why he took no comfort in the Court’s statement that a decision recognizing the right to same-sex intimacy did “not involve” same-sex marriage. 539 U.S. at 604, 123 S.Ct. 2472. That could be true, he wrote, “only if one entertains the belief that principle and logic have nothing to do with the decisions of this Court.” Id., at 605, 123 S.Ct. 2472. Score one for the dissent, as a matter of prophecy. And logic and principle are not one-way ratchets. Rights can contract in the same way and for the same reason—because whatever today’s majority might say, one thing really does lead to another. We fervently hope that does not happen because of today’s decision. We hope that we will not join Justice Scalia in the book of prophets. But we cannot understand how anyone can be confident that today’s opinion will be the last of its kind.

Consider, as our last word on this issue, contraception. The Constitution, of course, does not mention that word. And there is no historical right to contraception, of the kind the majority insists on. To the contrary, the American legal landscape in the decades after the Civil War was littered with bans on the sale of contraceptive devices. So again, there seem to be two choices. See supra, at 2242 – 2243, 2254 – 2255. If the majority is serious about its historical approach, then Griswold and its progeny are in the line of fire too. Or if it is not serious, then ... what is the basis of today’s decision? If we had to guess, we suspect the prospects of this Court approving bans on contraception are low. But once again, the future significance of today’s opinion will be decided in the future. At the least, today’s opinion will fuel the fight to get contraception, and any other issues with a moral dimension, out of the Fourteenth Amendment and into state legislatures.⁹

*2333 Anyway, today’s decision, taken on its own, is catastrophic enough. As a matter of constitutional method, the majority’s commitment to replicate in 2022 every view about the meaning of liberty held in 1868 has precious little to recommend it. Our law in this constitutional sphere, as in most, has for decades upon decades proceeded differently. It has considered fundamental constitutional principles, the whole course of the Nation’s history and traditions, and the step-by-step evolution of the Court’s precedents. It is disciplined but not static. It relies on accumulated judgments, not just the sentiments of one long-ago generation of men (who themselves believed, and drafted the Constitution to reflect, that the world progresses). And by doing so, it includes those excluded from that olden conversation, rather than perpetuating its bounds.

As a matter of constitutional substance, the majority’s opinion has all the flaws its method would suggest. Because laws in 1868 deprived women of any control over their bodies, the majority approves States doing so today. Because those laws prevented women from charting the course of their own lives, the majority says States can do the same again. Because in 1868, the government could tell a pregnant woman—even in the first days of her pregnancy—that she could do nothing but bear a child, it can once more impose that command. Today’s decision strips women of agency over what even the majority agrees is a contested and contestable moral issue. It forces her to carry out the State’s will, whatever the circumstances and whatever the harm it will wreak on her and her family. In the Fourteenth Amendment’s terms, it takes away her liberty. Even before we get to stare decisis, we dissent.

II

Stare decisis omitted. 

[T]he expectation of reproductive control is integral to many women’s identity and their place in the Nation. See Casey, 505 U.S. at 856, 112 S.Ct. 2791. That expectation helps define a woman as an “equal citizen[ ],” with all the rights, privileges, and obligations that status entails. Gonzales, 550 U.S. at 172, 127 S.Ct. 1610 (Ginsburg, J., dissenting); see supra, at 2329 – 2330. It reflects that she is an autonomous person, and that society and the law recognize her as such. Like many constitutional rights, the right to choose situates a woman in relationship to others and to the government. It helps define a *2346 sphere of freedom, in which a person has the capacity to make choices free of government control. As Casey recognized, the right “order[s]” her “thinking” as well as her “living.” 505 U.S. at 856, 112 S.Ct. 2791. Beyond any individual choice about residence, or education, or career, her whole life reflects the control and authority that the right grants.

Withdrawing a woman’s right to choose whether to continue a pregnancy does not mean that no choice is being made. It means that a majority of today’s Court has wrenched this choice from women and given it to the States. To allow a State to exert control over one of “the most intimate and personal choices” a woman may make is not only to affect the course of her life, monumental as those effects might be. Id., at 851, 112 S.Ct. 2791. It is to alter her “views of [herself]” and her understanding of her “place[ ] in society” as someone with the recognized dignity and authority to make these choices. Id., at 856, 112 S.Ct. 2791. Women have relied on Roe and Casey in this way for 50 years. Many have never known anything else. When Roe and Casey disappear, the loss of power, control, and dignity will be immense.

The Court’s failure to perceive the whole swath of expectations Roe and Casey created reflects an impoverished view of reliance. According to the majority, a reliance interest must be “very concrete,” like those involving “property” or “contract.” Ante, at 2276, 112 S.Ct. 2791. While many of this Court’s cases addressing reliance have been in the “commercial context,” Casey, 505 U.S. at 855, 112 S.Ct. 2791, none holds that interests must be analogous to commercial ones to warrant stare decisis protection.²⁸ This unprecedented assertion is, at bottom, a radical claim to power. By disclaiming any need to consider broad swaths of individuals’ interests, the Court arrogates to itself the authority to overrule established legal principles without even acknowledging the costs of its decisions for the individuals who live under the law, costs that this Court’s stare decisis doctrine instructs us to privilege when deciding whether to change course.

The majority claims that the reliance interests women have in Roe and Casey are too “intangible” for the Court to consider, even if it were inclined to do so. Ante, at 2277 – 2278, 133 S.Ct. 2151. This is to ignore as judges what we know as men and women. The interests women have in Roe and Casey are perfectly, viscerally concrete. Countless women will now make different decisions about careers, education, relationships, and whether to try to become pregnant than they would have when Roe served as a backstop. Other women will carry pregnancies to term, with all the costs and risk of harm that involves, when they would previously have chosen to obtain an abortion. For millions of women, Roe and Casey have been critical in giving them control of their bodies and their lives. Closing our eyes to the suffering today’s decision will impose will not make that suffering disappear. The majority cannot escape its obligation to “count[ ] the cost[s]” of its decision by invoking the “conflicting arguments” of “contending sides.” *2347Casey, 505 U.S. at 855, 112 S.Ct. 2791; ante, at 2277 – 2278. Stare decisis requires that the Court calculate the costs of a decision’s repudiation on those who have relied on the decision, not on those who have disavowed it. See Casey, 505 U.S. at 855, 112 S.Ct. 2791.

More broadly, the majority’s approach to reliance cannot be reconciled with our Nation’s understanding of constitutional rights. The majority’s insistence on a “concrete,” economic showing would preclude a finding of reliance on a wide variety of decisions recognizing constitutional rights—such as the right to express opinions, or choose whom to marry, or decide how to educate children. The Court, on the majority’s logic, could transfer those choices to the State without having to consider a person’s settled understanding that the law makes them hers. That must be wrong. All those rights, like the right to obtain an abortion, profoundly affect and, indeed, anchor individual lives. To recognize that people have relied on these rights is not to dabble in abstractions, but to acknowledge some of the most “concrete” and familiar aspects of human life and liberty. Ante, at 2276, 112 S.Ct. 2791.

All those rights, like the one here, also have a societal dimension, because of the role constitutional liberties play in our structure of government. See, e.g., Dickerson, 530 U.S. at 443, 120 S.Ct. 2326 (recognizing that Miranda “warnings have become part of our national culture” in declining to overrule Miranda v. Arizona, 384 U.S. 436, 86 S.Ct. 1602, 16 L.Ed.2d 694 (1966)). Rescinding an individual right in its entirety and conferring it on the State, an action the Court takes today for the first time in history, affects all who have relied on our constitutional system of government and its structure of individual liberties protected from state oversight. Roe and Casey have of course aroused controversy and provoked disagreement. But the right those decisions conferred and reaffirmed is part of society’s understanding of constitutional law and of how the Court has defined the liberty and equality that women are entitled to claim.

After today, young women will come of age with fewer rights than their mothers and grandmothers had. The majority accomplishes that result without so much as considering how women have relied on the right to choose or what it means to take that right away. The majority’s refusal even to consider the life-altering consequences of reversing Roe and Casey is a stunning indictment of its decision.

D

***

III

“Power, not reason, is the new currency of this Court’s decisionmaking.” Payne, 501 U.S. at 844, 111 S.Ct. 2597 (Marshall, J., dissenting). Roe has stood for fifty years. Casey, a precedent about precedent specifically confirming Roe, has stood for thirty…The right those decisions established and preserved is embedded in our constitutional law, both originating in and leading to other rights protecting bodily *2349 integrity, personal autonomy, and family relationships. The abortion right is also embedded in the lives of women—shaping their expectations, influencing their choices about relationships and work, supporting (as all reproductive rights do) their social and economic equality. Since the right’s recognition (and affirmation), nothing has changed to support what the majority does today. Neither law nor facts nor attitudes have provided any new reasons to reach a different result than Roe and Casey did. All that has changed is this Court.

Mississippi—and other States too—knew exactly what they were doing in ginning up new legal challenges to Roe and Casey. The 15-week ban at issue here was enacted in 2018. Other States quickly followed: Between 2019 and 2021, eight States banned abortion procedures after six to eight weeks of pregnancy, and three States enacted all-out bans.²⁹ Mississippi itself decided in 2019 that it had not gone far enough: The year after enacting the law under review, the State passed a 6-week restriction. A state senator who championed both Mississippi laws said the obvious out loud. “[A] lot of people thought,” he explained, that “finally, we have” a conservative Court “and so now would be a good time to start testing the limits of Roe.”³⁰ In its petition for certiorari, the State had exercised a smidgen of restraint. It had urged the Court merely to roll back Roe and Casey, specifically assuring the Court that “the questions presented in this petition do not require the Court to overturn” those precedents. Pet. for Cert. 5; see ante, at 2313, 111 S.Ct. 2597 (ROBERTS, C. J., concurring in judgment). But as Mississippi grew ever more confident in its prospects, it resolved to go all in. It urged the Court to overrule Roe and Casey. Nothing but everything would be enough.

Earlier this Term, this Court signaled that Mississippi’s stratagem would succeed. Texas was one of the fistful of States to have recently banned abortions after six weeks of pregnancy. It added to that “flagrantly unconstitutional” restriction an unprecedented scheme to “evade judicial scrutiny.” Whole Woman’s Healthv.Jackson, 594 U.S. ––––, ––––, 141 S.Ct. 2494, 2498, 210 L.Ed.2d 1014 (2021) (SOTOMAYOR, J., dissenting). And five Justices acceded to that cynical maneuver. They let Texas defy this Court’s constitutional rulings, nullifying Roe and Casey ahead of schedule in the Nation’s second largest State.

And now the other shoe drops, courtesy of that same five-person majority. (We believe that THE CHIEF JUSTICE’s opinion is wrong too, but no one should think that there is not a large difference between upholding a 15-week ban on the *2350 grounds he does and allowing States to prohibit abortion from the time of conception.) Now a new and bare majority of this Court—acting at practically the first moment possible—overrules Roe and Casey. It converts a series of dissenting opinions expressing antipathy toward Roe and Casey into a decision greenlighting even total abortion bans. See ante, at 2272 – 2273, 2273 – 2274, 2275 – 2276, 141 S.Ct. 2494, 2498, and nn. 61–64 (relying on former dissents). It eliminates a 50-year-old constitutional right that safeguards women’s freedom and equal station. It breaches a core rule-of-law principle, designed to promote constancy in the law. In doing all of that, it places in jeopardy other rights, from contraception to same-sex intimacy and marriage. And finally, it undermines the Court’s legitimacy.

***

With sorrow—for this Court, but more, for the many millions of American women who have today lost a fundamental constitutional protection—we dissent.

APPENDIX (omitted)