The truth about Roe vs Wade

As we get back into Roe vs Wade, prompted by the leak of what is said to be the US Supreme Court’s draft decision to throw out that famous judgment, prepare for an avalanche of misinformation. On BBC Radio 4 on Tuesday, the news said that the court’s 1973 decision had ‘legalised abortion’. Not so. Abortion had long been legal in many states of the Union. But until the judgment, different states had been free to adopt different policies. Roe vs Wade decided that within the 14th Amendment to the Constitution and its implied right to privacy lay a constitutional right to abortion and that the amendment’s ‘due process’ clause prevented any state from abridging that right. Critics at the time argued that this discovery of abortion rights (which, like privacy itself, are not mentioned in the amendment) was, to put it mildly, a stretch. Obviously much of the heat in the argument, then and now, depends on what you think about abortion.