Issues, Elections, and Political Change

In 1973, the Supreme Court declared in Roe v. Wade that the constitutional right to privacy, found in the Fourteenth Amendment's guarantee of liberty, was "broad enough to encompass a woman's right to terminate her pregnancy." ¹ Nineteen years later, in 1992, a very different Supreme Court held in Planned Parenthood of Southeastern Pennsylvania v. Casey that "the essential holding of Roe v. Wade should be retained and once again reaffirmed." ² In between these two landmark decisions, however, lay two decades of intense political battle.