For 49 years, the Supreme Court of the United States upheld the notion that women could obtain an abortion, could exercise their rights to privacy, to autonomy, to medical and emotional agency, and as guaranteed by the 14th amendment, to exercise liberty and pursue happiness. The landmark 1973, 7-2 Roe v. Wade ruling provided that the right to abortion in the United States was inherent in the framework of the constitution’s 14th amendment and Due Process clause.Irrespective of the state by state patchwork of abortion legislation, reproductive rights endured because of the doctrine of stare decisis, which prioritizes precedent to preserve a judicial process “founded in the law rather than in the proclivities of individuals.” With Planned Parenthood of Southeastern Pennsylvania v. Casey, in 1992, the Supreme Court reaffirmed Roe and established “undue burden” as a limitation on a state’s authority to legislate abortion by imposing time limits on abortion access.By 2022, amid an ideologically changing Supreme Court, the ground trembled.

A litany of Conservative states began testing the bounds of both Roe and Casey, in anticipation of the Supreme Court’s ruling in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health—their abortion restrictions grew more callous, oppressive, and impractical. This Supreme Court, with its new Conservative majority, was poised to rule in the favor of these states. Dobbs was the vehicle by which Roe could be overturned. Led by Trump-appointed, agenda-toting newcomers—Justices Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett—in addition to the Court’s veterans and Republican party sycophants—Justices Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas, this Supreme Court did just that.

Thirty years after Casey, almost to the day, the Supreme Court struck down Roe and Casey through Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization ruling, abandoning 49 years of precedent and the bedrock principle of stare decisis. Jackson’s Women’s Health Organization sued Mississippi Dept. of Health Officer, Thomas Dobbs, arguing against the constitutionality of Mississippi’s Gestational Act, which effectively limited abortion to 15 weeks in all cases except the all too ambiguous “medical emergency or in the case of a severe fetal abnormality”. Dobbs appealed to the Supreme Court after the Federal District Court ruled that Mississippi’s law was a violation of previous SCOTUS rulings prohibiting “pre-viability” restrictions, precedent set by Casey. The lower courts adhered to stare decisis and the SCOTUS dissent called Casey “precedent about precedent”. Each layer of this case desperately clung to the principle of stare decisis and the reality that there was no substantive reason to deviate from this principle.

Though it is essential to the role of the Supreme Court, there have been cases that demanded a deliberate rejection of stare decisis—namely, the landmark, Brown v. Board of Education, wherein the Supreme Court unanimously overruled Plessy v. Ferguson, declaring “separate but equal” unconstitutional. However, in Dobbs v. Jackson, stare decisis was essential. The majority’s haphazard attempts to limit the scope of their opinions’ impact on other precedent, like Griswold v. Connecticut or Obergefell v. Hodges was inadequate. While they argue that this ruling has no bearing on other Due Process cases, as long as abortion is not at issue, their opinion subverts stare decisis and erodes the framework set by the Fourteenth amendment. Justice Clarence Thomas, in his concurring opinion, undermines their apparent limitation, entirely. Thomas endorses the majority’s appraisal of Roe’s unconstitutionality, but goes even further, opining, “in future cases, we should reconsider all of this Court’s substantive due process precedents, including Griswold, Lawrence, and Obergefell,” all of which are rulings he explicitly deems “erroneous.” Several landmark cases rely on Due Process—Griswold declared contraception a protected privacy right in 1965 and Obergefell ruled marriage equality a “fundamental liberty” in 2015.

The debate over stare decisis and its bearing on judicial review permeated the Dobbs opinion. Justice Alito writes for the majority that Casey “deployed a novel version” of stare decisis and neglected to provide new justifications to substantiate abortion rights and “bolster Roe’s reasoning.” However, the dissent argues that Casey and Roe provided a navigable legal framework that balanced competing interests and litigation, while preserving the crux of abortion rights, which is the constitutional extension of the right to one though the Due Process clause. The majority opinion goes on to state that abortion rights have no constitutionality, but this obfuscates their justification for abandoning stare decisis in Casey because stare decisis, in part, protects previous rulings that interpret legal rights and protections from the constitution. Justices Breyer, Sotomayor, and Kagan, rebuke the majority’s assertion that there has never been reason to attribute abortion rights to the constitution’s protections of liberty, writing “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.” They underscore the ruling’s implications by writing, “either the mass of the majority's opinion is hypocrisy, or additional constitutional rights are under threat.” By ignoring stare decisis, they argue, the majority is abandoning precedent, in Roe, and “precedent about precedent” from Casey.

Despite these implications, the majority insisted that Dobbs had no bearing on other landmark rulings that relied on a similar interpretation of the Fourteenth amendment’s Due Process clause. Dobbs v. Jackson was largely confined to the domain of Roe and Casey, but it, too, set a precedent, one that “makes the court appear not restrained but aggressive, not modest but grasping.” Justices Kagan, Breyer, and Sotomayer go on to quote an unheeded warning from the Casey opinion, that by “overruling Roe…the Court would pay a “terrible price’.”

Through Dobbs, the Supreme Court’s sweeping assault on rights derived from the Due Process clause of the Fourteenth amendment, will endure, as the first revocation of a fundamental right by the Supreme Court and serve as a framework for further regression. By overruling Roe and Casey, Justices Breyer, Sotomayor, and Kagan contend, the Supreme Court jeopardizes other unenumerated rights, like those derived from substantive due process, including the right to privacy, contraception, interracial marriage, same-sex marriage, among others and “undermines the Court’s legitimacy.” The legitimacy of the Supreme Court is also central to the dissent. Over the past decade, the balance of this Court has shifted and was eventually upended by a conservative majority. Despite subtle attempts to present themselves as unhampered by the burdens of political agendas, quid pro quo appointments, and dogmatic jurisprudence, this Court made no attempt to disprove these public sentiments. Casey and its accompanying majority opinion is quoted profusely in the Dobbs dissent. Among the most notable points, however, was its emphatic articulation of the power of the Supreme Court. With that power comes a responsibility incumbent upon its justices to uphold the “promise of constancy” and preserve the Court’s reputation as a bastion of integrity and jurisprudence.

The Supreme Court is defined by its role as a distant lighthouse, presiding quietly, but authoritatively, over the vast, complicated, labyrinthian judiciary. Cases like Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization are a litmus test of the Supreme Court’s ability to fulfill this obligation. If their abandonment of stare decisis in deciding the fate of a fundamental right, a right rooted in substantive due process and responsible for facilitating women’s amelioration, both socially and economically, is any indication, then the Court has, undoubtedly, failed.