The Right to Choose

The decision to have a child in the US was rarely left to a woman before 1973. In most states, laws regulating abortion were not based on public health or constitutional principles, but on religious doctrine, paternalism, or outdated medical assumptions. Abortion was criminalized outright in thirty states, and thirteen others permitted it only under narrow exceptions, such as to save the mother’s life. In practice, this meant that most American women — regardless of education, income, or marital status — had no recognized legal authority over the most intimate decision of their lives: whether or not to bear a child.
For millions of American women, these laws were about more than reproductive choice, they represented an outright theft of their personal autonomy. If women had no legal right to decide whether or when to have children, then their homes could arguably become the site of their involuntary confinement. From their perspective, the right to control their bodies was never just about morality or even medicine, it was about power, and who had the right to wield it.

Behind Closed Doors

When the Supreme Court handed down its decision in Roe v. Wade in January 1973, it didn’t invent the right to abortion. What it did was recognize the Constitutional right to privacy in the Fourteenth Amendment’s Due Process Clause. The court’s decision didn’t come out of nowhere. It was a sort of logical procession from earlier cases that had already expanded the idea of privacy to inside the home. In 1965, Griswold v. Connecticut struck down a ban on birth control for married couples on the grounds that marriage was entitled to a private space the state couldn’t enter. A few years later, in Eisenstadt v. Baird, that same protection was extended to unmarried people, making privacy an individual right. Those cases cleared the path for Roe to draw the line even more sharply at the threshold of the home and forbidding the state to trespass.
Supreme Court Justice Harry Blackmun acknowledged in his majority opinion that the state’s interest in protecting potential life did not override a woman’s right to make decisions about her own body, particularly in the first trimester of pregnancy. The court divided pregnancy into trimesters with a graduated approach to state regulation. Roe placed a woman’s choice to end a pregnancy in the first trimester squarely within the private sphere and shielded it from state interference. As pregnancy advanced, the state was allowed a growing role — first in regulating the woman’s health, and later in protecting the potential life of the fetus. Roe dramatically shifted the issue of abortion from a medical or moral dilemma into a question of liberty itself. The decision reshaped both the law and the balance of power balance by establishing the boundary between public and private, state and home.

No Permission Needed

Roe’s impact extended well beyond hospitals and clinics. The decision reshaped how women spoke about pregnancy at home, in marriage, in parenting, and even with their doctors. Before, women nervously discussed an unwanted pregnancy with euphemisms like “trouble” or “taking care of something.” The new legal protection gave them the choice to speak plainly, or even to say nothing at all. For the first time, a pregnant woman didn’t need to ask a man, her parents, or a hospital review board for permission to control her own body. The decision to have a child was hers alone, and so was the choice to talk about it.
For all its constitutional grounding, of course, Roe didn’t eliminate the practical or cultural burdens that came with abortion. Many states, especially in the South and the Midwest, began looking for workarounds and loopholes to limit women’s rights to control their own bodies. In a concerted effort to discourage women from having abortions, new state regulations imposed waiting periods, parental consent, and required women to attend mandatory counseling sessions before getting abortions. Some of these restrictions were later challenged and struck down; but others were upheld. Rulings like Planned Parenthood v. Casey (1992), for example, kept Roe’s core tenets, but replaced its trimester framework with an “undue burden” standard that allowed states to enforce waiting periods and require parental consent forms as long as women were not unduly prevented access to an abortion.
Even with these caveats, though, Roe marked a turning point in women’s lives and gave them a legal foothold to gain other rights, as well. Women could now fight for the right to sterilization, access to birth control, and for the ability to sue in cases of medical abuse. Roe simultaneously established that bodily decisions were private, but also that they had public and political significance.

Blueprints for Liberation

The home had always been central to feminist debate and was often framed as a site of duty and obligation. But Roe inspired women to consider a new perspective that examined the home’s potential as a refuge. Roe was an opportunity for women to rethink the power dynamic between public and private and to reimagine the home as a zone of protected autonomy.
This shift in thinking was prompted by the court’s language in the decision — specifically, its emphasis on liberty and privacy. Roe established that women were not merely caregivers, wives, or mothers — they were legal citizens with rights that the state was constitutionally bound to respect. Once this concept took hold, it rippled outward. Women began to seize new leverage in family law, employment law, and health care. This new understanding not only helped women restructure their daily schedules and improve work-home balance, but it also emboldened them to take up the legal fight against marital rape, and to demand equitable health insurance from employers.
In a way, Roe became part of the basic architecture of modern feminism by laying a constitutional foundation to broadly reimagine gender roles. The decision didn’t solve everything or eliminate gender inequality, but it gave American women a solid framework from which to wage the fight.

The Walls Close In

Of course, no ruling, no matter how sweeping can change public opinion overnight or prevent cultural backlash. Roe’s passing immediately and predictably galvanized conservative activists who saw the decision not as a privacy victory but as a moral affront and a federal overreach. For them, the home was not a refuge of personal autonomy, it was the bedrock of traditional family values, and Roe represented a direct attack on its foundations.
Phyllis Schlafly, the conservative author, and activist who was busy leading the charge against the Equal Rights Amendment when Roe passed, saw the ruling as just another attempt by feminists to erode the moral order of traditional family values and ultimately bring down the American way of life. Schlafly and others framed abortion not as a private matter but as a public crisis and the onslaught of a dangerous cultural scourge that devalued motherhood and mocked traditional gender roles. Her campaign was a notable force against women’s rights and was critical in helping to forge a political alliance between religious conservatives and the Republican Party that would shape American politics for decades to come.
Roe had transformed the home, once idealized as a family’s sanctuary, with man firmly installed at the head, into a battleground for power. Who belonged there? Who controlled what happened inside? And who had the power to speak publicly for the people who lived there?

Will The Structure Hold

The story of Roe is not just a legal history — it is a story about power, individual privacy, and the walls we build around our lives to control who is allowed in and who may leave. Roe reshaped how women related to the state, to the culture, to their families, and to themselves. But it fell far short of solving the problem of women’s inequality. For even as women gained new rights on paper, a growing conservative movement was busy mobilizing to stop them from exercising them in their daily lives. The concurrent battle over the rise and stall of the Equal Rights Amendment and decade-long backlash it provoked would reveal just how deeply contested the idea of equality remained in 1970s America.

Notes
Roe v. Wade, 410 U.S. 113 (1973).
Leslie J. Reagan, When Abortion Was a Crime: Women, Medicine, and Law in the United States, 1867–1973 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 1–3.
Griswold v. Connecticut, 381 U.S. 479 (1965).
Eisenstadt v. Baird, 405 U.S. 438 (1972).
Mary Ziegler, After Roe: The Lost History of the Abortion Debate (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2015), 14–22.
Planned Parenthood of Southeastern Pennsylvania v. Casey, 505 U.S. 833 (1992).
Linda Greenhouse and Reva B. Siegel, “Before (and After) Roe v. Wade: New Questions About Backlash,” Yale Law Journal 120, no. 8 (June 2011): 2028–87.
Phyllis Schlafly, A Choice Not an Echo (Alton, IL: Pere Marquette Press, 1964).
Donald T. Critchlow, Phyllis Schlafly and Grassroots Conservatism: A Woman’s Crusade (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005), 169–202.