Planned Parenthood v. Casey
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| Planned Parenthood v. Casey | ||||||||
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 Supreme Court of the United States | ||||||||
| Argued April 22, 1992 Decided June 29, 1992 | ||||||||
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| A Pennsylvania law that required spousal notification prior to obtaining an abortion was invalid under the Fourteenth Amendment because it created an undue burden on married women seeking an abortion. Parental notification, informed consent, and 24-hour waiting period were constitutionally valid regulations. Judgment of Second Circuit affirmed in part and reversed in part. | ||||||||
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| Laws applied | ||||||||
| U.S. Const. Amend. XIV; 18 Pa. Cons. Stat. §§ 3203, 3205-09, 3214 (Pennsylvania Abortion Control Act of 1982) |
Planned Parenthood of Southeastern Pennsylvania v. Casey, 505 U.S. 833 (1992) was a case decided by the Supreme Court of the United States in which the constitutionality of several Pennsylvania state regulations regarding abortion was challenged. The Court's lead plurality opinion upheld the right to have an abortion but lowered the standard for analyzing restrictions of that right, invalidating one regulation but upholding the others.
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Background of the case
Four provisions of the Pennsylvania Abortion Control Act of 1982 were being challenged as unconstitutional under Roe v. Wade, which first recognized a constitutional right to have an abortion in the liberty protected by the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. The "informed consent" rule under the Act required doctors to provide women with information about the health risks and possible complications of having an abortion before one could be performed. The "spousal notification" rule required women to give prior notice to their husbands, and the "parental notification" rule required the same of minors to their parents. The fourth provision imposed a 24-hour waiting period before obtaining an abortion. When the case came before the Court on review, Pennsylvania defended the Act in part by urging the Court to overturn Roe as having been wrongly decided.
The case was a seminal one in the history of abortion rights in the United States, as it was the first direct challenge of Roe since the liberal Justice Brennan was replaced in 1990 with the Bush-appointed and ostensibly conservative Justice Souter. Furthermore, Justice Thurgood Marshall had recently been replaced on the Court with the appointment of Clarence Thomas, leaving the Court with eight Republican-appointed justices - five of whom appointed by Presidents Reagan and Bush, both of whom had campaigned as abortion opponents. Finally, the only remaining Democratic appointee - Justice Byron White - had been one of the two dissenters from the original Roe decision.
Given these circumstances, even most pro choice advocates expected Roe to be overruled and were gearing up for a subsequent State-by-State campaign against particular laws. However, Souter defied expectations and voted to uphold the constitutional right to have an abortion, preserving the precarious 5-4 Court vote in favor, though still changing the Court's abortion rights jurisprudence.
The Court's opinions
Casey is a divided judgment, in that none of the Justices' opinions was joined by a majority of justices. However, the plurality decision jointly written by Justices Souter, O'Connor, and Kennedy is recognized as the lead opinion with precedential weight because each of its parts were concurred in by at least two other Justices, albeit different ones for each part.
Justices Blackmun and Stevens concurred with the parts of the Court's decision that upheld Roe and invalidated one of the Pennsylvania regulations. On the other side, Chief Justice Rehnquist and Justice Scalia each wrote opinions concurring in the parts of the Court's decisions that weakened Roe and upheld abortion regulations and dissented from the rest. Both Rehnquist and Scalia joined each other's concurrence/dissent, and Justice White joined both.
The O'Connor, Kennedy and Souter plurality opinion
Though the plurality opinion stated that it was upholding what it called the "essential holding" of Roe, it did not leave it intact. The Court emphasized the right to abortion as "grounded in the general sense of liberty" under the Fourteenth Amendment, rather than recognizing a general right to privacy that had been implied in previous cases.
However, the Court overturned the strict trimester formula used in Roe to weigh the woman's interest in obtaining an abortion against the State's interest in the life of the fetus. Continuing advancements in medical technology meant that at the time Casey was decided, a fetus might be considered viable at 22 or 23 weeks rather than at the 28 weeks that was more common at the time of Roe. The Court recognized viability as the point at which the State interest in the life of the fetus outweighs the rights of the woman and abortion may be banned entirely.
The Court also replaced the heightened scrutiny of abortion regulations under Roe, which was standard for fundamental rights in the Court's case law, with a lesser "undue burden" standard previously unknown in the Court's case law. A legal restriction posing an undue burden was defined as one having "the purpose or effect of placing a substantial obstacle in the path of a woman seeking an abortion of a nonviable fetus."
Applying this new standard to the Pennsylvania Act under challenge, the Court struck the spousal notification requirement, stating that it gave too much power to husbands over their wives and would worsen situations of spousal abuse. The Court upheld the State's 24 hour waiting period, informed consent, and parental notification requirements, holding that none constituted an undue burden.
See Also
- Roe v. Wade, 410 U.S. 113 (1973)
- Griswold v. Connecticut, 381 U.S. 479 (1965)
- Doe v. Bolton, 410 U.S. 179 (1973)
- Webster v. Reproductive Health Services, 492 U.S. 490 (1989)
- Sex-related court cases in the United States
External link
- FindLaw: PLANNED PARENTHOOD OF SOUTHEASTERN PA. v. CASEY, 505 U.S. 833 (1992) (http://caselaw.lp.findlaw.com/scripts/getcase.pl?court=US&vol=505&invol=833)