Answer:
Roe v. Wade is the name of the case of 1973, by which the Supreme Court of the United States decriminalized - by a divided decision of 7 against 2 - induced abortion in that country.
In 1970, newly graduated lawyers from the University of Texas Law School, Linda Coffee and Sarah Weddington, filed a lawsuit in Texas representing Norma L. McCorvey ("Jane Roe"). McCorvey maintained that her pregnancy had been the product of an abuse. The District Attorney for Dallas County, Texas, Henry Wade, represented the State of Texas, which opposed abortion. The District Court ruled in favor of Jane Roe, but refused to establish a restriction against abortion laws.
The case was appealed on repeated occasions until it finally reached the Supreme Court of Justice of the United States, which finally decided in 1973 that women, protected by the right to privacy - under the "due process clause" of the Fourteenth Amendment - could choose whether or not to continue with the pregnancy; that right to privacy was considered a fundamental right under the protection of the US Constitution and therefore could not be legislated against by any state.
"Jane Roe" gave birth to her daughter while the case had not yet been decided. The baby was given up for adoption. Roe v. Wade was finally decided by the Supreme Court of the United States, leading to a landmark decision on abortion. According to this decision, most anti-abortion laws in the United States violated the constitutional right to privacy under the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment of the Constitution. The decision forced to modify all federal and state laws that proscribed or restricted abortion and that were contrary to the new decision.
This decision of the Court was interpreted as the decriminalization of abortion for the 50 states of the Union.
In 1995 Norma McCorvey regretted her actions and acknowledged that part of her testimony at the trial was not true. McCorvey alleges that she became a "pawn" for two ambitious young lawyers who were looking for a plaintiff who could change the legislation that prohibited abortion in the State of Texas. Sarah Weddington, the lawyer who litigated Roe v. Wade in the Supreme Court, explained in a speech at the Institute of Educational Ethics in Oklahoma, why she used the false charges of sexual abuse, up to the Supreme Court: "My conduct may not have been totally ethical. But I did it because of what I thought were good reasons". In 2005, she asked the Supreme Court to review the 1973 ruling, arguing that the case should be seen again due to new evidence of the harm that the procedure causes to the victims, but the request was denied.
