What did the Court say in Planned Parenthood v. Casey?
At least five (and maybe as many as seven) of the nine justices agreed that Roe v. Wade was wrongly decided. Prior to the Casey opinion, Justices Rehnquist, White, Scalia, Thomas, and Kennedy were believed to oppose Roe, while the positions of Justices O’Connor and Souter were less clear. Nonetheless, Justices O’Connor, Kennedy, and Souter, in an opinion known to lawyers as the “Casey plurality” refused to return the issue of abortion to the people. (A plurality opinion is an opinion in a case where a majority of the justices agree on the outcome, but they could not agree on why.) Instead, these three justices argued that the court must continue to protect abortion as a constitutional right because the American people had “organized intimate relationships and made choices that define their views of themselves and their places in society, in reliance on the availability of abortion in the event that contraception should fail.” The Casey plurality held that “viability marks the earliest
