Roe v. Wade: America's Landmark Ruling

Dan Snow's History Hit

History Hit

History

4.7 • 12.9K Ratings

🗓️ 21 January 2022

⏱️ 34 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

On January 22, 1973, the U.S. Supreme Court struck down a Texas law banning abortion, effectively legalising the procedure nationwide. The court held that a woman’s right to an abortion was implicit in the right to privacy protected by the 14th Amendment to the Constitution.

Roe v. Wade, involved the case of Norma McCorvey “Jane Roe”, who in 1969, wanted an abortion but lived in Texas, where abortion was illegal except when necessary to save the mother's life. Her attorneys, Sarah Weddington and Linda Coffee, filed a lawsuit on her behalf in U.S. federal court against her local district attorney, Henry Wade, alleging that Texas's abortion laws were unconstitutional.

Linda Greenhouse has reported on and written about the Supreme Court for The New York Times for more than four decades, earning numerous accolades, including a Pulitzer Prize. Currently, Linda writes an opinion column on the court and teaches at Yale Law School - today, she joins Dan on the podcast. They discuss the legality of abortion prior to the 19th century, the details of the court ruling, and the legacy and current challenges to Roe v. Wade, which continues to divide Americans today.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello everybody, welcome to Dan Snow's History It. On the 22nd of January it is the 49th anniversary
0:07.0	of the US Supreme Court's landmark ruling in the case of Row vs. Wade. Jane Row was in
0:14.8	fact called Norma McCorvey, she was a Texan woman in her early 20s who sought to terminate
0:19.3	the unwanted pregnancy in 1969. Her case was eventually after she'd had her child in fact
0:25.2	taken up by the Supreme Court and they decided to strike down the Texas law which banned
0:30.2	abortion and that effectively legalised the procedure nationwide. And that was the starting
0:36.6	gun for a major partisan culture war that rages to this day and may be nearing a successful
0:43.5	conclusion, those who wish to see Row vs. Wade overturned.
0:48.9	Tell me all about it. I've got one of the greats Linda Greenhouse who worked at New York
0:52.7	Times for four decades, she's written about the Supreme Court, she teaches at the Yale Law
0:57.2	School, she's very blitchess written a book about the remodeling the Supreme Court in the
1:01.2	last months and weeks of Donald Trump's regime and she's done to tell me all about Row vs.
1:06.8	Wade. Fascinating stuff, if you wish to listen to more of these podcasts without the ads
1:11.6	we go back five years, we've got five years of these podcasts, in fact we're starting
1:14.7	to do the same amount of histories again like that we did the 70th now we did the 75th.
1:19.1	Anyway, so that's how long we've been around, you can check them out only, they're exclusively
1:22.9	available at our digital history show, history hit TV, you get it on your TV, on your
1:28.4	phone, on your tablet, get it anywhere you want, it gets all of their podcasts out the
1:32.8	ads but also it's like Netflix for history. It's a whole history channel out there hundreds
1:37.0	of hours of history documentaries more going up all the time, I'm currently in the Royal
1:41.0	Armories in Leeds in the north of England where I'm going through many of the most canonical
1:47.4	satellite words, iconic weapons from English and British history, almost pulled my shoulder
	...

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