Roe v. Wade in the context of "Abortion in the United States"

Medical ethics is an applied branch of ethics which analyzes the practice of clinical medicine and related scientific research. Medical ethics is based on a set of values that professionals can refer to in the case of any confusion or conflict. These values include the respect for autonomy, non-maleficence, beneficence, and justice. Such tenets may allow doctors, care providers, and families to create a treatment plan and work towards the same common goal. These four values are not ranked in order of importance or relevance and they all encompass values pertaining to medical ethics. However, a conflict may arise leading to the need for hierarchy in an ethical system, such that some moral elements overrule others with the purpose of applying the best moral judgement to a difficult medical situation. Medical ethics is particularly relevant in decisions regarding involuntary treatment and involuntary commitment.

There are several codes of conduct. The Hippocratic Oath discusses basic principles for medical professionals. This document dates back to the fifth century BCE. Both The Declaration of Helsinki (1964) and The Nuremberg Code (1947) are two well-known and well respected documents contributing to medical ethics. Other important markings in the history of medical ethics include Roe v. Wade in 1973 and the development of hemodialysis in the 1960s. With hemodialysis now available, but a limited number of dialysis machines to treat patients, an ethical question arose on which patients to treat and which ones not to treat, and which factors to use in making such a decision. More recently, new techniques for gene editing aiming at treating, preventing, and curing diseases utilizing gene editing, are raising important moral questions about their applications in medicine and treatments as well as societal impacts on future generations.

The Fourteenth Amendment (Amendment XIV) to the United States Constitution was adopted on July 9, 1868, as one of the Reconstruction Amendments. Considered one of the most consequential amendments, it addresses citizenship rights and equal protection under the law at all levels of government. The Fourteenth Amendment was a response to issues affecting freed slaves following the American Civil War, and its enactment was bitterly contested. States of the defeated Confederacy were required to ratify it to regain representation in Congress. The amendment, particularly its first section, is one of the most litigated parts of the Constitution, forming the basis for landmark Supreme Court decisions, such as Brown v. Board of Education (1954; prohibiting racial segregation in public schools), Loving v. Virginia (1967; ending interracial marriage bans), Roe v. Wade (1973; recognizing federal right to abortion until overturned in 2022), Bush v. Gore (2000; settling 2000 presidential election), Obergefell v. Hodges (2015; extending right to marry to same-sex couples), and Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard (2023; prohibiting affirmative action in most college admissions).

The amendment's first section includes the Citizenship Clause, Privileges or Immunities Clause, Due Process Clause, and Equal Protection Clause. The Citizenship Clause broadly defines citizenship, superseding the Supreme Court's decision in Dred Scott v. Sandford (1857), which held that Americans descended from African slaves could not become American citizens. The Privileges or Immunities Clause was interpreted in the Slaughter-House Cases (1873) as preventing states from impeding federal rights, such as the freedom of movement. The Due Process Clause builds on the Fifth Amendment to prohibit all levels of government from depriving people of life, liberty, or property without substantive and procedural due process. Additionally, the Due Process Clause supports the incorporation doctrine, by which portions of the Bill of Rights have been applied to the states. The Equal Protection Clause requires each state to provide equal protection under the law to all people, including non-citizens, within its jurisdiction.

The United States anti-abortion movement, also called the pro-life movement or right-to-life movement, is a movement in the United States that opposes induced abortion and advocates for the protection of fetuses. Advocates support legal prohibition or restriction on ethical, moral, or religious grounds, arguing that human life begins at conception and that the human zygote, embryo, or fetus is a person and therefore has a right to life. The anti-abortion movement includes a variety of organizations, with no single centralized decision-making body. There are diverse arguments and rationales for the anti-abortion stance. Some allow for some permissible abortions, including therapeutic abortions, in exceptional circumstances such as incest, rape, severe fetal defects, or when the woman's health is at risk.

Before the Supreme Court 1973 decisions in Roe v. Wade and Doe v. Bolton, anti-abortion views predominated and found expression in state laws which prohibited or restricted abortions in a variety of ways. (See Abortion in the United States.) The anti-abortion movement became politically active and dedicated to the reversal of the Roe v. Wade decision, which struck down most state laws restricting abortion in the first trimester of pregnancy.In the United States, the movement is associated with several Christian religious groups, especially the Catholic Church and Evangelical churches, and is frequently, but not exclusively, allied with the Republican Party. The movement is also supported by secular organizations (such as Secular Pro-Life) and non-mainstream anti-abortion feminists. The movement has campaigned to reverse Roe v. Wade and to promote legislative changes or constitutional amendments, such as the Human Life Amendment, that prohibit or at least broadly restrict abortion.

Fetal rights or foetal rights (alternatively prenatal rights) are the moral rights or legal rights of the human embryo or fetus under natural and civil law. The term fetal rights came into wide usage after Roe v. Wade, the 1973 landmark case that legalized abortion in the United States and was essentially overturned in 2022. The concept of fetal rights has evolved to include the issues of maternal substance use disorders, including alcohol use disorder and opioid use disorder. Most international human rights charters "clearly reject claims that human rights should attach from conception or any time before birth." While most international human rights instruments lack a universal inclusion of the fetus as a person for the purposes of human rights, the fetus is granted various rights in the constitutions and civil codes of some countries.

Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization, 597 U.S. 215 (2022), is a landmark decision of the United States Supreme Court in which the court held that the United States Constitution does not confer a right to abortion. The court's decision overruled both Roe v. Wade (1973) and Planned Parenthood v. Casey (1992), devolving to state governments the authority to regulate any aspect of abortion that federal law does not preempt, as "direct control of medical practice in the states is beyond the power of the federal government" and the federal government has no general police power over health, education, and welfare.

The case concerned the constitutionality of a 2018 Mississippi state law that banned most abortion operations after the first 15 weeks of pregnancy. Jackson Women's Health Organization—Mississippi's only abortion clinic at the time—had sued Thomas E. Dobbs, state health officer with the Mississippi State Department of Health, in March 2018. Lower courts had enjoined enforcement of the law. The injunctions were based on the ruling in Planned Parenthood v. Casey (1992), which had prevented states from banning abortion before fetal viability, generally within the first 24 weeks, on the basis that a woman's choice for abortion during that time is protected by the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.

The March for Life is an annual rally and march against the practice and legality of abortion, held in Washington, D.C., either on or around the anniversary of Roe v. Wade, a decision legalizing abortion nationwide which was issued in 1973 by the United States Supreme Court. The participants in the march have advocated the overturning of Roe v. Wade, which happened at the end of the case Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization on June 24, 2022. It is a major gathering of the anti-abortion movement in the United States and it is organized by the March for Life Education and Defense Fund.

Doe v. Bolton, 410 U.S. 179 (1973), was a decision of the Supreme Court of the United States overturning the abortion law of Georgia. The Supreme Court's decision was released on January 22, 1973, the same day as the decision in the better-known case of Roe v. Wade.

The Human Life Amendment is the name of multiple proposals to amend the United States Constitution that would have the effect of overturning the Supreme Court 1973 decision Roe v. Wade, which ruled that prohibitions against abortion were unconstitutional. All of these amendment proposals seek to overturn Roe v. Wade, but most of them go further by forbidding both Congress and the states from legalizing abortion. Some of the proposals define human life as beginning with conception or fertilization.

These amendments are sponsored or supported by United States anti-abortion movements and opposed by the United States abortion rights movement. As of August 2022, none of these proposals have succeeded though Roe v. Wade was overturned in full by the Supreme Court in Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization in 2022.