Former Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, the first woman appointed to the United States Supreme Court, has died at age 93.
Though appointed to the court by pro-life President Ronald Reagan in 1981, just eight years following the Roe v. Wade decision, and considered a “constitutional conservative,” O’Connor was a pivotal player in keeping abortion legal despite claiming to be personally pro-life. In 1992, she co-authored the court’s decision in Planned Parenthood v. Casey, which upheld Roe and created a new benchmark for abortion laws. Following Casey, any pro-life law could be invalidated if it imposed an “undue burden” on women.
Casey centered around a 1989 Pennsylvania law that placed a 24-hour waiting period on abortion, required minors to get parental consent for an abortion, and established informed consent requirements. It also required married women to notify their spouse if they planned to have an abortion. Despite O’Connor’s personal opposition to abortion, in Casey, she argued that requiring husbands to be notified of an abortion put a “substantial obstacle in the path of a woman seeking an abortion before the fetus attains viability.”
Casey could have been the case that overturned Roe or even recognized that there is a right to life, law professor Mary Ziegler told Vox in 2018. Instead, Casey upheld Roe and created confusion over what qualifies as an ‘undue burden’. Ziegler explained, “[Casey] in many ways not only changed the law, but gave both sides a road map for what they would want to do going forward.”
O’Connor was, however, skeptical of Roe‘s use of trimesters as the benchmark for legalized abortion, saying that it was akin to “asking courts to make medical decisions.” Before Casey, O’Connor dissented from the 1983 pro-abortion Supreme Court opinion in City of Akron v. Akron Center for Reproductive Health, in which she criticized Roe‘s trimester and viability standards for legalized abortion.
“The Roe framework,” she wrote in her dissent, “is clearly on a collision course with itself. As the medical risks of various abortion procedures decrease, the point at which the state may regulate for reasons of maternal health is moved further forward to actual childbirth. As medical science becomes better able to provide for the separate existence of the fetus, the point of viability is moved further back toward conception.”
In June 2022, the Court overturned both Roe and Casey in its decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization.
“It is challenging to be a ‘first,'” O’Connor wrote in her 2013 history of the Supreme Court. “The first woman on the Court was carefully scrutinized by the press, the government, the lawyers, and the public,” she said. “It is not always comfortable to be the object of so much attention. But the appointment of a woman to the Court opened countless doors to women all across the country. For that I am grateful.”
O’Connor stepped down from the court in 2005 following her husband’s diagnosis of Alzheimer’s. She, herself, announced she would withdraw from public life in 2018 after her own diagnosis with dementia.
