January 22 · This Day in America
By a vote of 7 to 2, the Supreme Court rules in Roe v. Wade that the Constitution's protection of liberty includes a woman's decision to end a pregnancy, and strikes down a Texas abortion ban. Justice Harry Blackmun writes the majority opinion, building a trimester framework meant to balance a woman's right against the state's interests. The case had begun with a single pregnant woman in Dallas, recorded as "Jane Roe." The ruling reshapes American law and American life, and it does not settle the argument — it becomes the argument, for half a century, in courtrooms and campaigns and kitchens. In 2022 the Court reverses itself in Dobbs and returns the question to the states. Few decisions in the nation's history have been so consequential, so contested, or so personal to so many. This is the day the long fight over it truly began.
Source: www.oyez.org
Also on this day · 1973
While the country absorbs the Roe decision, the news interrupts itself: Lyndon Baines Johnson is dead. The 36th president — the man of the Great Society and the Voting Rights Act and Vietnam — suffers a fatal heart attack at his Texas ranch at 64. Two of the era's defining stories, a landmark ruling and the passing of a giant, land in the same hour of the same news broadcast. History rarely double-books a day like this.
Source: www.washingtonpost.com