Congressional Digest

Excerpt

For 19 years after the Supreme Court’s landmark decision in Roe v. Wade (1973) legalizing abortion across the Nation, States were largely prohibited from placing limits on the procedure during the first trimester of pregnancy. That changed in the 1992 Planned Parenthood v. Casey ruling, in which the Court upheld a Pennsylvania law that imposed a 24-hour wait period for abortions and parental consent for minors seeking the service, but struck down a requirement that women notify their spouses. Rather than subjecting abortion regulations to strict legal scrutiny, a narrow Court majority held that such measures ar…