The right of privacy… is broad enough to encompass a woman’s decision whether or not to terminate her pregnancy.

This line is from Justice Harry A. Blackmun’s majority opinion for the U.S. Supreme Court in Roe v. Wade (1973), the landmark decision that struck down a Texas law criminalizing most abortions. Writing for the Court, Blackmun located a constitutional “right of privacy” in the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment (drawing on earlier privacy cases) and treated that right as encompassing a pregnant woman’s decision whether to continue a pregnancy. The opinion then balanced that liberty interest against the state’s interests in maternal health and potential life, producing the well-known trimester framework that governed abortion regulation for decades until Roe was overruled in 2022.

The sentence encapsulates Roe’s core constitutional move: framing abortion not primarily as a question of criminal law or medical policy, but as a matter of individual liberty protected from undue state intrusion. By describing privacy as “broad enough” to include the abortion decision, Blackmun signals that the right is not limited to secrecy, but extends to decisional autonomy in intimate, bodily, and family matters. The phrasing also implies limits—privacy is expansive but not absolute—foreshadowing the opinion’s balancing approach, in which the state may regulate more heavily as pregnancy progresses and as its asserted interests become weightier.