Forty years after the Roe v. Wade decision the United States continues to have one of the most extreme abortion regimes in the world. Yet we’re often led to believe that Roe merely legalized abortion in the first three months of pregnancy. The trouble is that the Roe Court actually said abortion must be allowed for any reason in the next three months as well. It then said laws against abortion must have a broad health exception even in the final “trimester,” but only described its breadth in the little known companion case, Doe v. Bolton, decided the same day. In Doe, the Court announced that health, for the purposes of late-term abortion law, would be synonymous with the mother’s “physical, emotional, psychological, familial … wellbeing”– in other words, every reason a pregnant woman could give for seeking an abortion in the first place.

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