"In 1973, in the landmark case of Roe vs. Wade, the United States Supreme Court ruled that the Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution provided a fundamental right for women to obtain abortions. The Supreme Court held that the "right to privacy," established by the Court’s precedents in the contraception cases of the 1960’s and early 70’s, assured the freedom of a person to abort unless the state had a "compelling interest" in preventing the abortion. The Court then held that, though the state had an interest in protecting fetal life, this interest did not become "compelling" (i.e. adequate to allow banning an abortion) until fetal viability occurred in the third trimester of pregnancy. Thus, all the state abortion laws that regulated abortion during the first six months of pregnancy (except for the purpose of protecting maternal health during the second trimester) were invalidated. 
    What this means is that before Roe v. Wade in 1973, the legality of abortion essentially rested with the legislatures of the several states. However, in 1973, the Supreme Court made it an issue of federal constitutional law by holding that abortion was a constitutional right. From then on, whether abortion was legal or not depended on the Supreme Court’s decisions as to how broad the Roe right to abortion actually was. State legislatures continue to have a say only in the little room the Court has left outside the scope of the abortion right."

    The attempt to place limits on the types of abortion procedures performed was first heard in the Supreme Court in the Planned Parenthood of Central Missouri v. Danforth, 428 U.S. 52 (1976) case.  “That case dealt with saline amniocentesis abortions and found that a ban on them was unconstitutional,” (Abortion Law Homepage, p.1).  The main points to that case was that it seemingly made illegal a procedure which was deemed safer with respect to maternal mortality and was viewed by the justices as an “unreasonable arbitrary regulation designed to inhibit…the vast majority of abortions after the first 12 weeks,” (Danforth, at 78-79).

    Several procedure ban cases were heard in the United States (federal) Circuit Court of Appeals, which is the midway level between the trial level and the U.S. Supreme Court.  The sixth circuit court of appeals held that Ohio’s ban on partial-birth abortions was unconstitutional in Women’s Medical Professional Corp. v. Voinovich, 130 F.3d 187 (6th Cir. 1997). The fourth circuit court of appeals hear the Richmond Medical Center for Women v. Gilmore, 144 F.3d 326 (4th Cir. 1998), but their motion was denied by the Supreme Court.  In a much different outcome, in October of 1999, the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals upheld the constitutionality of the Illinois and Wisconsin procedure ban statues in The Hope Clinic, et al. v. James E. Ryan, Attorney General of Illinois, et al., No 98-1726 (7th Cir., October 26, 1999). 

    It was with the public’s great interest, therefore, to hear the Supreme Court’s ruling of the Stenberg v. Carhart decision.  This was the Supreme Court’s first partial-birth abortion case, and it’s first major decision since 1992’s Casey case.