Breyer, Sotomayor, and Kagan, JJ., dissenting
rights with a strong basis in the Constitution's most fundamental commitments; they did not, as the majority does here, take away a right that individuals have held, and relied on, for 50 years. To take that action based on a new and bare majority's declaration that two Courts got the result egregiously wrong? And to justify that action by reference to Barnette? Or to Brown—a case in which the Chief Justice also wrote an (11-page) opinion in which the entire Court could speak with one voice? These questions answer themselves.
Casey itself addressed both West Coast Hotel and Brown, and found that neither supported Roe's overruling. In West Coast Hotel, Casey explained, "the facts of economic life" had proved "different from those previously assumed." 505 U. S., at 862. And even though "Plessy was wrong the day it was decided," the passage of time had made that ever more clear to ever more citizens: "Society's understanding of the facts" in 1954 was "fundamentally different" than in 1896. Id., at 863. So the Court needed to reverse course. "In constitutional adjudication as elsewhere in life, changed circumstances may impose new obligations." Id., at 864. And because such dramatic change had occurred, the public could understand why the Court was acting. "[T]he Nation could accept each decision" as a "response to the Court's constitutional duty." Ibid. But that would not be true of a reversal of Roe—"[b]ecause neither the factual underpinnings of Roe's central holding nor our understanding of it has changed." 505 U. S., at 864.
That is just as much so today, because Roe and Casey continue to reflect, not diverge from, broad trends in American society. It is, of course, true that many Americans, including many women, opposed those decisions when issued and do so now as well. Yet the fact remains: Roe and Casey were the product of a profound and ongoing change in women's roles in the latter part of the 20th century. Only a dozen years before Roe, the Court described women as "the center
