Opinion of the Court
cisis protection.[1] This unprecedented assertion is, at bottom, a radical claim to power. By disclaiming any need to consider broad swaths of individuals' interests, the Court arrogates to itself the authority to overrule established legal principles without even acknowledging the costs of its decisions for the individuals who live under the law, costs that this Court's stare decisis doctrine instructs us to privilege when deciding whether to change course.
The majority claims that the reliance interests women have in Roe and Casey are too "intangible" for the Court to consider, even if it were inclined to do so. Ante, at 65. This is to ignore as judges what we know as men and women. The interests women have in Roe and Casey are perfectly, viscerally concrete. Countless women will now make different decisions about careers, education, relationships, and whether to try to become pregnant than they would have when Roe served as a backstop. Other women will carry pregnancies to term, with all the costs and risk of harm that involves, when they would previously have chosen to obtain an abortion. For millions of women, Roe and Casey have been critical in giving them control of their bodies and their lives. Closing our eyes to the suffering today's decision will impose will not make that suffering disappear. The majority cannot escape its obligation to "count[] the cost [s]" of its decision by invoking the "conflicting arguments" of "contending sides." Casey, 505 U. S., at 855; ante, at 65. Stare decis is requires that the Court calculate the costs of a decision's repudiation on those who have relied on the decision,
- ↑ The majority's sole citation for its "concreteness" requirement is Payne v. Tennessee, 501 U. S. 808 (1991). But Payne merely discounted reliance interests in cases involving "procedural and evidentiary rules." Id., at 828. Unlike the individual right at stake here, those rules do "not alter primary conduct." Hohn v. United States, 524 U. S. 236, 252 (1998). Accordingly, they generally "do not implicate the reliance interests of private parties at all. Alleyne v. United States, 570 U. S. 99, 119 (2013) (Sotomayor, J., concurring).
