Breyer, Sotomayor, and Kagan, JJ., dissenting
not on those who have disavowed it. See Casey, 505 U. S., at 855.
More broadly, the majority's approach to reliance cannot be reconciled with our Nation's understanding of constitutional rights. The majority's insistence on a "concrete," economic showing would preclude a finding of reliance on a wide variety of decisions recognizing constitutional rights—such as the right to express opinions, or choose whom to marry, or decide how to educate children. The Court, on the majority's logic, could transfer those choices to the State without having to consider a person's settled understanding that the law makes them hers. That must be wrong. All those rights, like the right to obtain an abortion, profoundly affect and, indeed, anchor individual lives. To recognize that people have relied on these rights is not to dabble in abstractions, but to acknowledge some of the most "concrete" and familiar aspects of human life and liberty. Ante, at 64.
All those rights, like the one here, also have a societal dimension, because of the role constitutional liberties play in our structure of government. See, e.g., Dickerson, 530 U. S., at 443 (recognizing that Miranda "warnings have become part of our national culture" in declining to overrule Miranda v. Arizona, 384 U. S. 436 (1966)). Rescinding an individual right in its entirety and conferring it on the State, an action the Court takes today for the first time in history, affects all who have relied on our constitutional system of government and its structure of individual liberties protected from state oversight. Roe and Casey have of course aroused controversy and provoked disagreement. But the right those decisions conferred and reaffirmed is part of society's understanding of constitutional law and of how the Court has defined the liberty and equality that women are entitled to claim.
After today, young women will come of age with fewer
