Syllabus
When Casey revisited Roe almost 20 years later, it reaffirmed Roe’s central holding, but pointedly refrained from endorsing most of its reasoning. The Court abandoned any reliance on a privacy right and instead grounded the abortion right entirely on the Fourteenth Amendment’s Due Process Clause. 505 U. S., at 846. The controlling opinion criticized and rejected Roe’s trimester scheme, 505 U. S., at 872, and substituted a new and obscure “undue burden” test. Casey, in short, either refused to reaffirm or rejected important aspects of Roe’s analysis, failed to remedy glaring deficiencies in Roe’s reasoning, endorsed what it termed Roe’s central holding while suggesting that a majority might not have thought it was correct, provided no new support for the abortion right other than Roe’s status as precedent, and imposed a new test with no firm grounding in constitutional text, history, or precedent. Pp. 45–56.
(3) Workability. Deciding whether a precedent should be overruled depends in part on whether the rule it imposes is workable—that is, whether it can be understood and applied in a consistent and predictable manner. Casey’s “undue burden” test has scored poorly on the workability scale. The Casey plurality tried to put meaning into the “undue burden” test by setting out three subsidiary rules, but these rules created their own problems. And the difficulty of applying Casey’s new rules surfaced in that very case. Compare 505 U. S., at 881–887, with id., at 920–922 (Stevens, J., concurring in part and dissenting in part). The experience of the Courts of Appeals provides further evidence that Casey’s “line between” permissible and unconstitutional restrictions “has proved to be impossible to draw with precision.” Janus, 585 U. S., at ___. Casey has generated a long list of Circuit conflicts. Continued adherence to Casey’s unworkable “undue burden” test would undermine, not advance, the “evenhanded, predictable, and consistent development of legal principles.” Payne, 501 U. S., at 827. Pp. 56–62.
(4) Effect on other areas of law. Roe and Casey have led to the distortion of many important but unrelated legal doctrines, and that effect provides further support for overruling those decisions. See Ramos v. Louisiana, 590 U. S. ___, ___ (Kavanaugh, J., concurring in part). Pp. 62–63.
