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For nearly half a century, the Supreme Court’s 1973 decision in Roe v. Wade stood as a landmark of American law. It established that a person’s choice to have an abortion was a fundamental right, protected from government interference by a constitutional right to privacy.
In 2022, the Supreme Court’s decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization explicitly overturned Roe and declared that the U.S. Constitution provides no right to abortion, returning authority to regulate or ban the procedure to individual states.
This shift has created new challenges in our digital world, where everyday online activities can now become evidence in criminal cases.
The Genesis of Privacy Rights: From Contraception to Abortion
The right to abortion established in Roe wasn’t created in a legal vacuum. It was the culmination of Supreme Court decisions that gradually built a constitutional “right to privacy,” even though that phrase doesn’t appear in the Constitution.
Finding Privacy in Constitutional “Penumbras”
The Constitution doesn’t contain the word “privacy.” However, the Supreme Court has long recognized that certain personal rights can be deemed “fundamental” and are therefore included in the guarantee of personal privacy under the Constitution.
The legal basis is found primarily in the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, which states that no state shall “deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law.” The Court has interpreted “liberty” as broad enough to protect certain personal choices from government intrusion.
The modern concept of constitutional privacy gained footing in the idea that specific guarantees in the Bill of Rights have “penumbras,” or surrounding shadows, formed by emanations from those guarantees. Protections like the First Amendment’s freedom of speech, the Third Amendment’s prohibition against quartering soldiers in private homes, and the Fourth Amendment’s protection against unreasonable searches collectively create “zones of privacy” where the government cannot easily tread.
Building the Legal Foundation
The path to recognizing a privacy right that included abortion began with contraception. Two key cases built the legal foundation for Roe.
Griswold v. Connecticut (1965): Marital Privacy
The journey began with a challenge to an 1879 Connecticut law that made it a crime to use “any drug, medicinal article or instrument for the purpose of preventing conception.” In 1961, Estelle Griswold, executive director of the Planned Parenthood League of Connecticut, and Dr. C. Lee Buxton deliberately opened a birth control clinic in New Haven to challenge the law. They were arrested and fined for providing contraceptive advice to married couples.
Their case, Griswold v. Connecticut, reached the Supreme Court, which struck down the law in a 7-2 decision. Writing for the majority, Justice William O. Douglas argued that the law operated “directly on an intimate relation of husband and wife.” He reasoned that various guarantees in the Bill of Rights create “zones of privacy” and that the marital relationship falls within such a zone.
Griswold formally established a constitutional right to privacy, but one specifically tied to marriage.
Eisenstadt v. Baird (1972): Individual Autonomy
The logic of Griswold expanded just one year before Roe in Eisenstadt v. Baird. William Baird, a birth control activist, was convicted in Massachusetts for giving a lecture on contraception at Boston University and then handing contraceptive foam to an unmarried woman, deliberately testing a state law that barred distribution of contraceptives to unmarried people.
The Supreme Court overturned Baird’s conviction, marking a crucial evolution in privacy law. The Court ruled that the Massachusetts law violated the Equal Protection Clause because there was no rational basis for treating married and unmarried individuals differently regarding contraception access.
Justice William Brennan wrote what became one of the most influential sentences in privacy law: “If the right of privacy means anything, it is the right of the individual, married or single, to be free from unwarranted governmental intrusion into matters so fundamentally affecting a person as the decision whether to bear or beget a child.”
This ruling was the critical linchpin that made Roe possible. Where Griswold had established a right protecting marriage, Eisenstadt transformed it into a right protecting individual autonomy. By shifting focus from the marital unit to the individual, the Court universalized the right to privacy.
Roe v. Wade (1973): Privacy Encompasses Abortion
With individual privacy in matters of procreation established, the stage was set for the ultimate challenge. The case was brought by Norma McCorvey, who used the legal pseudonym “Jane Roe,” against Henry Wade, the district attorney of Dallas County, Texas. Roe challenged a Texas statute that made it a crime to procure an abortion except to save the mother’s life.
In a 7–2 decision authored by Justice Harry Blackmun, the Supreme Court agreed with Roe. The Court held that the right of personal privacy, located in the Fourteenth Amendment’s guarantee of “liberty,” was “broad enough to encompass a woman’s decision whether or not to terminate her pregnancy.” The Court classified this right as “fundamental,” meaning any state law infringing upon it had to be justified by a “compelling state interest” and be narrowly tailored—a legal standard known as “strict scrutiny.”
The Court determined this right wasn’t absolute. It had to be balanced against legitimate state interests that grew in importance as pregnancy progressed. The Court identified two compelling interests: protecting the health of the pregnant woman and protecting “the potentiality of human life.”
The Trimester Framework
To manage this balance, the Court devised its famous trimester framework:
First Trimester: During the first three months of pregnancy, the state’s interests weren’t yet compelling. The decision to have an abortion was left to the “medical judgment of the pregnant woman’s attending physician.” The state couldn’t regulate the abortion decision at all during this stage.
Second Trimester: After the first trimester, the state’s interest in protecting maternal health became compelling. The state could enact regulations on abortion that were “reasonably related to maternal health,” such as licensing requirements for facilities or qualifications for medical personnel.
Third Trimester (Post-Viability): Once the fetus reached viability—the point at which it could potentially survive outside the womb (around 24-28 weeks at the time)—the state’s interest in protecting potential life became compelling. At this stage, a state could regulate and even prohibit abortion, but was still required to include exceptions for procedures necessary to preserve the life or health of the mother.
This framework governed abortion law in the United States for nearly five decades, creating a national standard based on the constitutional right to privacy.
The Reversal: Why the Supreme Court Overturned Roe
The legal and political battle over Roe never ceased. For decades, opponents sought to overturn the decision, arguing it was judicial overreach with no basis in the Constitution’s text or history. This campaign culminated in 2022 with Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization.
The Case: Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization (2022)
The case originated with a 2018 Mississippi law known as the “Gestational Age Act,” which prohibited abortions after 15 weeks of pregnancy, with narrow exceptions for medical emergencies or severe fetal abnormalities. This law directly challenged the core holdings of Roe v. Wade and Planned Parenthood v. Casey (1992), which had affirmed that states couldn’t ban abortion before the point of fetal viability, generally considered to be around 24 weeks.
Jackson Women’s Health Organization, Mississippi’s only abortion clinic at the time, sued to block the law. Lower courts enjoined its enforcement, citing the clear precedent of Roe and Casey. When the case reached the Supreme Court, Mississippi didn’t merely defend its 15-week ban; it explicitly asked the Court to overrule Roe and Casey entirely and declare that the Constitution provides no right to abortion.
The Majority Opinion: A Return to History and Tradition
In a 6-3 decision to uphold the Mississippi law and a narrower 5-4 decision to fully overturn Roe v. Wade, the Supreme Court fundamentally altered American constitutional law. The majority opinion, authored by Justice Samuel Alito, declared that “the Constitution does not confer a right to abortion” and that “Roe and Casey must be overruled.”
The Court’s reasoning rested on several key pillars:
Absence of an Explicit Right: The opinion began by stating the “critical question” was whether the Constitution, “properly understood,” protects the right to an abortion. The Court’s answer was no, emphasizing that the Constitution makes no express reference to abortion.
The “Deeply Rooted” Historical Test: The majority established a strict test for recognizing unenumerated rights under the Fourteenth Amendment’s Due Process Clause. It argued that any such right must be “deeply rooted in this Nation’s history and tradition” and “implicit in the concept of ordered liberty.” This approach, drawn from an originalist school of constitutional interpretation, requires looking back to the historical understanding of rights, particularly around the time the Fourteenth Amendment was ratified in 1868.
Rejection of Abortion’s Historical Basis: Applying this test, the Court undertook a detailed historical analysis and concluded that a right to abortion wasn’t deeply rooted in American history. Justice Alito wrote that at the time the Fourteenth Amendment was adopted, three-quarters of the states had enacted statutes making abortion a crime at any stage of pregnancy.
Distinguishing Abortion from Other Privacy Rights: The majority argued that abortion is “critically different” from other rights recognized in the Court’s privacy precedents, such as rights to contraception, marriage, and intimate relations. The key distinction, the opinion stated, is that abortion is unique because it destroys what Roe termed “potential life” and what the Mississippi law called an “unborn human being.”
Overturning Precedent: The Court rejected the argument that it should adhere to Roe and Casey under the doctrine of stare decisis (the legal principle of respecting past rulings). The majority concluded that stare decisis is “not an inexorable command” and is at its “weakest when we interpret the Constitution.” It characterized Roe as “egregiously wrong from the start,” with “exceptionally weak” reasoning that had “damaging consequences.”
The New Legal Standard: Rational-Basis Review
The most immediate practical consequence of overturning Roe was the demotion of the legal standard used to evaluate abortion laws. Because abortion was no longer considered a “fundamental right,” state regulations would no longer be subject to the demanding “strict scrutiny” test.
Instead, the Court declared that abortion laws would now be evaluated under “rational-basis review.” This is the most deferential standard of judicial review. Under this test, a challenged law is presumed to be valid and “must be sustained if there is a rational basis on which the legislature could have thought it would serve legitimate state interests.” These interests can include protecting fetal life, safeguarding maternal health, and eliminating “gruesome and barbaric” medical procedures.
This shift gives state legislatures enormous latitude to regulate or ban abortion, as their laws are now entitled to a “strong presumption of validity” in court.
The Dissenting View: Undermining Liberty and Equality
In a rare joint dissent, Justices Stephen Breyer, Sonia Sotomayor, and Elena Kagan vehemently criticized the majority’s decision. They argued that the ruling was a radical break from precedent that would have devastating consequences for the liberty and equality of women.
The dissenters contended that the majority had abandoned the principle of stare decisis not for any compelling legal reason, but because the composition of the Court had changed. They argued that for 50 years, the Court had consistently reaffirmed that the right to abortion was part of a “constellation of rights” connected to “bodily integrity, family matters, and procreation.”
The dissent concluded that by taking away this right, the majority wasn’t returning the issue to the people but was instead substituting its own judgment, curtailing women’s “status as free and equal citizens.” They warned that the decision marked the first time in its history that the Supreme Court had “taken away a fundamental constitutional right.”
How Dobbs Threatens Other Privacy-Based Rights
The overturning of Roe v. Wade raised immediate concern that other fundamental rights, also grounded in the constitutional right to privacy, could now be vulnerable. The Dobbs dissenters warned that the majority’s decision threatened to unravel an entire “constitutional fabric” of personal liberties.
The “Constitutional Fabric”: Interwoven Rights
The right to abortion established in Roe didn’t exist in isolation. It was part of a broader legal doctrine recognizing that the “liberty” protected by the Fourteenth Amendment shields certain personal decisions from government interference. The dissent in Dobbs argued that the Court’s precedents concerning “bodily autonomy, sexual and familial relations, and procreation are all interwoven.”
These rights, including decisions about contraception, marriage, family relationships, and intimacy, all stem from the same principle: that there is a sphere of personal life beyond the reach of the state. Critics of the Dobbs decision fear that by pulling the thread of Roe, the majority has destabilized the entire legal foundation for these other cherished rights.
Vulnerable Precedents
Two landmark cases are frequently cited as being particularly at risk because they rely on the same substantive due process reasoning that the Dobbs court rejected.
Lawrence v. Texas (2003): The Right to Intimate Consensual Conduct
In Lawrence v. Texas, the Supreme Court struck down a Texas law that made it a crime for two people of the same sex to engage in intimate sexual conduct. The 6-3 majority opinion, written by Justice Anthony Kennedy, ruled that the law violated the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment because it infringed upon the personal liberty of individuals to engage in private, consensual conduct in their own homes.
The decision explicitly overruled the Court’s 1986 ruling in Bowers v. Hardwick, which had upheld a similar anti-sodomy law in Georgia. The Lawrence decision drew its strength from the same line of privacy cases that underpinned Roe, arguing that “liberty presumes an autonomy of self that includes freedom of thought, belief, expression, and certain intimate conduct.”
Obergefell v. Hodges (2015): The Right to Same-Sex Marriage
Twelve years later, in Obergefell v. Hodges, the Court extended this logic to the right to marry. In a 5-4 decision, also authored by Justice Kennedy, the Court held that the Due Process and Equal Protection Clauses of the Fourteenth Amendment guarantee the right of same-sex couples to marry.
The opinion described the right to marry as a fundamental liberty inherent to “individual autonomy” and essential for protecting the “most intimate association between two people.” The ruling was celebrated as a landmark victory for civil rights, but its legal foundation rests on the same concept of a broad, evolving right to liberty that the Dobbs majority rejected.
The Concurrence and the Roadmap: An Explicit Threat
While the Dobbs majority opinion attempted to assure the public that its decision was limited to abortion, a concurring opinion from Justice Clarence Thomas suggested otherwise. He argued that the Court should go further and systematically dismantle the entire legal doctrine of “substantive due process,” which he described as a “legal fiction” and an “oxymoron.”
Justice Thomas provided an explicit roadmap for future challenges, writing that “in future cases, we should reconsider all of this Court’s substantive due process precedents.” He specifically named Griswold v. Connecticut (the right to contraception), Lawrence v. Texas (the right to same-sex intimacy), and Obergefell v. Hodges (the right to same-sex marriage) as decisions that were “demonstrably erroneous” and should be overruled.
The majority’s attempt to limit its reasoning to abortion appears legally fragile. The core problem lies in the universal nature of the “deeply rooted in history” test. While the majority tried to distinguish abortion on the facts, the legal test it established isn’t based on those facts.
That test asks what rights were recognized in 1868 when the Fourteenth Amendment was ratified. Rights to contraception, same-sex intimacy, and same-sex marriage were not only unrecognized in the 19th century; they were often actively criminalized.
If the “deeply rooted” test is the correct constitutional standard, as the Dobbs majority insists, then Griswold, Lawrence, and Obergefell are logically vulnerable to being overturned on the same grounds. Justice Thomas’s concurrence isn’t a rogue opinion but rather the intellectually consistent application of the majority’s own framework.
This perceived vulnerability prompted a direct political response, including the passage of the federal Respect for Marriage Act in 2022, designed to protect same-sex and interracial marriages should the Supreme Court overrule Obergefell.
The Evolution of the Constitutional Right to Privacy
| Case & Year | Right Established | Key Legal Principle |
|---|---|---|
| Griswold v. Connecticut (1965) | Married couples’ right to contraception | “Zones of privacy” in marriage |
| Eisenstadt v. Baird (1972) | Individual right to contraception | Privacy extends to individuals, not just married couples |
| Roe v. Wade (1973) | Right to abortion | Privacy includes reproductive autonomy |
| Planned Parenthood v. Casey (1992) | Reaffirmed abortion right | “Undue burden” standard |
| Lawrence v. Texas (2003) | Right to same-sex intimate conduct | Privacy protects consensual adult intimacy |
| Obergefell v. Hodges (2015) | Right to same-sex marriage | Marriage as fundamental right for all |
The New Privacy Battleground: Digital Surveillance in a Post-Roe World
The concept of privacy at the heart of Roe was primarily concerned with preventing government intrusion into physical spaces—a person’s home, a doctor’s office, and the confidential patient-physician relationship. In the 21st century, the most significant privacy battles are being fought on digital terrain.
In the post-Dobbs landscape, where seeking, providing, or assisting with an abortion can be a crime in many states, the vast and detailed digital footprint that individuals create every day has transformed into a potential trove of evidence for law enforcement and private litigants.
From the Doctor’s Office to the Data Broker
The criminalization of abortion in numerous states has created a powerful, market-driven incentive for a new kind of surveillance. Before Dobbs, personal data related to reproductive health, such as search history or location information, primarily had commercial value for advertisers.
After Dobbs, this same data now has immense legal value. It can be used by law enforcement to build criminal cases against individuals and providers, and by private citizens in states with “bounty” laws to file civil lawsuits. This has created a new and lucrative market for data brokers, who can collect and sell this highly sensitive information to law enforcement or other interested parties, often without a warrant.
This development has placed tech companies in a precarious position, caught between their users’ expectations of privacy and a rising tide of legal demands for their data.
Vectors of Digital Vulnerability
In this new environment, everyday digital activities can create a trail of potentially incriminating evidence. Law enforcement agencies can obtain this data by accessing a physical device, making legal requests to tech companies, or simply purchasing it from third-party data brokers.
Key areas of vulnerability include:
Location Data
Smartphones constantly log their users’ locations. This geolocation data can paint a detailed picture of a person’s life, including visits to medical facilities like abortion clinics.
This information is particularly potent because it can be obtained in several ways. Law enforcement can issue “geofence” warrants, which compel tech companies like Google to turn over data on all devices that were near a specific location during a certain time frame.
More troubling, location data is regularly collected by apps and sold to data brokers, who can then sell it to anyone, including anti-abortion groups or law enforcement, without the need for a warrant. One investigation revealed that a data broker had allegedly collected location data from visits to nearly 600 Planned Parenthood clinics and sold it to an anti-abortion group, which then used it for a targeted ad campaign.
Search History
A person’s internet search history—queries for “abortion pills,” “clinics near me,” or information on how to end a pregnancy—is stored by search engines like Google. This data can be subpoenaed by law enforcement and used as evidence to establish intent in a criminal prosecution.
While using private or incognito browsing modes can prevent a browser from saving this history on a shared device, it doesn’t stop internet service providers or the search engines themselves from logging the activity.
Private Communications
Text messages, emails, and direct messages on social media platforms have already been used as evidence in abortion-related cases. For example, a man in Texas used his ex-wife’s private text messages about abortion pills to sue her and her friends.
Communications are most secure on platforms that use end-to-end encryption by default, which ensures that only the sender and recipient can read the messages. However, many popular services don’t have this feature enabled automatically, leaving conversations vulnerable to being turned over to law enforcement with a warrant.
Health and Period-Tracking Apps
Millions of people use smartphone apps to track their menstrual cycles, fertility, and other health metrics. This data can be used to infer when a person becomes pregnant and when that pregnancy ends. This information is a prime target for investigations, yet most of these popular consumer health apps aren’t covered by federal health privacy laws.
The Limits of Legal Protections: The HIPAA Gap
Many Americans mistakenly believe that the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996 (HIPAA) protects all of their health-related information. In the post-Dobbs era, this misunderstanding can be dangerous.
HIPAA’s privacy and security rules apply only to “covered entities”—which are defined as health care providers (like doctors and hospitals), health plans (insurers), and their “business associates” (vendors who handle health data on their behalf).
HIPAA doesn’t apply to the vast amount of health-related data that individuals voluntarily provide to consumer-facing technologies. This includes information entered into a period-tracking app, data from a fitness tracker, search history on a web browser, or posts on social media. This creates a massive gap in privacy protection for the very types of data most likely to be sought in an abortion-related investigation.
Furthermore, even for the data that HIPAA does cover—known as Protected Health Information (PHI)—the law contains significant exceptions. The HIPAA Privacy Rule explicitly permits a covered entity to disclose PHI to law enforcement without a patient’s authorization in response to a court order, warrant, subpoena, or other legal process.
In response to the Dobbs decision, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) issued a new rule to strengthen privacy protections. The rule prohibits covered entities from using or disclosing PHI for the purpose of investigating or prosecuting a person for seeking, obtaining, providing, or facilitating reproductive health care that was lawful in the state where it was provided.
While this offers some protection, it leaves a significant gray area for care that is deemed unlawful in a particular state. The rule is also facing legal challenges from states with abortion bans, which argue it interferes with their ability to enforce their laws, leaving the ultimate scope of these federal protections uncertain.
The Fractured Nation: A State-by-State Fight Over Autonomy
The Dobbs decision didn’t resolve the national conflict over abortion; it decentralized it, transforming a single legal battle into 50 distinct ones. The ruling has resulted in a fractured legal map where a person’s ability to make fundamental decisions about their own body is now dictated by their zip code.
This has triggered a new and more aggressive form of American federalism, where states aren’t merely setting different policies but are actively engaged in legal and informational conflict with one another.
The Return to the States: A Patchwork of Legality
Immediately following the Supreme Court’s ruling in June 2022, the legal landscape changed dramatically. “Trigger laws”—pre-existing statutes designed to take effect the moment Roe was overturned—banned or severely restricted abortion in 13 states.
In the years since, the country has settled into a starkly divided reality. According to the Guttmacher Institute, as of mid-2025, abortion is subject to a total ban in 13 states, with an additional 28 states banning the procedure at various points in pregnancy, from 6 weeks to viability. This has created a patchwork of legality, forcing thousands of people to travel across state lines to access care.
The Counter-Movement: “Shield Laws” and Interstate Legal Conflict
In response to this new reality, states where abortion remains legal have begun to erect legal defenses. This has led to the rise of “shield laws,” a new legislative tool designed to protect patients who travel for care and the providers who treat them. These laws represent a novel form of interstate legal conflict.
Shield laws typically work by prohibiting state officials and agencies from cooperating with out-of-state investigations, lawsuits, or extradition requests related to the provision of abortion care that is legal within their borders.
For example, a shield law might prevent a California court from enforcing a subpoena from Texas seeking the medical records of a Texas resident who traveled to California for an abortion. Some of these laws also extend to the digital realm, prohibiting tech companies headquartered in the protective state from complying with out-of-state warrants or subpoenas for data related to reproductive health care.
As of late 2023, 22 states and the District of Columbia had enacted some form of shield law protection, creating a legal firewall around states with abortion access.
This dynamic transforms American federalism from a system of parallel governance into one of direct interstate confrontation. A state like Texas doesn’t merely ban abortion within its borders; it seeks to penalize its citizens for exercising a right that is legal in California. In response, California doesn’t simply maintain its own laws; it passes a shield law to actively block Texas’s legal reach.
This raises profound constitutional questions about the right to travel, state jurisdiction, and the “Full Faith and Credit” Clause, which requires states to respect the “public acts, records, and judicial proceedings of every other state.” These conflicts are likely to be the subject of intense legal battles for years to come.
The Will of the People: State Constitutions and Ballot Initiatives
With the U.S. Constitution no longer providing a floor for abortion rights, advocates and citizens have turned to state constitutions as a last line of defense. This has opened two major fronts in the state-level battle: litigation in state courts and direct democracy through ballot initiatives.
State Court Challenges
In many states, legal challenges are underway arguing that state constitutions provide an independent right to privacy, liberty, or bodily autonomy that protects abortion access, regardless of the federal ruling. High courts in states like Alaska, Florida, Kansas, and Montana had previously recognized such protections under their own constitutions. Since Dobbs, providers have filed lawsuits in numerous other states, arguing that abortion bans violate these state-level constitutional guarantees.
Ballot Initiatives
In a powerful display of direct democracy, voters are increasingly deciding the issue themselves through citizen-initiated constitutional amendments. Since the Dobbs decision, this has become a major strategy for securing abortion rights.
In 2022, voters in California, Michigan, and Vermont passed amendments to enshrine reproductive freedom in their state constitutions, while voters in Kansas and Kentucky rejected measures that would have curtailed abortion rights. In 2023, Ohio voters approved a similar protective amendment. The trend continued into 2024, with voters in states like Arizona, Colorado, and New York approving measures to protect abortion rights.
These results often show that the “will of the people” is more supportive of abortion access than the policies enacted by their elected legislatures. However, passing a constitutional amendment is often just the beginning of another legal fight, as existing restrictive laws aren’t automatically invalidated and must be challenged in court under the new constitutional language.
Overview of State Abortion Laws and Privacy Protections Post-Dobbs
| State | Abortion Status | Privacy Protections | Shield Laws |
|---|---|---|---|
| Alabama | Total Ban | None | None |
| Alaska | Legal | State Constitutional Right | Limited |
| Arizona | Restricted | Voter-Approved Amendment (2024) | Limited |
| Arkansas | Total Ban | None | None |
| California | Protected | Constitutional Amendment | Comprehensive |
| Colorado | Protected | Constitutional Amendment | Comprehensive |
| Connecticut | Protected | State Law | Comprehensive |
| Delaware | Protected | State Law | Limited |
| Florida | Restricted (6 weeks) | None | None |
| Georgia | Restricted (6 weeks) | None | None |
| Hawaii | Protected | State Law | Limited |
| Idaho | Total Ban | None | None |
| Illinois | Protected | State Law | Comprehensive |
| Indiana | Total Ban (with exceptions) | None | None |
| Iowa | Restricted (6 weeks) | None | None |
| Kansas | Limited Protections | State Court Ruling | None |
| Kentucky | Total Ban | None | None |
| Louisiana | Total Ban | None | None |
| Maine | Protected | State Law | Limited |
| Maryland | Protected | Constitutional Amendment | Comprehensive |
| Massachusetts | Protected | State Law | Comprehensive |
| Michigan | Protected | Constitutional Amendment | Limited |
| Minnesota | Protected | State Law | Comprehensive |
| Mississippi | Total Ban | None | None |
| Missouri | Total Ban | None | None |
| Montana | Protected | State Constitutional Right | Limited |
| Nebraska | Restricted (20 weeks) | None | None |
| Nevada | Protected | State Law | Limited |
| New Hampshire | Legal | None | None |
| New Jersey | Protected | State Law | Comprehensive |
| New Mexico | Protected | State Law | Limited |
| New York | Protected | Constitutional Amendment | Comprehensive |
| North Carolina | Restricted (12 weeks) | None | None |
| North Dakota | Total Ban | None | None |
| Ohio | Protected | Constitutional Amendment (2023) | Limited |
| Oklahoma | Total Ban | None | None |
| Oregon | Protected | State Law | Comprehensive |
| Pennsylvania | Legal | None | None |
| Rhode Island | Protected | State Law | Limited |
| South Carolina | Restricted (6 weeks) | None | None |
| South Dakota | Total Ban | None | None |
| Tennessee | Total Ban | None | None |
| Texas | Total Ban | None | None |
| Utah | Total Ban (with exceptions) | None | None |
| Vermont | Protected | Constitutional Amendment | Comprehensive |
| Virginia | Legal | None | None |
| Washington | Protected | State Law | Comprehensive |
| West Virginia | Total Ban | None | None |
| Wisconsin | Legal | None | None |
| Wyoming | Total Ban | None | None |
Note: This table reflects the legal status as of mid-2025 and is subject to change due to ongoing litigation and legislation. Data compiled from sources including the Guttmacher Institute, KFF, and NCSL.
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