There's a reason why Roe's defenders focus on its result, not its logic

Prior to joining the Court, Ruth Bader Ginsburg criticized Roe’s reasoning and its scope. Ginsburg, who argued that abortion bans amounted to unconstitutional sex discrimination, thought the 14th Amendment’s guarantee of equal protection would have provided a firmer foundation for the right announced in Roe. She also faulted the Court for deciding more than was required to resolve the case, which involved a Texas law that banned abortion except when it was deemed necessary to save the mother’s life.

“Doctrinal limbs too swiftly shaped, experience teaches, may prove unstable,” Ginsburg, then an appeals court judge, said in a 1992 lecture. “Suppose the Court had stopped [after] rightly declaring unconstitutional the most extreme brand of law in the nation, and had not gone on, as the Court did in Roe, to fashion a regime blanketing the subject, a set of rules that displaced virtually every state law then in force. Would there have been the 20-year controversy we have witnessed, reflected most recently in the Supreme Court’s splintered decision in Planned Parenthood v. Casey? A less encompassing Roe, one that merely struck down the extreme Texas law and went no further on that day…might have served to reduce rather than to fuel controversy.” Instead, she said, the Court had “prolonged divisiveness,” “deferred stable settlement of the issue,” and “halted a political process that was moving in a reform direction.”…

Harvard law professor Lawrence Tribe offered a similar assessment around the same time. “One of the most curious things about Roe is that, behind its own verbal smokescreen, the substantive judgment on which it rests is nowhere to be found,” Tribe wrote in the Harvard Law Review.