uit on behalf of all women with unwanted pregnancies. The Supreme Court Justices heard the case and the outcome is one of the most memorable rulings in the history of the Court's rulings. The judgement, which the Justices by a 7-2 vote declared the law unconstitutional, voided any state law that restricted a woman's right to obtain an abortion. Under the new decision, a woman is permitted to terminate her pregnancy for any reason provided that the fetus in not viable. After viability, states can prevent abortion except if it is necessary to preserve the health or life of the mother.
             The decision to declare the law unconstitutional was made by a mostly liberal, Democratic panel of Justices. Some analysts have suggested that the decision should have been made by a demographically elected legislature instead of "appointed for life" Supreme Court Justices. As public opinion polls showed, the court's determination of the value of embryonic life differed completely with that of the masses.
             Antiabortion groups were outraged by the decision. These same groups often equated the legalization of abortion to the Nazi holocaust and the case was compared to that of Dred Scott v. Samford, the infamous 1857 case that declared that blacks had no rights. In both instances, the court ruled that a group of "people" (slaves in Dred and human embryos in Roe) to be "nonpersons." It was also argued that both rulings were made to invalidate certain instances: in Dred, the Missouri Compromise was voided and in Roe, it "invalidated the efforts of state legislatures to reform their abortion laws without surrendering state jurisdiction over abortion."
             In the years following Roe, several new laws were introduced and rejected. For instance, a law requiring parental consent fo
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