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Rh future. But this Court will no longer decide the fundamental question of whether abortion must be allowed throughout the United States through 6 weeks, or 12 weeks, or 15 weeks, or 24 weeks, or some other line. The Court will no longer decide how to evaluate the interests of the pregnant woman and the interests in protecting fetal life throughout pregnancy. Instead, those difficult moral and policy questions will be decided, as the Constitution dictates, by the people and their elected representatives through the constitutional processes of democratic self-government.

The Roe Court took sides on a consequential moral and policy issue that this Court had no constitutional authority to decide. By taking sides, the Roe Court distorted the Nation’s understanding of this Court’s proper role in the American constitutional system and thereby damaged the Court as an institution. As Justice Scalia explained, Roe “destroyed the compromises of the past, rendered compromise impossible for the future, and required the entire issue to be resolved uniformly, at the national level.” Casey, 505 U. S., at 995 (opinion concurring in judgment in part and dissenting in part).

The Court’s decision today properly returns the Court to a position of judicial neutrality on the issue of abortion, and properly restores the people’s authority to resolve the issue of abortion through the processes of democratic self=government established by the Constitution.

To be sure, many Americans will disagree with the Court’s decision today. That would be true no matter how the Court decided this case. Both sides on the abortion issue believe sincerely and passionately in the rightness of their cause. Especially in those difficult and fraught circumstances, the Court must scrupulously adhere to the Constitution’s neutral position on the issue of abortion.

Since 1973, more than 20 Justices of this Court have now