Page:Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization.pdf/142

Rh Following that “fundamental principle of judicial restraint,” Washington State Grange, 552 U. S., at 450, we should begin with the narrowest basis for disposition, proceeding to consider a broader one only if necessary to resolve the case at hand. See, e.g., Office of Personnel Management v. Richmond, 496 U. S. 414, 423 (1990). It is only where there is no valid narrower ground of decision that we should go on to address a broader issue, such as whether a constitutional decision should be overturned. See Federal Election Comm’n v. Wisconsin Right to Life, Inc., 551 U. S. 449, 482 (2007) (declining to address the claim that a constitutional decision should be overruled when the appellant prevailed on its narrower constitutional argument).

Here, there is a clear path to deciding this case correctly without overruling Roe all the way down to the studs: recognize that the viability line must be discarded, as the majority rightly does, and leave for another day whether to reject any right to an abortion at all. See Webster v. Reproductive Health Services, 492 U. S. 490, 518, 521 (1989) (plurality opinion) (rejecting Roe’s viability line as “rigid” and “indeterminate,” while also finding “no occasion to revisit the holding of Roe” that, under the Constitution, a State must provide an opportunity to choose to terminate a pregnancy).

Of course, such an approach would not be available if the rationale of Roe and Casey was inextricably entangled with and dependent upon the viability standard. It is not. Our precedents in this area ground the abortion right in a woman’s “right to choose.” See Carey v. Population Services Int’l, 431 U. S. 678, 688–689 (1977) (“underlying foundation of the holdings” in Roe and Griswold v. Connecticut, 381 U. S. 479 (1965), was the “right of decision in matters of childbearing”); Maher v. Roe, 432 U. S. 464, 473 (1977) (Roe and other cases “recognize a constitutionally protected interest in making certain kinds of important decisions free from governmental compulsion” (internal quotation marks