Page:Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization.pdf/184

 fere with the mailing of drugs used for medication abortions? The Constitution protects travel and speech and interstate commerce, so today's ruling will give rise to a host of new constitutional questions. Far from removing the Court from the abortion issue, the majority puts the Court at the center of the coming "interjurisdictional abortion wars." Id., at (draft, at 1).

In short, the majority does not save judges from unwieldy tests or extricate them from the sphere of controversy. To the contrary, it discards a known, workable, and predictable standard in favor of something novel and probably far more complicated. It forces the Court to wade further into hotly contested issues, including moral and philosophical ones, that the majority criticizes Roe and Casey for addressing.

When overruling constitutional precedent, the Court has almost always pointed to major legal or factual changes undermining a decision's original basis. A review of the Appendix to this dissent proves the point. See infra, at 61-66. Most "successful proponent [s] of overruling precedent," this Court once said, have carried "the heavy burden of persuading the Court that changes in society or in the law dictate that the values served by stare decisis yield in favor of a greater objective." Vasquez, 474 U. S., at 266. Certainly, that was so of the main examples the majority cites: Brown v. Board of Education, 347 U. S. 483 (1954), and West Coast Hotel Co. v. Parrish, 300 U. S. 379 (1937). But it is not so today. Although nodding to some arguments others have made about "modern developments," the majority does not really rely on them, no doubt seeing their slimness. Ante, at 33; see ante, at 34. The majority briefly invokes the current controversy over abortion. See ante, at 70-71. But it has to acknowledge that the same dispute has existed for