Page:Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization - Court opinion draft, February 2022.pdf/16

16 Roe either ignored or misstated this history, and Casey declined to reconsider Roe's faulty historical analysis. It is therefore important to set the record straight.

We begin with the common law, under which abortion was a crime at least after "quickening"—i.e., the first felt movement of the fetus in the womb, which usually occurs between the 16th and 18th week of pregnancy.

The "eminent common-law authorities (Blackstone, Coke, Hale, and the like)," Kahler v. Kansas, 589 U.S. __, __ (2020) (slip op., at 7), all describe abortion after quickening as criminal. Henry de Bracton's 13th-century treatise explained that if a person has "struck a pregnant woman, or has given her poison, whereby he has caused an abortion, if the foetus be already formed and animated, and particularly if it be animated, he commits homicide." H. Bracton, De Legibus et Consuetudinibus Angliae 279 (T. Twiss ed. 1879); see also 1 Fleta ch. 20, reprinted in 53 Selden Soc'y 60–61 (H.G. Richardson & G.O Sayles eds. 1953)