Page:Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization - Court opinion draft, February 2022.pdf/60

60 (slip op.op., [sic] at 15); Janus, 585 U. S., at ___ (slip op., at 34–35).

Traditional reliance interests arise "when advance planning of great precision is most obviously a necessity." Casey, 505 U. S., at 856 (plurality opinion); see also Payne, 501 U. S., at 828. In Casey, the controlling opinion conceded that those traditional reliance interests were not implicated because getting an abortion is generally "unplanned activity," and "reproductive planning could take virtually immediate account of any sudden restoration of state authority to ban abortions." 505 U. S., at 856. For these reasons, we agree with the Casey plurality that conventional, concrete reliance interests are not present here.

Unable to find reliance in the conventional sense, the controlling opinion in Casey perceived a more intangible form of reliance. It wrote that "people [had] organized intimate relationships and made choices that define their views of themselves and their places in society[&thinsp;] in reliance on the availability of abortion in the event that contraception should fail" and that "[t]he ability of women to participate equally in the economic and social life of the Nation has been facilitated by their ability to control their reproductive lives." Ibid. But this Court is ill-equipped to assess "generalized assertions about the national psyche." Id., at 957 (Rehnquist, C. J., concurring in part and dissenting in part). Casey's notion of reliance thus finds little support in our cases, which instead emphasize very concrete reliance interests, like those that develop in "cases involving property and contract rights." Payne, 501 U. S., at 829.

When a concrete reliance interest is asserted, courts are equipped to evaluate the claim, but assessing the novel and intangible form of reliance endorsed by the Casey plurality