Cite as: 505 U. S. 833 (1992)
Syllabus
on the present record and in the context of this facial challenge. Pp. 881-887. 2. Section 3206's one-parent consent requirement and judicial bypass procedure are constitutional. See, e. g., Ohio v. Akron Center for Reproductive Health, 497 U. S. 502, 510-519. Pp. 899-900.
Justice Blackmun concluded that application of the strict scrutiny standard of review required by this Court's abortion precedents results in the invalidation of all the challenged provisions in the Pennsylvania statute, including the reporting requirements, and therefore concurred in the judgment that the requirement that a pregnant woman report her reasons for failing to provide spousal notice is unconstitutional. Pp. 930, 934-936.
The Chief Justice, joined by Justice White, Justice Scalia, and Justice Thomas, concluded that: 1. Although Roe v. Wade, 410 U. S. 113, is not directly implicated by the Pennsylvania statute, which simply regulates and does not prohibit abortion, a reexamination of the "fundamental right" Roe accorded to a woman's decision to abort a fetus, with the concomitant requirement that any state regulation of abortion survive "strict scrutiny," id., at 154-156, is warranted by the confusing and uncertain state of this Court's post-Roe decisional law. A review of post-Roe cases demonstrates both that they have expanded upon Roe in imposing increasingly greater restrictions on the States, see Thornburgh v. American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, 476 U. S. 747, 783 (Burger, C. J., dissenting), and that the Court has become increasingly more divided, none of the last three such decisions having commanded a majority opinion, see Ohio v. Akron Center for Reproductive Health, 497 U. S. 502; Hodgson v. Minnesota, 497 U. S. 417; Webster v. Reproductive Health Services, 492 U. S. 490. This confusion and uncertainty complicated the task of the Court of Appeals, which concluded that the "undue burden" standard adopted by Justice O'Connor in Webster and Hodgson governs the present cases. Pp. 944-951. 2. The Roe Court reached too far when it analogized the right to abort a fetus to the rights involved in Pierce v. Society of Sisters, 268 U. S. 510; Meyer v. Nebraska, 262 U. S. 390; Loving v. Virginia, 388 U. S. 1; and Griswold v. Connecticut, 381 U. S. 479, and thereby deemed the right to abortion to be "fundamental." None of these decisions endorsed an all-encompassing "right of privacy," as Roe, supra, at 152-153, claimed. Because abortion involves the purposeful termination of potential life, the abortion decision must be recognized as sui generis, different in kind from the rights protected in the earlier cases under the rubric of personal or family privacy and autonomy. And the historical traditions of the American people—as evidenced by the English common
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