Cite as: 521 U. S. 702 (1997)
Opinion of the Court
formed under compulsion of the State." 505 U. S., at 851.
Brief for Respondents 12. By choosing this language, the Court's opinion in Casey described, in a general way and in light of our prior cases, those personal activities and decisions that this Court has identified as so deeply rooted in our history and traditions, or so fundamental to our concept of constitutionally ordered liberty, that they are protected by the Fourteenth Amendment.19 The opinion moved from the recognition that liberty necessarily includes freedom of conscience and belief about ultimate considerations to the observation that "though the abortion decision may originate within the zone of conscience and belief, it is more than a philosophic exercise." Casey, 505 U. S., at 852 (emphasis added). That many of the rights and liberties protected by the Due Process Clause sound in personal autonomy does not warrant the sweeping conclusion that any and all important, intimate, and personal decisions are so protected, San An-19 See Moore v. East Cleveland, 431 U. S. 494, 503 (1977) ("[T]he Constitution protects the sanctity of the family precisely because the institution of the family is deeply rooted in this Nation's history and tradition" (emphasis added)); Griswold v. Connecticut, 381 U. S. 479, 485-486 (1965) (intrusions into the "sacred precincts of marital bedrooms" offend rights "older than the Bill of Rights"); id., at 495-496 (Goldberg, J., concurring) (the law in question "disrupt[ed] the traditional relation of the family—a relation as old and as fundamental as our entire civilization"); Loving v. Virginia, 388 U. S. 1, 12 (1967) ("The freedom to marry has long been recognized as one of the vital personal rights essential to the orderly pursuit of happiness"); Turner v. Safley, 482 U. S. 78, 95 (1987) ("[T]he decision to marry is a fundamental right"); Roe v. Wade, 410 U. S. 113, 140 (1973) (stating that at the founding and throughout the 19th century, "a woman enjoyed a substantially broader right to terminate a pregnancy"); Skinner v. Oklahoma ex rel. Williamson, 316 U. S. 535, 541 (1942) ("Marriage and procreation are fundamental"); Pierce v. Society of Sisters, 268 U. S. 510, 535 (1925); Meyer v. Nebraska, 262 U. S. 390, 399 (1923) (liberty includes "those privileges long recognized at common law as essential to the orderly pursuit of happiness by free men").
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