The inside story of how Sandra Day O’Connor rebuffed pressure from Scalia and others to overturn Roe v. Wade

During much of the 1980s, Justice Sandra O’Connor, the first woman on the Supreme Court, cast a consistent vote against abortion rights. That changed in 1989.

During much of the 1980s, Justice Sandra O’Connor, the first woman on the Supreme Court, cast a consistent vote against abortion rights. But in 1989, things changed. A new conservative majority was in place and appeared to have the votes to eviscerate Roe v. Wade, for the first time since the 1973 landmark made abortion legal nationwide. O’Connor struggled with the new dynamic. Some of her ambivalence emerged in her opinions, but newly available correspondence and handwritten notes of secret deliberations reviewed by CNN flesh out her budding resistance. They show her evolution in a Missouri abortion case, as she faced pressure to cast the decisive vote that would have reversed Roe and instead set a path that preserved abortion rights for another three decades. The O’Connor archive demonstrates how the nine Supreme Court justices, both then and now, negotiate behind the scenes through memos, personal entreaties, and various means of persuasion — some more successful than others. At times, the papers show, pressure on individual justices can have the opposite of the intended effect. The documents also underscore the difference on abortion rights between the court of that era and the contemporary far-right bench, which in 2022 jettisoned Roe and nearly a half century of reproductive rights. Pressing for reversal of Roe and pushing hard on O’Connor were Justice Antonin Scalia, relatively new to the bench but already known for a forceful, if sometimes bullying, presence; and Chief Justice William Rehnquist, one of the original two dissenters in Roe.