More Perfect: The Viability Line

Airs Monday, February 19, 2024 at 9 p.m. on WKSU
When the justices heard oral arguments in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, the landmark abortion case, one word came up more than any other: viability. The viability line was at the core of Roe v. Wade, and it’s been entrenched in the abortion rights movement ever since. But no one seems to remember how this idea made its way into the abortion debate in the first place. In the second of a five-part series on the Supreme Court, More Perfect from WNYC traces it back to the source and discovers how a clerk and a couple of judges turned a fuzzy medical concept into a hard legal line.