O’Connor had immense power as swing vote

Critical of Roe decision
The Roe decision had divided pregnancy into three trimesters, each with differing levels of permissible state regulation.

"The Roe framework," O'Connor said, "is clearly on a collision course with itself." Advances in neonatal treatment were pushing the fetus's ability to survive outside the womb "further back toward conception."

At that point in her career on the court, O'Connor was willing to permit restrictions on abortion so long as they did not impose "an undue burden" or create "absolute obstacles" to a woman's ability to get an abortion.

In a 1986 case in which a five-justice majority struck down Pennsylvania's abortion law, O'Connor complained that the court was going too far in preventing states from restricting abortion. She said it was "painfully clear that no legal rule or doctrine is safe from ad hoc nullification by this Court" when it involved an attempt to regulate abortion.

But over the next six years O'Connor changed her mind.

In the 1992 case Planned Parenthood v. Casey, O'Connor joined forces with Justice Anthony Kennedy, a Reagan appointee, and Justice David Souter, who'd been appointed to the court by George Bush in 1990, to declare that "the essential holding of Roe v. Wade should be retained."

Together with pro-Roe Justices John Paul Stevens and Harry Blackmun, the O'Connor-Kennedy-Souter trio supplied the five votes to uphold Roe.

Shift on abortion
O'Connor and her allies said, "An entire generation has come of age free to assume Roe's concept of liberty in defining the capacity of women to act in society, and to make reproductive decisions."

The trio hinted that they thought Roe v. Wade might have been wrongly decided but they would stick by it: "A decision to overrule Roe's essential holding under the existing circumstances would address error, if error there was, at the cost of both profound and unnecessary damage to the Court's legitimacy, and to the Nation's commitment to the rule of law. It is therefore imperative to adhere to the essence of Roe's original decision."

In the Casey decision, the court adopted O'Connor's notion of an "undue burden" test to determine whether abortion regulations would pass muster. But it left the meaning of "undue burden" vague, to be decided by judges on a case-by-case basis.

Scalia was sardonic in his attack on O'Connor's apparent change of heart, mentioning her several times by name in his dissenting opinion.

O'Connor's "undue burden" test, Scalia charged, was "unprincipled" and "will prove hopelessly unworkable in practice." He denounced O'Connor and the others in the majority for what he called their "almost czarist arrogance" in ruling that the Roe decision must not be overturned.

Childhood on a cattle ranch
O’Connor was born in El Paso, Texas, on March 26, 1930. She grew up on a cattle ranch that her grandfather had established in 1880 on the Arizona-New Mexico border.

O'Connor, her sister and her brother spent their childhood riding horses, tending livestock and keeping pets such as a bobcat.

In her memoir, "Lazy B," O'Connor said, "The value system we learned was simple and unsophisticated and the product of necessity. What counted was competence and the ability to do whatever was required to maintain the ranch operation in good working order. ... Verbal skills were less important than the ability to know and understand how things work in the physical world."

She attended Stanford University and its law school, where one of her classmates was her future colleague, William Rehnquist.

She married in 1952 and has three sons.

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