The highest court of the Federal government and therefore of the United States of America, is the Supreme Court of this great land. The Supreme Court has since its inception made judicial decisions that have reverberated throughout this country, for better or for worse. Even though our Constitution, is a written document, and subject to change only through Amendments passed by the necessary margin in our Legislature, Supreme Court justices, have demonstrated time and time again, that they may interpret this Constitution in a manner that they believe it means to them, or should mean, or might mean, or that the Constitution somehow is a living document, that changes with the prevailing winds of the time. This means, in effect, that different Supreme Court justices or different times in the era of this Constitutional republic will result in different results and different decisions from the Supreme Court.
In point of fact, take the troubling and notorious case of Dred Scott v. Sandford, a case decided in the favor of Sandford by a vote of 7-2, in 1857, as believed by the majority opinion, that the Constitution recognizes slavery, and that a slave does not become entitled to his freedom, when his owner takes him to a State where slavery is prohibited, and afterwards returns to his slave-holding State. According to Chief Justice Taney, slaves were not people, but property, and further that to provide freedom to what has been declared property, simply because you have crossed certain State boundaries, was a violation of the 5th Amendment of the Constitution, which does not permit the depriving of property without due process of the law, to which according to this Supreme Court decision, meant that property, in this case the property of a slave, had no rights because it was legally seen by this court as property, and hence had no quarter. Two justices dissented in this decision, pointing out that at the time of the ratification of our Constitution five out of the thirteen States had granted the vote to black men, and further that rather than the Constitution recognizing that slavery was equal to property, stated, "Representatives and direct Taxes shall be apportioned … by adding to the whole Number of free Persons, including those bound to Service for a Term of Years, and excluding Indians not taxed, three fifths of all other Persons." Additionally, Justice Curtis stated: "When a strict interpretation of the Constitution, according to the fixed rules which govern the interpretation of laws, is abandoned, and the theoretical opinions of individuals are allowed to control its meaning, we have no longer a Constitution…" It was not until the 13th Amendment was ratified, after our Civil War, that the Dred Scott decision was overturned.
In the case of Roe v. Wade in 1973, the Supreme Court granted the right for females to abort fetuses essentially under the right of privacy, by a vote of 7-2. The most significant issue for the Supreme Court to get their head around was the definition of a "person", in which the majority ruled that persons as described in the Constitution only dealt with those that were postnatal and not prenatal. Rehnquist stated in his dissent, that the very nature of an abortion which involves a medical doctor is: "hardly 'private' ", and Justice White was even more vigorous in his dissent stating that the court: "values the convenience of the pregnant mother more than the continued existence and development of the life or potential life that she carries." The thing about the Roe v. Wade decision, which today is looked upon as a "woman's right to choose", basically signified that the fetus that the mother carries, is her property, to dispose and/or to treat pretty much as she so desires or sees fit, and that doing so, is no business of the State, as the mother has an implicit right of privacy.
Roe v. Wade basically is about whether fetuses are persons and thereby entitled to full Constitutional rights or instead are properly seen as the private property of the mother. So too, Dred Scott was about the conflict between one man's private property as sanctioned by governmental decree, as compared to the fact that under certain circumstances and certain States, that same private property was legally seen as a person. To put it succinctly, is it ever possible for something to be correctly classified as private property but later to be correctly re-classified as a person?