Thirty years ago today, the US Supreme Court delivered a decision on behalf of a poor Texas woman, Norma McCorvey, which has profoundly changed the lives of millions. Its consequences still reverberate.
In Roe v Wade, the court struck down a state ban on abortion and opened the way for a new era for American women. The ruling's rationale, for good or bad, has been central to the bitter arguments ever since on the morality of abortion.
McCorvey was a 23-year-old mother of two. The product of a broken home and of childhood rape, she had spent much time in reform schools which she left at 16.
Her first child, the product of a disastrous short marriage, was being brought up by her mother. The second, the result of a brief affair, by its father. Now McCorvey was pregnant again.
When her own doctor refused to assist in procuring an abortion - there were an estimated 3,000 illegal abortions a year in Dallas - McCorvey became Jane Roe, the plaintiff in the first constitutional challenge to anti-abortion laws.
That was 1970. Three years and an abortion later, on January 22nd, 1973, the Supreme Court's Justice Harry Blackman struck down the state of Texas's appeal.
Blackman declared on behalf of the seven-two majority that the US constitution's 14th Amendment implied a concept of privacy or personal liberty "broad enough to encompass a woman's decision whether or not to terminate her pregnancy".
A similar recognition of the implications of a right to privacy by the Irish Supreme Court would see contraception legalised in the McGee case.
Key to the decision, which ruled that states could not ban abortion before viability, was Blackman's assertion that judges could not decide the vexed issue of when life began but that "the word 'person' as used in the Fourteenth Amendment, does not include the unborn."
Dissenting, Justice Byron White suggested that the demand for abortion by many women was motivated "by convenience, family planning, economics, dislike of children, the embarrassment of illegitimacy" . . . or even "no reason at all".
He accused his fellow judges of allowing women to "exterminate" life and of pandering to "the convenience, whim or caprice of the putative mother more than the life or potential life of the foetus".
Delivering one of his first judgments from the Supreme Court bench, Justice William Rehnquist also dissented. A "strict constructionist", he could not see in the constitution the implied rights which his more liberal colleagues were determined to develop.
Now the US Chief Justice, Rehnquist presides over a court where abortion is every bit as controversial. Today the arguments are largely about late-term abortions and access to state-funded terminations.
But while Roe v Wade still has majority backing in the court, anti-abortion activists - and the Bush administration - long for the opportunity to make new appointments and have its reversal firmly in their sights.
Rehnquist apart, another of 1973's dramatis personae is also still involved in the argument. Norma McCorvey. After years as an icon of the campaign for abortion rights, she has decided she was wrong all those years ago, joined the antis and is a star of their rallies.