As an eighth grader in a Long Island suburb in the 1950s, Daniel Roth didn’t want to recite a prayer with the rest of his class in public school. Growing up on a farm in Wisconsin in the 1960s, Vernon Yutzy saw no reason to protest when his parents followed Amish religious tradition and refused to send him to public school after eighth grade. Roth’s and Yutzy’s experiences as children led to two landmark First Amendment cases: Engel v. Vitale, in which the US Supreme Court found school-sponsored prayer in public schools to be unconstitutional, and Wisconsin v.
Norma McCorvey, who was Jane Roe in the 1973 case Roe v. Wade that legalized abortion in the U.S., died of heart failure, her biographer said. She was 69.
After the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, ending nearly 50 years of federal protection for abortion, some states began enforcing strict abortion bans while others became new havens for the procedure. ProPublica is investigating how sweeping changes to reproductive health care access in America are affecting people, institutions and governments.