The issue focused on questions that federal court rulings have permitted courts to address: whether parents can divorce their children by medical consent; whether legal rights are legally protected from lawsuits against medical professionals who perform abortions; and whether laws criminalizing illegal abortion rights prevent women from obtaining legal abortion services.

As Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote in the majority opinion, federal law allows judicial recognition of civil divorce laws as constitutional under certain circumstances. But federal law does not establish such legal rights for legal abortions. "So long as