(NewsNation) — Thirty years before the overturn of Roe v. Wade, Sandra Day O’Connor, who died Friday at the age of 93, was instrumental in keeping abortion legal at the federal level during her tenure.

In 1973, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled on Roe v. Wade, deciding that abortion was federally protected in a 7-2 vote. The New Yorker writes that there was immediate backlash from the Christian right, with many leaders seeking to reverse the ruling.

This made O’Connor’s views on abortion a source of “intense speculation” when then-President Ronald Reagan nominated her to the Supreme Court in 1981, according to The New Yorker. At the time, O’Connor said she was opposed to abortion as a personal matter, The New Yorker said. However, O’Connor, then 51 and having undergone a hysterectomy months earlier, was quoted by the publication as saying, “I am not going to be pregnant anymore, so it is perhaps easy for me.”

PBS writes that O’Connor’s first public SCOTUS opinion on abortion was in the 1983 case Akron v. Akron Center for Reproductive Health. In this case, the court struck down a number of abortion restrictions and O’Connor dissented in a separate opinion — but PBS notes that O’Connor “wouldn’t go along” with fully undercutting Roe, and she wrote that, though there may be time in the future to deal with the bigger issue, that time had not yet arrived.

Then, in 1989, O’Connor refused to join four other justices who were ready to reverse Roe v. Wade with the case of Webster v. Reproductive Services. When pressed by Chief Justice William Justice Rehnquist to do so, O’Connor held back, the New York Times wrote.

Years later, during the 1992 case Planned Parenthood v. Casey, O’Connor helped forge and lead a five-justice majority that reaffirmed Roe v. Wade.

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Reading a summary of the decision in Planned Parenthood v. Casey, O’Connor said even though “some of us as individuals find abortion offensive to our most basic principles of morality… that can’t control our decision.”

“Our obligation is to define the liberty of all, not to mandate our own moral code,” O’Connor said. O’Connor and two other justices, in a jointly-written opinion, said that while they might not have joined the original majority ruling in favor of Roe if they were on the 1973 court, to overturn the precedent would cause “both profound and unnecessary damage to the court’s legitimacy, and to the nation’s commitment to the rule of law,” The New York Times reported.

In June 2022, a more conservative court overturned Roe v. Wade.

Although O’Connor disagreed with her conservative colleagues on issues such as abortion, she is still regarded fondly by them. Justice Clarence Thomas, for instance, called O’Connor an “outstanding colleague, civil in dissent and gracious when in the majority” upon her retirement.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.