Sandra Day O’Connor, who made history as the first female justice on the Supreme Court, died Friday morning. She was 93.

O’Connor, who retired from the high bench in 2006, 25 years after her nomination by President Ronald Reagan, passed away in her home state of Arizona due to complications from advanced dementia and a respiratory illness.

“A daughter of the American Southwest, Sandra Day O’Connor blazed an historic trail as our Nation’s first female Justice,” Chief Justice John Roberts said in a statement issued by the court. “She met that challenge with undaunted determination, indisputable ability, and engaging candor.”

A moderate conservative, O’Connor was best known for her co-authorship of the majority opinion in 1992’s Planned Parenthood v. Casey, in which the justices ruled that state laws restricting abortion should not impose an “undue burden” on women seeking the procedure.

“Some of us as individuals find abortion offensive to our most basic principles of morality, but that can’t control our decision,” O’Connor said from the bench, as she read a summary of the decision. “Our obligation is to define the liberty of all, not to mandate our own moral code.”

Planned Parenthood v. Casey was overturned in June 2022 by the court’s decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, which returned responsibility for deciding restrictions on the procedure to the states.

The opinion in that case was written by O’Connor’s successor, Justice Samuel Alito.

O’Connor also signed on to the majority opinion in Bush v. Gore, which put an end to the weeks-long drama of the 2000 presidential election by nixing then-Vice President Al Gore’s demands for a recount in Florida. 

“It was fitting that Sandra became the first female appointed to our highest court, because she was a pioneer who lived by the code of the West,” former President George W. Bush said in a statement. “She was determined and honest, modest and considerate, dependable and self-reliant. She was also fun and funny, with a wonderful sense of humor.”

O’Connor also authored the decision in 2003’s Grutter v. Bollinger, which held that affirmative action programs based on race did not violate the 14th Amendment — a decision that was also all but overturned by the high court this past June.

The granddaughter of a pioneer who traveled west from Vermont and founded the family ranch some three decades before Arizona became a state in 1912, O’Connor had a tenacious, independent spirit that came naturally.

As a child growing up in the remote outback, she learned early to ride horses, round up cattle and drive trucks and tractors.

“I didn’t do all the things the boys did,” she told Time magazine in 1981, “but I fixed windmills and repaired fences.”

After attending Stanford University and graduating from its law school in 1952, O’Connor discovered that most large law firms did not hire women. 

One Los Angeles firm offered her a job as a secretary.

She later found work as a deputy county attorney in San Mateo, Calif., then accompanied her husband to Germany to work as a civilian attorney after he was drafted into the Army. 

Following a five-year hiatus to raise her three sons, O’Connor — who had worked on Arizona Sen. Barry Goldwater’s 1964 presidential campaign — served as an assistant Arizona attorney general before being appointed in 1969 to a seat in the Arizona Senate.

She remained there for six years, rising to become the chamber’s first female majority leader. 

In 1974, O’Connor was appointed a superior court judge for Maricopa County, then became a state appeals court judge five years later.

On July 6, 1981, she was personally notified by Reagan that he would nominate her to the Supreme Court the next day.

O’Connor received more than 60,000 letters in her first year as a justice, more than any one member in the court’s history. 

“I had no idea when I was appointed how much it would mean to many people around the country,” she once said. “It affected them in a very personal way. People saw it as a signal that there are virtually unlimited opportunities for women. It’s important to parents for their daughters, and to daughters for themselves.”

After her ascension to the Supreme Court, O’Connor remained the only woman on the bench until she was joined in 1993 by Ruth Bader Ginsburg.

Currently, the Supreme Court boasts four women: Amy Coney Barrett, Ketanji Brown Jackson, Elena Kagan and Sonia Sotomayor.

Former President Barack Obama, who awarded O’Connor the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2009, praised her Friday for “forging a new path and building a bridge behind her for all young women to follow.”

O’Connor was regarded with great fondness by many of her colleagues.

When she retired, Justice Clarence Thomas called her “an outstanding colleague, civil in dissent and gracious when in the majority.”

O’Connor could, nonetheless, express her views tartly.

In one of her final actions as a justice, a dissent to a 5-4 ruling to allow local governments to condemn and seize personal property to allow private developers to build shopping plazas, office buildings and other facilities, she warned the majority had unwisely ceded yet more power to the powerful. 

“The specter of condemnation hangs over all property,” she wrote. “Nothing is to prevent the state from replacing … any home with a shopping mall, or any farm with a factory.”

Following her retirement, O’Connor remained active in the government.

She sat as a judge on several federal appeals courts, advocated for judicial independence and served on the Iraq Study Group.

She also was appointed to the honorary post of chancellor at the College of William and Mary in Virginia.

In 2018, O’Connor announced that she had been diagnosed with “the beginning stages of dementia, probably Alzheimer’s disease.”

O’Connor’s survivors include her three sons, Scott, Brian and Jay, six grandchildren and a brother.

Her husband, John O’Connor, died of complications of Alzheimer’s in 2009. 

With Post wires