1973

"If these laws are held to be constitutional, their wisdom will continue to be debated in our state and national legislatures. If any doubt exists, would it not be better to allow the discussion to continue?"

"Until some kind of definite evidence is available concerning the social pattern that is emerging in those states which have removed all restrictions on abortion, should a final decision be made which would extend abortion-on-demand to the entire country?"

"The easy solution of abortion discourages more constructive solutions. Even if one overlooks the biological evidence concerning the unborn child, or the psychological testimony that most women seeking to take the life of their unborn baby, like most persons seeking to take their own life, desire to be stopped by someone, is abortion really a satisfactory solution to any social problem? Will the availability of the easier abortion “solution” discourage our society from seeking deeper and more permanent solutions? Such a fear appears to lie behind the opposition to abortion-on-demand within the black community. Despite assurances by abortion advocates, many members of the black community seem to suspect that numerous abortion clinics in ghetto areas could end up as the “white man’s” solution to the problems of poverty and race. When the poor cry out for bread, what response will they receive? The more difficult response—an equitable distribution of society’s resources? Or the easier response—a list of centers where abortions can be performed on those who would not seek them except for their desperate poverty? While these two responses are not mutually exclusive, to what extent will the availability of the second lessen society’s incentive to seek the first?"

"[B]oth the moral and the legal arguments for abortion-on-demand have attained popularity only within the last few years. Since the test of time has not been applied, should a final decision be made which would extend abortion-on-demand to the entire country?"

"(1) The unborn child is a distinct individual. Modern genetics has confirmed scientifically what women have long felt intuitively—the presence of another human life, a life to be reverenced and protected. (2) Many women who seek abortions are acting from an overpowering but temporary fear. Most of these women really desire to have their baby, and they will later be glad that their effort to secure an abortion was unsuccessful. In order to react constructively to the stresses and tensions of pregnancy, women need the support of society—not the address of the nearest abortion clinic. (3) While abortion is an easy solution for many social problems, it is not a true solution for any. Its availability may prevent more constructive solutions from emerging. (4) The social consequences of unlimited abortion are as yet unknown."

"Oral contraceptives (OCs) of the combined type are "almost 100 percent effective" when "taken according to the prescribed regimen." But the oral contraceptives have disadvantages such as side effects during their early use. Moreover, their use is medically contraindicated for certain patients, particularly those with a history of thromboembolic disease.... [E]ven the theoretically most effective or highly effective methods of contraception are not always actually effective for a number of reasons. Except for voluntary sterilization which many people will not use, even the most effective or highly effective methods have shortcomings either in terms of method failures or in terms of side effects or medical contraindications. In addition some of the methods are so difficult to practice regularly and correctly that they have little practical utility."

"Although contraceptive services are legally available in all states to married persons and in almost all states without regard to marital status, in fact contraceptives are not readily available to a substantial portion of the population. This is particularly true of urban and rural poor in many areas of the country. In some of these areas even non-prescription and relatively ineffective contraceptives cannot be obtained. Even if some form of contraception is available there is likelihood of unwanted pregnancy since the most effective and practical contraceptives, such as the birth control pill, the intrauterine device, and the diaphragm can be obtained only on the prescription of a doctor whose services are denied to hundreds of thousands of poor...."

"This commitment to the principle that safe abortions should be available to all who seek them is a necessary corollary of Planned Parenthood’s activities in the area of birth control. While Planned Parenthood does not view abortion as an alternative to contraception, it recognizes that abortion services are essential to protect women where contraception is unavailable, where it has not been used or where it has failed. Planned Parenthood believes that abortions must also be available to women who have been raped and in cases where the fetus may be deformed as a result of the mother’s exposure to rubella, her use of drugs which affect fetal development or as a result of other factors."

"Planned Parenthood's concern with family planning and family health necessarily includes concern with the availability of abortion and with the compelling problems which result from restrictive abortion laws which make medically safe, legal abortions unavailable to many women. Planned Parenthood has adopted a policy on abortion which states in part: The optimum method of birth control is the consistent employment of effective contraception but in practice this goal is sometimes not achieved. It is, therefore, desirable that provisions respecting abortion not be contained in state Criminal Codes. Planned Parenthood believes that since abortion is a medical procedure, it should be governed by the same rules as apply to other medical procedures in general when performed by properly qualified physicians with reasonable medical safeguards."

"Millions of women are now becoming truly conscious of the manifold forms of oppression and discrimination of their sex in our society. They are beginning to publicly express their outrage at what they have always known—that bearing and raising a child that they do not want is indeed cruel and unusual punishment. Such punishment involves not only an indeterminate sentence and a loss of citizenship rights as an independent person...great physical hardship and emotional damage disproportionate to the crime of participating equally in sexual activity with a man...but is punishment for her status as a woman and a potential child-bearer.... Abortion laws reinforce the legally legitimized indignities that women have already suffered under for too long and bear witness to the inferior position to which women are relegated. The total destruction of a woman’s status in society results from compelling her to take sole responsibility for having the illegal abortion or bear the unwanted child, and suffer the physical hardship and mental anguish whichever she chooses. Only the woman is punished by society for an act in which she has participated equally, only she is punished for her "status" as child-bearer. In light of “evolving standards of decency that mark the progress of a maturing society,” the basis of the Eighth Amendment...the struggle of women for full and meaningful equality in society over the last hundred years indicates that it would indeed be a sign of the immaturity of our social development if these laws were upheld. White persons have had to readjust their thinking and actions to question whether laws which discriminated against blacks were unconstitutional. Men (of whom the legislatures and courts are almost exclusively composed) must now learn that they may not constitutionally impose the cruel penalties of unwanted pregnancy and motherhood on women, where the penalties fall solely on them...."

"Laws which force women to endure unwanted pregnancy and motherhood against their will or to become criminals and take the risks to physical and mental health resulting from an illegal abortion are disproportionate to the act for which they are being punished—an act which, in many instances, is not even illegal. Further, amici contend that abortions, in fact if not in theory, punish women for private, sexual activity for which only women bear the repercussions of pregnancy therefore punishing them for their status as women and potential child-bearers. The pain and suffering associated with an unwanted pregnancy or child, is not solely physical pain. The emotional pain and scarring which accompanies an unwanted pregnancy is an equally important and far more lasting form of pain which must be considered in the context of guarantees of the Eighth Amendment, and the emphasis given to mental anguish as a crucial component of “cruel and unusual punishment.” According to Dr. Natalie Shainess, who has devoted the majority of her 25-year practice as a psychoanalyst and psychiatrist to the area of feminine psychology and particularly with experience of being a mother, a woman who does not want her pregnancy suffers depression through nearly the entire pregnancy and often that depression is extremely severe. Furthermore, according to Dr. Shainess that depression continues even after birth may even go into psychotic states, and may result in permanent emotional damage to the woman. Such potential permanent emotional damage, the risks to physical health and safety which may also result in permanent physical harm, and the burdens of taking care of an unwanted child, constitute a form of long-term imprisonment. Such long term imprisonment “could be so disproportionate to the offense as to fall within the inhibition” of the Eighth Amendment...."

"The Fundamental Rights to Marital and Personal Privacy Are Acknowledged in Decisions of This Court as Protected by the First, Fourth, Ninth, and Fourteenth Amendments."

"Abortion is an accepted medical procedure for terminating pregnancy. Amici medical organizations recognize the acceptability of abortion, as their policy statements indicate; they draw no distinction between abortion and other medical procedures. The Texas abortion law effectively denies Appellants Roe and Doe access to health care. Jane Roe was forced to bear a pregnancy to term though an abortion would have involved considerably less risk to her health. Physicians who would otherwise be willing to perform an abortion in clinical surroundings are deterred by the fear of prosecution. Since Appellant Roe could not afford to travel elsewhere to secure a safe abortion, to avoid continuation of pregnancy she would have been forced to resort to an unskilled layman and accept all the health hazards attendant to such a procedure. Even had she been able to travel out of state, the time required to make financial and travel arrangements would have entailed greater health risks inherent in later abortions."

"Although this Court has not expressly delineated a right to seek health care, the importance of such care has been recognized and the existence of such a right suggested. In United States v. Vuitch (1971), this Court reaffirmed society’s expectation that patients receive “such treatment as is necessary to preserve their health.” In this Court’s invalidation of Connecticut’s proscription against contraception, Justice White noted that statute’s intrusion upon “access to medical assistance...in respect to proper methods of birth control.” Griswold v. Connecticut (1965) (White, J., concurring)."

"The Right to Seek and Receive Medical Care for the Protection of Health and Well-Being Is a Fundamental Personal Liberty Recognized by Decisions of This Court and by International and National Understanding."

"Appellants contend that fundamental rights entitled to constitutional protection are involved in the instant case, namely the right of individuals to seek and receive health care unhindered by arbitrary state restraint; the right of married couples and of women to privacy and autonomy in the control of reproduction; and the right of physicians to practice medicine according to the highest professional standards. These asserted rights meet constitutional standards arising from several sources and expressed in decisions of this Court. The Texas abortion law infringes these rights, and since the law is not supported by a compelling justification, it is therefore unconstitutional."

"The Constitution does not specifically enumerate a “right to seek abortion,” or a “right of privacy.” That such a right is not enumerated in the Constitution is no impediment to the existence of the right. Other rights not specifically enumerated have been recognized as fundamental rights entitled to constitutional protection including the right to marry, the right to have offspring, the right to use contraceptives to avoid having offspring, the right to direct the upbringing and education of one’s children, as well as the right to travel."

"The Provisions in the Texas Penal Code, Articles 1191–1194 and 1196, Which Prohibit the Medical Procedure of Induced Abortion Unless “procured or attempted by medical advice for the purpose of saving the life of the mother,” Abridge Fundamental Personal Rights of Appellants Secured by the First, Fourth, Ninth, and Fourteenth Amendments, and Do Not Advance a Narrowly Drawn, Compelling State Interest."

"Evidence of American standards of medical practice respecting induced abortion is found in the policy statements of professional organizations. Both the American Medical Association and the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists have set standards of professional practice in recent years. ACOG policy sanctions therapeutic and elective abortion “to safeguard the patient’s health or improve her family life situation.” ACOG recognizes that “abortion may be performed at the patient’s request....” A very similar position was taken by the American Medical Association. The AMA at one time had followed the A.L.I. model, listing four or five vaguely defined situations for sanctioned abortion. This proved unworkable, and the policy was changed in order not to limit the physicians’ traditional responsibility for evaluating “the merits of each individual case....”"

"Today, only abortions performed in non-medical environments present significant risks of morbidity and mortality; with proper medical supervision, abortions are safe and simple procedures. In keeping with modern medical practice, this Court would reinforce the purpose of early abortion legislation if it invalidated the statute. This would permit abortions to be done by licensed physicians in adequate medical facilities and discourage abortions by unskilled practitioners. Moreover, it would preserve the 117-year-old purpose of the law, and the common law."

"On another level as well, abortion is a safe procedure: it is without clinically significant psychiatric sequelae. A number of recent studies confirm that abortion does not produce serious psychological side-effects damaging to the mental wellbeing of the patient."

"[S]urgical dangers warned against any medical procedure. Induced abortion, in particular, involved internal use of surgical instruments, and the inevitable introduction of infection into the womb. Far better, the legislature obviously deemed, that a woman risk childbirth, than death on the operating table. Only when the risks cancelled themselves out did she have an option. Today the comparative risks weigh heavily in favor of permitting induced abortion, not as an emergency matter as in 1851, but as an elective medical procedure. Surgery in those times was almost always fatal. As the next section shows, medicine is a different science today. Induced abortion, in medical practice today, is a relatively minor surgical procedure, insofar as risks to the patient’s physical or mental well-being are concerned...."

"The law on abortion cannot be understood without reviewing the pertinent aspects of medical and legal history which gave rise to the law. When this is done, it becomes abundantly clear that public health considerations motivated this type of legislation, and that these factors no longer justify maintaining such stringent restrictions in the criminal code. In the 1820s when the first American abortion statutes were enacted, there was no medical profession as we know it. Physicians and quacks alike advertised their treatments and potions in the same marketplace. Both had little to offer the public. Medical science, an infant branch of learning in the 1800s, did not uncover the need for clean hands in gynecological examinations until the 1840s."

"Appellant Jane Roe sued as an unmarried pregnant adult woman on behalf of herself “and all other women who have sought, are seeking, or in the future will seek to obtain a legal, medically safe abortion but whose lives are not critically threatened by the pregnancy.” At the time the action was filed, Jane Roe had been “unable to secure a legal abortion in Dallas County because of the existence of the Texas Abortion Laws.” She had sought this medical procedure “because of the economic hardship which pregnancy entailed and because of the social stigma attached to the bearing of illegitimate children in our society.” Miss Roe admitted that insofar as her own interpretation of Texas law was concerned, her “life [did] not appear to be threatened by the continuation of her pregnancy,” other than in a qualitative sense, and in the “extreme difficulty in securing employment of any kind” because of her pregnant condition. ane Roe suffered emotional trauma when unable to obtain a legal abortion in Texas. She regarded herself as a law-abiding citizen and did not want to participate in a felony offense by obtaining an illegal abortion. Also, she had only a tenth grade education and no well-paying job which might provide sufficient funds to travel to another jurisdiction for a legal abortion in a safe, clinical setting."

"The armed forces have acted today solely from the patriotic inspiration of saving the country from the tremendous chaos into which it was being plunged by the Marxist government of Salvador Allende.… The Junta will maintain judicial power and consultantship of the Comptroller. The Chambers will remain in recess until further orders. That is all."

"The United States... supported authoritarian regimes throughout Central and South America during and after the Cold War in defense of its economic and political interests. In tiny Guatemala, the Central Intelligence Agency mounted a coup overthrowing the democratically elected government in 1954, and it backed subsequent rightwing governments against small leftist rebel groups for four decades. Roughly 200,000 civilians died. In Chile, a CIA-supported coup helped put Gen. Augusto Pinochet in power from 1973 to 1990. In Peru, a fragile democratic government is still unraveling the agency's role in a decade of support for the now-deposed and disgraced president, Alberto K. Fujimori, and his disreputable spy chief, Vladimiro L. Montesinos."

"1 in 10 chance perhaps, but save Chile! worth spending; not concerned; no involvement of embassy; $10,000,000 available, more if necessary; full-time job — best men we have; game plan; make the economy scream; 48 hours for plan of action."

"Chile had known class struggle within a bourgeois democratic framework for many decades: that was its tradition. With the coming to the presidency of Allende, the conservative forces progressively turned class struggle into class war — and here too, it is worth stressing that it was the conservative forces which turned the one into the other."

"At midday on September 11, 1973, after months of mounting tensions in the streets of Santiago, Chile, British-made Hawker Hunter jets swooped overhead, dropping bombs on La Moneda, the neoclassical presidential palace in the center of the city. As the bombs continued to fall, La Moneda burned. President Salvador Allende, elected three years earlier at the head of a leftist coalition, was barricaded inside. During his term, Chile had been wracked by social unrest, economic crisis, and political paralysis. Allende had said he would not leave his post until he had finished his job—but now the moment of truth had arrived. Under the command of General Augusto Pinochet, Chile’s armed forces were seizing control of the country. Early in the morning on that fateful day, Allende offered defiant words on a national radio broadcast, hoping that his 8 many supporters would take to the streets in defense of democracy. But the resistance never materialized. The military police who guarded the palace had abandoned him; his broadcast was met with silence. Within hours, President Allende was dead. So, too, was Chilean democracy. This is how we tend to think of democracies dying: at the hands of men with guns. During the Cold War, coups d’état accounted for nearly three out of every four democratic breakdowns. Democracies in Argentina, Brazil, the Dominican Republic, Ghana, Greece, Guatemala, Nigeria, Pakistan, Peru, Thailand, Turkey, and Uruguay all died this way. More recently, military coups toppled Egyptian President Mohamed Morsi in 2013 and Thai Prime Minister Yingluck Shinawatra in 2014. In all these cases, democracy dissolved in spectacular fashion, through military power and coercion. But there is another way to break a democracy. It is less dramatic but equally destructive. Democracies may die at the hands not of generals but of elected leaders—presidents or prime ministers who subvert the very process that brought them to power. Some of these leaders dismantle democracy quickly, as Hitler did in the wake of the 1933 Reichstag fire in Germany. More often, though, democracies erode slowly, in barely visible steps."

"I don't see why we need to stand by and watch a country go communist due to the irresponsibility of its own people. The issues are much too important for the Chilean voters to be left to decide for themselves."

"As had been the case during Nixon's last years in office, the nation again faced the question of whether the United States should, or even could, maintain separate standards in fighting the Cold War from what it was prepared to accept at home. Events in Chile posed the dilemma most clearly. A successful military coup had finally taken place in Santiago in September, 1973. It left Allende dead—probably by suicide—and a reliably anti-communist government in power headed by General Augusto Pinochet. Direct C.I.A. complicity was never established, but Nixon and Kissinger openly welcomed the outcome and sought to cooperate with the new Chilean leader. By the time the C.I.A. investigations got under way in 1975, however, Pinochet's government had imprisoned, tortured, and executed thousands of Allende supporters—some of them American citizens. Chile, for many years a democracy, now had one of the most repressive dictatorships Latin America had ever seen. What the United States did in Chile differed little from what it had done, two decades earlier, in Iran and Guatemala. But the 1970s were not the 1950s: once the information got out that the Nixon administration had tried to keep Allende from the office to which he had been elected and had sought to remove him once there, "plausible denial" became impossible. That made questions about responsibility unavoidable. Could Allende have remained in power if there had been no American campaign against him? Would he have retained democratic procedures had he done so? Should the United States have refrained, to the extent that it did, from condemning Pinochet's abuses? Had it made a greater effort, might it have stopped them? There are, even today, no clear answers: Washington's role in Chile's horrors remains a hotly contested issue among both historians of these events and participants in them. What was clear at the time, though, was that the C.I.A.'s license to operate without constraints had produced actions in Chile that, by its own admission, failed the "daylight" test. They could not be justified when exposed to public view."

"Zu welcher Zeit kann man sich erlauben, Pazifist zu sein? Die Ukraine befindet sich in der interessanten Situation, in der man diese Konzepte überprüfen kann. Aber jetzt sitze ich in meinem Studio und wir reden über Philosophie, obwohl ich den Beschuss höre. Ich bin gespannt, wie es weitergeht."

"Wenn Wahlergebnisse es nicht hergeben sollten, dass gegen die Linke eine Koalition gebildet wird, muss trotzdem eine handlungsfähige Regierung gebildet werden. Da muss die CDU pragmatisch sein."

"Wer wirklich ein guter Schauspieler werden will, muss im Theater lernen. Hier kann man sich als Künstler auch am besten ausleben. Wobei Shakespeare selbstverständlich die Kür ist."

"In innigen Beziehungen wird auch innig gestritten."

"Ich war nicht gerade der beste Spieler meiner Generation. Was mich am Ende herausgehoben hat? Dass ich mich facettenreich präsentiert habe."

"Ich kenne das Geheimnis des Erfolges nicht. Aber ich kenne das Geheimnis des Misserfolges: es allen recht machen zu wollen."

"Ich bin ein Spießer im Tattoo-Pelz."

"Niemand motiviert mich so wie Jan"

"Ich habe niemals in meiner Karriere einen anderen Rennfahrer betrogen. Das ist Fakt."

"Da kann ich kaum verstehen, wenn man die oft elternlosen Kinder in den schlimmen Verhältnissen ohne Perspektive und Bildung sieht, wie wir hier in Deutschland klagen können. Wir müssten eigentlich jeden Tag mit einem Lächeln aufstehen."

"Ab dem Tag war nichts mehr, wie es vorher war. Wie es dazu kommen konnte, weiß ich allerdings bis heute nicht."