Women

"McCorvey’s 1995 jump from abortion rights advocate to a fierce activist against the very law her own unwanted pregnancy ushered in has long been a complicated story within the U.S. abortion debate."

"In 1969, McCorvey was 22 and on her third pregnancy when she tried to get an abortion, which was illegal in Texas at the time unless it was to save the mother’s life. She was referred to Linda Coffee, a lawyer in Dallas who was looking for a case to challenge the Texas law. Coffee teamed up with former law school classmate Sara Weddington, who was known for testing anti-abortion statutes. In the three years it took for the case to go through the courts, McCorvey gave birth to a baby girl who she set up for adoption."

"This paper investigates the impact of the abortion law changes on family labor supply in the United States in the early 1970s. It attempts to answer the key question: do the law changes affect labor supply of fertile women and their parents who co-reside with them? Following the works of Chiappori, Fortin, and Lacroix (2002) and Oreffice (2007), I propose a collective labor supply model for households in which a fertile daughter resides with her parents. In empirical section, using data from the March Current Population Survey and Panel Study of Income Dynamics, I find a significantly positive influence of the law on fertile women's capacity to work and a negative influence on their mothers in mother-daughter family scenario. It can be explained that the availability of the birth control allows the daughters more time to work for earning and provides their mothers fewer opportunities to financially support their newborn grandchildren. The paper uses the Heckman selection bias correction technique to correct the bias due to missing data on working behaviors of the family members. The novelty of this paper includes the investigation of the effect on working behaviors of people rather than spouses in an extended family."

"Today, Catholics and evangelical Protestants assert shared religious beliefs in conflicts over sexual norms. This coalition did not exist at the time of Roe, for example, when evangelical Protestants had different views about abortion and were unwilling to join in political coalition with Catholics in opposing it. But the views of evangelical Protestants about abortion have changed in the intervening years, as has their willingness to assert claims of common faith with Catholics on the question. Theological differences, of course, persist. But since the era of Ronald Reagan’s election, when Republican leaders encouraged evangelical Protestants to enter politics in common cause with Catholics opposed to abortion, a conservative, cross-denominational coalition of Christians has pursued self-consciously traditional and conservative ends."

"[A] sound foundation for final and reasonable resolution."

"Norma had told the press that she was Jane Roe way back in 1973. But not until 1987-when she recanted the lie that she had been raped-did the press take much notice of her. And it was two more years before Norma was famous, lifted from the veil of a pseudonym by five weeks of press in the spring of 1989."

"According to a news release issued by WUSA about the interview, Sarah Weddington, one of the two lawyers who took the case to the Supreme Court, said she had never touched the issue of rape and only emphasized the question of whether the Constitution gives to the state or leaves to a woman the questions of what she can or must do with her body. Kate Michelman, executive director of the National Abortion Rights Action League, said in an interview today that Ms. McCorvey's disclosure should not cloud the discussion about the right of a woman to terminate her pregnancy. If she lied, you have to remember that abortions were illegal, Ms. Michelman said, and that women were looked down upon if they were pregnant outside of marriage. It was her life circumstances that created the conditions that mitigated against her being straightforward about the fact that she was pregnant and wanted to terminate that pregnancy. After the celebrated Supreme Court decision, Ms. McCorvey at first lived in relative obscurity in Dallas, fearing that she would become a target of anti-abortion activists."

"[ Gay rights, contraceptives, certain fertility treatments and even interracial marriage ] are imperiled because they’re all rooted in that right to privacy. All of this has been implied because they’re understood to be core, basic human rights. You don’t need the state to recognize them because they are vested in you by virtue of being a human."

"If Roe were reversed and all high-risk states banned abortion, 39% of the national population of women aged 15–44 would experience increases in travel distances ranging from less than 1 mile to 791 miles. If these women respond similarly to travel distances as Texas women, county-level abortion rates would fall by amounts ranging from less than 1% to more than 40%. Aggregating across all affected regions, the average resident is expected to experience a 249 mile increase in travel distance, and the abortion rate is predicted to fall by 32.8% (95% confidence interval 25.9–39.6%) in the year following a Roe reversal."

"The title of Worst Joke in Legal History belongs to one of history's highest-profile cases. Defending Texas's abortion restrictions before the Supreme Court, attorney Mr. Jay Floyd decided to open oral argument with a sexist joke. Arguing against two female attorneys, Floyd begins: “It’s an old joke, but when a man argues against two beautiful ladies like this, they are going to have the last word.” The joke is demeaning and (as Floyd himself admits) unoriginal, but it also lacks the saving grace of at least being funny. A recording of the oral argument, which can be listened to here, demonstrates just how badly the joke bombed with the Supreme Court. Painful silence endures for just over three seconds. Not captured on the recording are the physical reactions of the justices. According to the later recollection of one of the “beautiful ladies” arguing against Floyd, Chief Justice Warren Burger was so furious that he almost rushed down “right off the bench at him. He glared him down.” Dr. Ryan Malphurs, a scholar of Supreme Court humor (yes, there is such a thing), describes how “Floyd struggled to gain momentum through the rest of his argument.” A flustered Floyd responds to Justice Thurgood Marshall’s questioning with the stunning admission that these are “unanswerable questions,” a response that earns derisive laughter. (Thurgood Marshall replies, “I appreciate it.”) Floyd apologizes for his “artless statement,” which garners even more laughter. The man who had attempted to begin with a joke ends as the object of comedy. When the Supreme Court requested re-argument on Roe v. Wade eleven months later, Floyd was gone. Floyd’s disastrous “beautiful ladies get the last word” is the greatest failed joke in U.S. legal history, and some claim it is the worst joke of all time, in any setting. It occurred on the highest possible stage, in a high-profile case, while also (here’s the spoiled icing on the collapsed cake) managing to be a sexist joke during a landmark women’s rights case. But did the failed Roe v. Wade joke actually affect the Court’s eventual 7-2 ruling? This seems highly unlikely. The only justice who conceivably could have been affected by Floyd’s argument was Chief Justice Burger. Burger was a conservative who later voted to restrict abortions – and yet he voted with the Roe v. Wade majority. So was Burger swayed to vote for abortion rights based on Floyd’s calamitous oral argument? Probably not – most scholars have explained Burger’s vote in Roe as a simple strategic move. (So long as he voted with the majority, Burger, as Chief Justice, could control who wrote the majority opinion in Roe, and thus partially control what that opinion said.)"

"In the year following a reversal, increases in travel distances are predicted to prevent 93,546–143,561 women from accessing abortion care."

"“I am dedicated to spending the rest of my life undoing the law that bears my name,” McCorvey told a U.S. Senate subcommittee in 1998. “I would like nothing more than to have this law overturned.” A 2000 court affidavit underscores McCorvey's true feelings on the famous case: "They said yes, ‘You’re white. You’re young, pregnant, and you want an abortion.’ At that time, I didn’t know their full intent. Only that they wanted to make abortion legal and they thought I’d be a good plaintiff. I came for the food, and they led me to believe that they could help me get an abortion. At that time, I was a street person. I lived, worked, and panhandled out on the streets. My totally powerless circumstance made it easy for them to use me. My presence was a necessary evil. My real interests were not their concern." McCorvey petitioned the Supreme Court to overturn Roe v. Wade in 2005. Her request was denied."

"We can trace the emergence of healthcare refusals legislation to Congress’s passage of the Church Amendment in 1973. That legislation followed on the heels of two significant judicial decisions: the Supreme Court’s 1973 Roe v. Wade decision invalidating criminal prohibitions on abortion; and a 1972 federal district court decision enjoining a Catholic affiliated hospital, which was deemed to engage in state action because of its receipt of federal funding, from prohibiting sterilization at its facilities. The Church Amendment, which passed with near unanimous support, provided that receipt of federal funds would not provide a basis for requiring a physician or nurse “to perform or assist in the performance of any sterilization procedure or abortion if his performance or assistance in the performance of such procedure or abortion would be contrary to his religious beliefs or moral convictions.” It also provided that no “entity” could be compelled to “make its facilities available for the performance of any sterilization procedure or abortion if [such] performance . . . is prohibited by the entity on the basis of religious beliefs or moral convictions.”"

"Norma McCorvey, Jane Roe of the landmark U.S. Supreme Court Roe v. Wade decision, passed away of a heart ailment at 69 years old, reports The Washington Post. She leaves behind a complicated legacy. While many women's rights advocates originally considered her a compatriot, McCorvey never intended to become a reproductive rights activist. In fact, she eventually declared herself pro-life and sought to overturn the very legislation that turned her into a feminist icon. McCorvey adopted the pseudonym of Jane Roe to protect her anonymity during the 1973 Roe v. Wade Supreme Court case whose ruling would legalize abortion and become a crucial touchstone of female reproductive rights in America. When she first filed the now infamous suit in 1970, however, McCorvey's goal was not sweeping political reform. Rather, the then 22-year-old Texan hoped only to gain the ability to legally and safely end a pregnancy she did not want."

"In Roe v. Wade,' the Supreme Court concluded that the abortion decision of a female is protected by the penumbral right of privacy. The Court noted, however, that this right to abort is not absolute. Rather, the right to terminate one's pregnancy must be weighed against compelling state interests. Two such interests found by the Court in Roe were the protection of the pregnant woman's health and the protection of potential life. The Court in Roe considered the right of an adult female to an abortion. When the issue is the abortion decision of a minor, the courts must also contend with the additional interest of the parents. In Danforth, the state advanced the parents' interest in raising their children as they see fit as a compelling state interest to justify the parental consent provision. These parental consent requirement statutes, however, have not met with favorable receptions in other courts. In fact, the decisions of several courts have cast considerable doubt on their validity."

"A doctor has a direct, personal, substantial interest for his decision may send him to jail. Not only does the State prevent the physician from making an impartial decision about terminating his patient’s pregnancy, it unfairly influences this decision in a shocking way. The State says that only if the physician wrongly decides that the operation is needed to preserve her life is he criminally liable. If he wrongly decides the operation is not needed to preserve her life, he is subject to no criminal penalties. The State of Texas thus requires that all errors in a doctor’s evaluation of his patient’s need for termination of pregnancy be on the side of her death... A physician practising medicine under the Texas statute cannot keep as his sole concern his patient’s life. A doctor would have to be superhuman if he were able to ignore the fact that his decision can be second-guessed by a jury which may totally disregard medical evidence. Therefore, his patient cannot receive the impartial decision required by due process of law...."

"The trimester system was actually the result of a compromise among the Justices. Blackmun’s original idea was that a woman had the right to an abortion without interference from the state until the end of the first trimester. During the first trimester, the abortion decision was left to “the best medical judgment of the pregnant woman’s attending physician.” Afterward states could limit legal abortions to “stated reasonable therapeutic categories”-such as the woman’s physical or mental health-“that are articulated with sufficient clarity” to give physicians fair warning. The idea was that health regulations were unnecessary until the second trimester because first-trimester abortions were as safe for women as carrying the fetus to term. However, Justices William Brennan and Thurgood Marshall objected that the first trimester didn’t give women enough time to discover that they were pregnant, find a doctor, and take the necessary steps to obtain an abortion. Marshall, in particular, was worried about the effect of Blackmun’s rule on poor and minority women. Blackmun agreed that the first trimester was an arbitrary point, and he responded by pushing the cutoff point to the moment of viability. However, Blackmun believed that states should still be able to regulate abortions for health reasons after the first trimester. In effect, this produced three different sets of rules for three different trimesters. Brennan responded that the point of viability was imprecise. The Court did not have to specify a specific cutoff point but should leave that question to “medically informed” legislatures I the first instance. However, Blackmun ignored this suggestion, and the result was Roe’s trimester framework."

"Since the current court overturned it in 2022, “Roe is the floor, not the ceiling” has become a rallying cry for activists who vowed to rebuild access, especially for marginalized communities, according to Pamela Merritt, executive director of Medical Students for Choice, a group that opposes viability clauses."

"These facts should give conservative opponents of Roe pause. Can it be that they have misunderstood the central tenets of their own philosophy? Do they have a good account of why this philosophy should apply to all sorts of other choices, but not to the choices made by women about whether to bear a child? Many anti-Roe activists would no doubt respond that the abortion decision is different because it is not merely self-regarding. The rights of another entity-the fetus-are at stake. If this were true-if the fetus were an appropriate rights bearer-this argument would have considerable force. But some Roe supporters deny that it is true. One thing that has persisted for the quarter-century since Roe was decided-and is likely to persist for the indefinite future-is moral disagreement among intelligent and well-intentioned people about the moral status of the fetus. Some conservative opponents of Roe claim that this moral disagreement serves to undermine Roe. If people disagree about abortion, they argue, and if the disagreement cannot be settled by reference to the text of the Constitution or the intent of the framers, should not the disagreement be settled by the political process? Does not Roe therefore reflect indefensible judicial activism?"

"The Roe decision did not prompt "abortion on demand" as many opponents of the procedure predicted it would. Nor have various legislatures or court rulings restricted access as much as some supporters claim. New research from the Alan Guttmacher Institute found the rate of abortions is at its lowest level since Roe, about 1.31 million in the year 2000, down 4 percent from 1996."

"For the justices, Roe reflected earlier cases involving the right to privacy. That "right," wrote Justice Harry Blackmun in the main opinion for the Court is "broad enough to encompass a woman's decision whether or not to terminate her pregnancy.""

"A leading anti-abortion voice in the Legislature, Representative Woody Jenkins, said: In the late 70's we passed an act that said if Roe v. Wade was overturned, all of our previous laws would have continued vitality. What we are doing in a friendly way is instructing D.A.'s to enforce the criminal statutes."

"After McCorvey fell out of favor, she slipped into anonymity until she resurfaced in the 1990s as a devout Christian. She apologized publicly for her role in helping to bring about access to legal abortion. "I thought I was doing something right," she said during a 1996 memorial service for unborn children. "I didn't realize I would be leading innocent children to a senseless and terrible death.""

"I think the general consensus in Louisiana is they want to see Roe v. Wade overturned, Mr. Connick said. Laws in Nearly All States Nearly all states have on their books at least some abortion restrictions that have been regarded as unconstitutional under the Supreme Court's 1973 decision in Roe v. Wade and subsequent rulings. In addition to Louisiana, 20 states plus the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico have never repealed pre-1973 statutes that made most abortions a crime. Had the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, it is unclear whether these laws would have automatically sprung back to life. The answer depends in part on how each state's legal system regards old laws that have long been unenforced. Rachael Pine, a lawyer with the American Civil Liberties Union's Reproductive Freedom Project in New York, said today that no other state appears to have embarked on Louisiana's course. Ms. Pine's office is monitoring state developments and preparing to offer legal assistance if necessary."

"Professor Ely's admiration for the Warren Court was not unbounded. The main strand of Warren Court liberalism was small-d democracy, Professor Tushnet said. There was another strand, of personal autonomy, which was 1960's stuff. Ely didn't agree with it. Professor Ely expressed that disagreement most memorably in a caustic critique of the reasoning in Roe v. Wade, the 1973 decision finding a right to abortion in the Constitution. Earl Warren was no longer chief justice by then, but the Roe decision was rooted in a 1965 decision of the court. What is frightening about Roe is that this super-protected right, Professor Ely wrote in the Yale Law Journal in 1973, is not inferable from the language of the Constitution, the framers' thinking respecting the specific problem in issue, any general value derivable from the provisions they included, or the nation's governmental structure. Professor Ely had said he supported the availability of abortion as a matter of policy. But he wrote that the Roe decision was untenable as a matter of intellectually honest jurisprudence. It is not constitutional law, he said of the decision, and gives almost no sense of an obligation to try to be."

"In 1973 the U.S. Supreme Court made its landmark decision in Roe v. Wade which prohibited states from imposing restrictions on abortion even though the Constitution is silent on such matters. To justify their decision the Court made up a new “right” not found in the Constitution: the right to privacy. The founders of course never intended for such rights to exist s we know privacy is limited in many ways."

"Constitutional attorney and author of Men in Black: How the Supreme Court is Destroying America, Mark R. Levin refers to Justice Blackmuns opinion: “We need not resolve the question of when life begins. When those trained in the respective disciplines of medicine, philosophy, and theology are unable to arrive at any consensus, the judiciary, at this point in the development of man’s knowledge, is not in the position to speculate as to the answer.” Levin goes on to comment, “Blackmun gave deference to medicine, philosophy, and theology (from his own perspective) but not to the Constitution, the people, the states, or the other branches of the federal government. In truth, Blackmun did establish, at least for constitutional purposes, when life begins by recognizing abortion as a constitutionally protected right to privacy. He did precisely what he lectures should not be done.”"

"I should start by saying that this is not a statement about abortion being right or wrong, about whether Roe vs. Wade is a good decision or should be repealed. It's a statement trying to understand the incredible decline in crime that we had in the 1990s. And I don't know how much people are aware of it, but violent crime is down almost 50 percent in the United States. And so I have spent about five years looking at all the usual types of suspects of why crime might have fallen. There still is a lot left over and I puzzled over this for years until one day I stumbled on to a set of statistics about the amount of abortion that takes place in the United States. It turns out after legalization in 1973 to the present, about one in four pregnancies in the United States ends in abortion. How can that not have a big social impact? And since I've been thinking about crime, I thought, `Well, is it possible this could really be linked to crime?' And it turns out there's decades' worth of social scientific research that suggests that if a child comes into the world, he's unwanted, has a difficult home life, that child's at tremendously increased risk for criminal activity. And so the theory is really pretty simple. After legalized abortion, there were fewer unwanted children being born. There are fewer unwanted children. When they grew up to reach their peak crime ages, they just weren't there to do the crime. And so it looks like about a third of this decline in crime that we saw in the '90s I believe can be attributed to the legalization of abortion."

"[A]s a matter of constitutional interpretation, even most liberal jurisprudes — if you administer truth serum — will tell you it is basically indefensible."

"There was another factor, meanwhile, that had greatly contributed to the massive crime drop of the 1990s. It had taken shape more than twenty years earlier and concerned a young woman in Dallas named Norma McCorvey. Like the proverbial butterfly that flaps its wings on one continent and eventually causes a hurricane on another, Norma McCorvey dramatically altered the course of events without intending to. All she had wanted was an abortion. She was a poor, uneducated, unskilled, alcoholic, drug-using twenty-one-year-old woman who had already given up two children for adoption and now, in 1970, found herself pregnant again. But in Texas, as in all but a few states at that time, abortion was illegal. McCorvey’s cause came to be adopted by people far more powerful than she."

"Norma McCorvey was unmarried and unemployed when she became pregnant for the third time at age 22. It was 1969, and it was illegal to have an abortion in Texas, where she lived. McCorvey resorted to seeing an underground abortion doctor but walked out because of the "filth and cockroaches." Soon after, McCorvey became a national symbol for the abortion rights movement. For years she was known simply as Jane Roe, the plaintiff from one of the most famous Supreme Court cases in history: Roe v. Wade."

"So how did Roe v. Wade help trigger, a generation later, the greatest crime drop in recorded history? As far as crime is concerned, it turns out that not all children are born equal. Not even close. Decades of studies have shown that a child born into an adverse family environment is far more likely than other children to become a criminal. And the millions of women most likely to have an abortion in the wake of Roe v. Wade-poor, unmarried, and teenage mothers for whom illegal abortions had been too expensive or too hard to get-were often models of adversity. They were the very women whose children, if born, would have been much more likely than average to become criminals. But because of Roe v. Wade, these children weren’t being born. This powerful cause would have a drastic, distant effect: years later, just as these unborn children would have entered their criminal primes, the rate of crime began to plummet. It wasn’t gun control or a strong economy or new police strategies that finally blunted the American crime wave. It was, among other factors, the reality that the pool of potential criminals had dramatically shrunk. Now, as the crime-drop experts (the former crime doomsayers) spun their theories to the media, how many times did they cite legalized abortion as a cause? Zero."

"None of this is to say that Justice Blackmun did not delegate too much of the original design for the intellectual content for his opinions to law clerks. Notwithstanding my enormous affection and admiration for the justice, I think he did—and Garrow's discussion of how Roe v. Wade's trimester framework came into being helps illustrate the point. In my view, every justice should be deeply engaged in the original formulation of every significant doctrinal twist and turn of his or her opinions. On at least some occasions, Blackmun was not. And in this regard, a piece like Garrow's, despite its methodological failings, provides a useful counterpoint to the usual claptrap minimizing the role that clerks play in fashioning the law."

"As a matter of constitutional interpretation and judicial method, Roe borders on the indefensible. I say this as someone utterly committed to the right to choose, as someone who believes such a right has grounding elsewhere in the Constitution instead of where Roe placed it, and as someone who loved Roe’s author like a grandfather."

"What, exactly, is the problem with Roe? The problem, I believe, is that it has little connection to the Constitutional right it purportedly interpreted. A constitutional right to privacy broad enough to include abortion has no meaningful foundation in constitutional text, history, or precedent – at least, it does not if those sources are fairly described and reasonably faithfully followed."

"McCorvey's story always included more than a few inconsistencies, according to the film. When she joined the Roe v. Wade litigation, McCorvey claimed that she had been raped and became pregnant as a result. In the 1980s, she rescinded the claim in a televised interview, saying she had never been raped."

"Although I am pro-choice, I was taught in law school, and still believe, that Roe v. Wade is a muddle of bad reasoning and an authentic example of judicial overreaching. I also believe it was a political disaster for liberals. Roe is what first politicized religious conservatives while cutting off a political process that was legalizing abortion state by state anyway."

"In 1973, the U.S. Supreme Court first held that a right to have an abortion was protected by the U.S. Constitution, in Roe v. Wade. While the legal test articulated in Roe has since been jettisoned by the Court, its “essential holding” has been reaffirmed. That holding has been summarized as having three parts: First is a recognition of the right of the woman to choose to have an abortion before viability and to obtain it without undue interference from the State. Before viability, the State’s interests are not strong enough to support a prohibition of abortion or the imposition of a substantial obstacle to the woman’s effective right to elect the procedure. Second is a confirmation of the State’s power to restrict abortions after fetal viability, if the law contains exceptions for pregnancies which endanger the woman’s life or health. And third is the principle that the State has legitimate interests from the outset of the pregnancy in protecting the health of the woman and the life of the fetus that may become a child. These principles do not contradict one another; and we adhere to each."

"The better argument for the result reached in Roe v. Wade is that it's necessary for the equality of women, rather than grounding it in the privacy right," says Edward Lazarus, a former law clerk for Blackmun and the author of "Closed Chambers: The Rise, Fall, and Future of the Modern Supreme Court."

"Liberal judicial activism peaked with Roe v. Wade, the 1973 abortion decision…"

"The anonymous plaintiff in the groundbreaking 1973 Supreme Court abortion rights case tells her story in the gritty, rough-edged memoir, I Am Roe: My Life, Roe v. Wade, and Freedom of Choice. Norma McCorvey was a 21-year-old drifter with a drug and alcohol problem when she found herself pregnant a third time. Her search for an abortion led to two young lawyers, Sarah Weddington and Linda Coffee, who needed a plaintiff to challenge the Texas law banning abortions. McCorvey’s role from that point was nominal: She learned of the victory in a newspaper article, months after her baby had been born and given up for adoption. There emerges a tragic juxtaposition between McCorvey’s thwarted life and Weddington’s, whose expensive Mexican abortion in 1967 enabled her to finish law school, and whose role in Roe brought fame. It’s a comparison that highlights the disadvantages of poor and disenfranchised women in the abortion rights debate."

"Twenty-five years ago this week, the Supreme Court held that the Constitution protects a woman’s decision whether to terminate her pregnancy. Roe v. Wade guaranteed women the right to a safe, legal medical abortion. It has preserved the health and lives of millions of women, maintaining their privacy, their dignity and their future. Roe v. Wade was a landmark victory for women’s rights. Before 1973, an estimated 1.2 million women a year turned in desperation to dangerous and illegal back-alley abortions. 5,000 died every year from the appalling treatment they endured, and large numbers of others suffered serious injury. The lesson of the years before Roe is clear-if a safe, legal abortion is not available, women will turn to unsafe means to terminate pregnancies."

"In Roe v. Wade much of Justice Blackmun’s judgment was devoted to the history of abortion in Anglo-American law. He concluded that a constitutional right to abortion was consistent with that history. In Webster v. Reproductive Health Services, 281 American historians signed an amicus brief which claimed that Roe was consistent with the nation’s history and traditions. This article respectfully questions Justice Blackmun’s conclusion and the historians’ claim."

"Who is best suited to make this intensely personal and agonizing decision- woman in consultation with her doctor, or politicians? The guarantee contained in Roe enables women to act according to their own beliefs, with limited government interference. A new generation of women have been born since Roe, and they have never lived in a society in which the only option to terminate a pregnancy was a dangerous and illegal back-alley abortion. Let us affirm once again that they never will. We must remain vigilant in our efforts to keep abortion safe and legal, and we must also take steps to make abortion rare. Pro-choice and anti-choice Americans must deal more effectively with the causes of unintended pregnancies, and give their support to efforts in Congress and around the country to ensure greater access to family planning for both women and men. The health and dignity of all women depend upon our commitment to these principles."

"We are here talking about the great 13th floor of the human family. Everyone knows it is there, but it is convenient to pretend that it is not there. I am talking about the humanity of the unborn. One of the great misperceptions of many of the media is that we prolife Congressmen and Senators are a willful, small, arrogant little band of people trying to manipulate the entire country into a rather vulgar, out-of-date, anachronistic view of human life and its value, and whether it should be protected by the Constitution. I think it is important to point out that out there in the country there are millions of people who are appalled by the results of Roe v. Wade and who constitute the prolife movement, which is growing every day."

"Centuries ago we had alchemists, people who sought to change base metal into gold. We today have our alchemists who have successfully turned what was once a crime, the crime of abortion, into the gold of an act of compassion and humanity. Roe v. Wade certainly is the keystone of that result and we are told that it is the ultimate authority, that the Supreme Court, having spoken on the question of personhood and having confessed its incompetency to determine when human life begins because it said it could find no consensus in law theology, and philosophy, then said it is not necessary to determine when human life begins, but then they did pronounce on the basis of that vacuum that the preborn is not a person within the meaning of the 14th amendment."

"What is the matter with a little congressional activism? When we are faced with a decision that has been criticized from Austin to Boston by legal scholars who themselves may support abortion as a solution to unwanted pregnancies instead of, as I would say, the failure to look for a solution, but who criticize the case as totally unwarranted, are we to be impotent? Are we to say we cannot do anything in the face of 1.5 million abortions a year? If reappointment is important for courts not to be activists, I suggest to you that the carnage involved in the killing of 1.5 million defenseless, voiceless, preborn children is justification for a little congressional activism."

"SUPPORT FOR the Roe v. Wade decision that made abortions legal during the first three months of pregnancy has hit its lowest level since 1985, a Harris Interactive poll shows.* U.S. adults are now almost equally split on the ruling, with 49% saying they favor it, and 47% opposing, according to the poll. Harris has surveyed Americans on abortion since 1973. See full results of the most-recent poll here."

"No matter one’s personal view on abortion, we can all recognize that, at least for the short term, this bill may similarly be unenforceable. As citizens of this great country, we must always respect the authority of the U.S. Supreme Court even when we disagree with their decisions. Many Americans, myself included, disagreed when Roe v. Wade was handed down in 1973. The sponsors of this bill believe that it is time, once again, for the U.S. Supreme Court to revisit this important matter, and they believe this act may bring about the best opportunity for this to occur."

"By making abortion legal nationwide, Roe v. Wade has had a dramatic impact on the health and well-being of American women. Deaths from abortion have plummeted, and are now a rarity. In addition, women have been able to have abortions earlier in pregnancy when the procedure is safest: The proportion of abortions obtained early in the first trimester has risen from 20% in 1970 to 56% in 1998. These public health accomplishments may now be seriously threatened. Supporters of legal abortion face the bleakest political landscape in recent history. Congress is poised to pass legislation criminalizing some abortion procedures (termed "partial-birth" abortion) even when they are performed prior to fetal viability and when they are deemed by the physician to be in the best interest of the woman's health; by doing so, the Partial-Birth Abortion Ban Act takes direct aim at the basic principles underlying Roe."