"Months after the Supreme Court’s ruling, John Hart Ely, a renowned and liberal Yale law professor, eviscerated Blackmun’s opinion in The Yale Law Journal. Ely said that if he were a legislator, he would vote to legalize abortion. He understood why Griswold was about privacy, because forbidding the use of contraception would require “the most outrageous sort of governmental prying into the privacy of the home.” But Roe was not a case about governmental snooping. Ely recognized that becoming pregnant, in the wrong circumstance, can ruin a person’s life. But the potential life of the fetus also “hangs in the balance,” creating a moral dilemma the court did not “even begin to resolve.” Roe, as Blackmun wrote it, had “nothing to do with privacy in the Bill of Rights sense” and was thus untethered from the Constitution, making the decision “frightening.” Ely’s article “sent Roe into the world disabled,” Greenhouse told me. “It really was very damaging. Not because the American public cared about doctrine — they cared about results — but because it left Roe without friends in high places.”"
Quote Details
Added by wikiquote-import-bot
Unverified quote
0 likes
Original Language: English
Available Languages (1)
Sources
Imported from EN Wikiquote
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Roe_v._Wade
Revision History
No revisions have been submitted for this quote.
Categories
Roe v. Wade
Roe v. Wade, 410 U.S. 113 (1973), was a landmark decision of the U.S. Supreme Court in which the Court ruled that the
1424 quotes on TrueQuotesView all quotes by Roe v. Wade →
Related Quotes
"Harry Blackmun questioned Weddington again on the issue of fetal personhood, as did Potter Stewart. They wanted her t…"
"In 1938, seven Justices heard a constitutional challenge to a federal ban on shipping adulterated milk in interstate …"
"The Court has simultaneously transformed judicially created rights like the right to abortion into preferred constitu…"
"Beyond these paltry authorities, the Court adds only the argument that we should not “encourage a kitchen-sink approa…"
"JUSTICE BREYER, with whom JUSTICE SOTOMAYOR and JUSTICE KAGAN join, dissenting. The procedural posture of this case l…"
"JUSTICE SOTOMAYOR, with whom JUSTICE BREYER and JUSTICE KAGAN join, dissenting. The Court’s order is stunning. Presen…"
"By the time that Michael Taylor sent out his communiqué, pro-life lawyers had been preparing legal arguments in Roe a…"
"Lawyers for the states of both Georgia and Texas argued that abortion restrictions were appropriate because the state…"
"Pro-life lawyers had complained before about the poor quality of state attorney’s attempts to defend restrictive abor…"
"Ellen McCormack’s Long Island-based organization, Women for the Unborn, which now had 2,000 members, submitted a brie…"