"Some of the same Justices who heard and decided Roe and Doe had emphasized the importance of a factual record in prior “privacy” cases. In Poe v. Ullman in 1961, Justice Brennan supported dismissal of the case, in part, because of the “skimpy record.” During the Supreme Court oral argument in January 1971 in the Vuitch case, involving the District of Columbia abortion law, Samuel Huntington, the attorney for the United States, pointed out that the record contained “no development whatever of any of the facts bearing on the charges contained in the indictment,” and Chief Justice Burger noted that the Court might benefit from “a record of testimony as to what is the present state of medical knowledge.” And in his opinion in the Vuitch case decided the day before the Justices voted to hear Roe, Justice White emphasized that “this case comes to us unilluminated by facts or record.” If this was true in Vuitch-which was a comparatively limited inquiry into whether the District of Columbia’s abortion law was “unconstitutionally vague”-it was even truer in Roe and Doe, which aimed to sweep away the abortion laws of all fifty states. It is not as if the Justices were not warned that there was no factual record. In the first Doe argument, Georgia’s attorney, Dorothy Beasley, made the lack-of-factual-record point no less than five times. Beasley pointed out that there was no record to show how abortions were being done under the new 1968 statute in Georgia. Georgia and thirteen other states had enacted these laws between 1967 and 1970, and the Court did not have any facts about how they operated. How could the Supreme Court decide to legalize abortion on a broader basis, through the first and second trimester, when they did not have even a basic understanding, developed through a trial, of how these “reform” statues had operated in the few months or years since they had been enacted? These problems suggest that the Court should have reached no decision, or sent the case back for trial, or taken other cases with a trial record, or at least reached a narrow decision. Instead, the Justices issues one of the broadest decisions possible."