"The Court initially seemed to indicate that it had only limited interest in listening to arguments from either side. Chief Justice Warren Burger arranged for the Court to begin hearing oral arguments in the cases before the two newest justices Lewis Powell and William Rehnquist, had been sworn in, which would have made them ineligible to vote in the decisions-a move that seemed highly unusual if the chief justice had wanted a historic, path-breaking decision. Furthermore, he allowed only the perfunctory one hour for oral arguments in each case; whenever the Court issued a major ruling, observers noted, it usually allocated far more time than that. Thus, the American Medical News concluded that there was “little likelihood” that the Court would overturn the Georgia and Texas abortion statutes. The lawyers for the plaintiffs in the two cases glumly admitted as much. The Court would probably dismiss the plaintiff’s’ claims in Roe on procedural grounds, Sarah Weddington told NARAL president Lee Gidding in August 1971, and abortion rights advocates would be denied the landmark decision that they sought. The Supreme Court surprised observers by refraining from issuing a ruling, and instead decided to rehear the cases in the fall of 1972, after all of the Court’s new justices had been seated. By that time, the pro-life movement was stronger, both numerically and politically, than it had been a year earlier. Yet in the courts, the abortion rights movement had won some important victories. A majority of the lower courts that had tested the constitutionality of restrictive abortion statues had ruled in favor of abortion rights, invalidating restrictive abortion rights statues. The “right to privacy,” which lay at the heart of the Roe and Doe plaintiff’s claims, had received an important reiteration earlier in the year when the Supreme Court ruled, in the birth control case Eisenstadt v. Baird (1972), that unmarried people were entitled to the same privacy as married people. Griswold had located the right to reproductive privacy in the institution of marriage, but Eisenstadt placed that right where the pro-choice movement wanted it: with the individual. “If the right to privacy means anything, it is the right of the individual, married or single, to be free from unwarranted governmental intrusion into matters so fundamentally affecting a person as the decision whether to bear or beget a child,” the Court declared. Weddington quoted this line when she argued her case again before the Supreme Court, because it seemed to support everything that she had been arguing. If a woman had the constitutional right to make reproductive decisions without the interference of the state, surely the state could not legitimately prohibit her from having an abortion."