1973

"Two works published in 2015, Joanna Schoen’s Abortion after Roe (2015) and Mary Ziegler’s After Roe: The Lost History of the Abortion Debate introduce new directions in scholarship on Roe’s effects on abortion law and practice. Both texts, however, contribute to the erasure of McCorvey from the history of legalized abortion through either misinformation or by omitting her entirely. Schoen’s Abortion after Roe is a feminist medical history that examines the effects of Roe v. Wade on abortion providers and women seeking abortion from the 1970s through the early 2000s. Schoen draws on extensive interviews with abortion providers, whom she sought out through the National Abortion Federation (a professional organization for abortion clinic employees). She is attentive to the backlash to Roe throughout, which is evident through her incisive analysis of pro-life rhetoric."

"While many of these texts mention McCorvey fleetingly, no expansive historical text—or for that matter, more than a handful of paragraphs in a historical monograph— has been written thus far on the subject of McCorvey’s life before, during, or after the Roe decision. Relegated to the margins of an issue in which she performed perhaps a symbolic, but nonetheless a crucial role, McCorvey has been denied the sort of scholarly analysis which could complicate the caricature into which she was reduced throughout her life."

"In their personal recounting of Roe v. Wade, Sarah Weddington, Linda Coffee, and Norma McCorvey pinpointed the advent of the case at different points in time. For Weddington, Roe began “at a yard sale, amid paltry castoffs”—a benefit for the abortion referral service she provided legal aid for in Austin. Coffee’s earliest involvement was trickier to pin down, as she officially joined the case at Weddington’s request, but warmed to the idea of fighting Texas’s anti-abortion law while researching an earlier case. McCorvey’s version of the story was reflective of her unique role in the case. As noted before, it began with the discovery of her third pregnancy while working at a carnival. Journalists and scholars who have sought to reconstruct Roe’s earliest moments have had to find a middle ground between these three women’s testimonies, crafting a backstory primarily from memory and oral history. Most writers have reached a consensus, using the first meeting between Coffee, Weddington and McCorvey at Colombo’s Pizza at the end of 1969 or early 1970 (sources diverge on this particular point) as the de facto start of the case. Finding a middle ground between the women’s testimonies, however, has not automatically translated into a fair presentation of the women themselves. For example, journalist Marian Faux’s version of the story in her 1988 book Roe v. Wade: The Untold Story of the Landmark Supreme Court Decision That Made Abortion Legal is rife with contradictions. While Faux attempted to construct a great woman narrative of the case, she simultaneously defeated her own goal by filling in the gaps in the visual record with subtly misogynistic language."

"As each woman arrives, the reader is granted a detailed description of her physical appearance. Faux excuses away the shabby appearances of the first two arrivals, informing the reader that “none of the three women coming to this dinner meeting had much money.” Linda Coffee, we learn immediately, cares more for her work than her looks. The “diffident” lawyer attempts to convey professionalism through her attire, but more often tends towards a “disheveled appearance.” The pregnant Norma McCorvey, by contrast to Coffee, gives away her working-class background and naiveté through her choice of denim pants and a casual top."

"Having both arrived early, the odd pair make a feeble attempt at chit-chatting with one another, an effort that is complicated by Coffee’s shyness and McCorvey’s lack of “social graces.” The appearance of Sarah Weddington, a “tall, heavy-set woman,” who, despite her large frame, “moved with unusual grace,” saves the two from continued awkwardness. Over pizza and beer, the three women discuss a topic that one can only assume was hardly the usual subject of conversation at the “unpretentious” Colombo’s: challenging Texas’s restrictive anti-abortion law. In the ebb and flow of conversation, both the lawyers’ quest to abolish this law and McCorvey’s own pregnancy are discussed. As McCorvey tells the lawyers about the latter, her story takes a horrific turn. She recalls a harrowing tale of being raped by a man while she was working at a traveling carnival, and consequently becoming pregnant. While the lawyers had concerns about the validity of McCorvey’s tale, as she struggled to consistently relay the details of the alleged assault, they agreed after the meeting to overlook their qualms about her reliability. McCorvey had something the two women desperately needed: a pregnancy which she had no desire to keep."

"Although it is tinged with sexist language, Marian Faux’s rendition of Roe v. Wade’s origin story is a compelling one. There is a wholesome Americanness to the shared financial hardship of the three women, and an inspirational tenor to this story of three women who will go on to fight Texas’s anti-abortion law despite the restrictions placed upon them by their gendered social mores of their community, not to mention to the sensational appeal of capturing the “untold story” of this controversial case. It is no wonder the Colombo’s story has been told by historians, journalists, and its key players alike. In addition to taking in all three women’s roles, it can easily suit a number of ideologically incompatible narratives. Faux’s telling, however, obscures many of the underlying conflicts that would later escalate into an unbridgeable divide between McCorvey and Weddington (as well as between herself and the leadership of the pro-choice movement as a whole) in the four decades following Roe. By likening the socioeconomic standing of McCorvey with that of Coffee and Weddington, Faux ignores the fact that McCorvey’s class status was undeniably lower than that of her lawyers, a reality that would continue to reassert itself through a number of unexpected outcomes during and after Roe was tried. McCorvey’s poverty was not a fluke: it was a prerequisite for her to become the plaintiff in Roe. While her class and whiteness was crucial in Weddington and Coffee’s decision to have her become the Roe plaintiff, these identities, as well as other aspects of McCorvey’s past and personality, caused tension within the pro-choice movement as the abortion issue became increasingly politicized by pro-life activists following the 1973 Supreme Court ruling."

"At this point, Weddington had never tried a contested case in court, and the preparatory work alone was a daunting enough prospect for a young lawyer. Impressed by both Linda Coffee’s work as a law student and her subsequent experience with federal cases while she was clerking for Judge Sarah Hughes, Weddington knew that Coffee would be an ideal partner in this endeavor. Buoyed by the excitement of aiding McCluskey in the partially-successful Buchanan, Coffee was eager to lend her expertise. As the two women strategized, they faced a troubling dilemma: they did not have a plaintiff. In order to ensure the continued secrecy of the abortion referral service, Coffee cautioned against using the service’s volunteers as plaintiffs. Thankfully, the two found a married couple, Marsha and David King, who were eager to sign on as plaintiffs early in the process. Marsha, a Dallas-area feminist with a PhD in English approached the lawyers after hearing Coffee give a lecture on the intended lawsuit. Due to a neurological condition, she could not safely carry a pregnancy to term, nor could she use hormonal birth control pills. As the Supreme Court had recently ruled in Griswold v. Connecticut that married couples had a constitutional right to privacy, the Kings presented one viable angle through which to challenge Texas’s abortion law. Nevertheless, the lawyers knew that in order to most effectively counter the constitutionality of the statute, they would need a pregnant woman who was willing to take on the task of being a plaintiff. While the Austin abortion referral service offered a number of promising leads, none of these women elected to join the lawsuit as they had the financial means through which to acquire a safe, but illegal, abortion. Meanwhile in Dallas, Norma McCorvey was not so lucky. For her, the meeting at Colombo’s was not one step in a long process of legal strategizing, it was a desperate attempt to finally obtain a procedure that would free her from the physical and emotional turmoil of giving birth to a third child that she could not raise herself. Because of this major discrepancy, it is here that, in their respective memoirs, A Questions of Choice (1992) and I am Roe (1994) Weddington and McCorvey’s stories begin to diverge. Notably, both texts were published in the early-1990s, over two decades after the initial federal district court Roe trial. Nevertheless, the two women’s ideological approaches to their involvement in the case are as blatant as the chasm between the worlds they inhabited."

"In McCorvey’s version of her meeting with both Coffee and Weddington at Colombo’s, she recalls a number of details that contradict or add additional dimensions to Faux’s heroic account, primarily with regard to her sexuality and class identity. Her recollection of the two lawyer’s outfits amplifies the class difference between herself and the two women. Coffee and Weddington both wore “two-piece business suits” while McCorvey wore jeans, a “button-down shirt tied at the waist,” and “a bandanna [sic] tied around my left leg, above the knee” to indicate that she “didn’t have a girlfriend.” McCorvey’s casual use of a variation on the hanky code, a system for signifying sexual availability that flourished in the gay community during the 1970s, was only one of the ways in which she expressed her non-normative sexuality to the lawyers. When asked about her own life, she opened up to them about her lesbian relationships and past marriage to the abusive Woody McCorvey. In McCorvey’s telling, she only claimed that she had been raped upon sensing the lawyer’s discomfort with her sexual history. Desperate to regain their good faith, she used this story as an attempt to save face and depict herself as the sort of woman who was deserving of an abortion."

"In Sarah Weddington’s version, the beginning of the conversation between the three women is the same—a discussion of the intended lawsuit— but this point is one of the few areas in which her and McCorvey’s story overlap. Throughout the text, she refers to McCorvey as “Jane Roe,” and only relays that information which had already been made public by McCorvey at the time of the book’s publication (in keeping with lawyer-client confidentiality). It is clear that the autobiography was published shortly after McCorvey publicly retracted her claim of being raped, as Weddington dedicated a paragraph to explaining in detail that McCorvey’s rape claim was never used by the lawyers in their case, reiterating again a few pages later that, in the affidavit McCorvey signed, “there was no mention of how she got pregnant.” While McCorvey was openly identified as a lesbian at this time, Weddington makes no note of her sexuality. The rape claim here is depicted as more of tactical move on McCorvey’s part, as she ponders aloud to her lawyers whether or not being raped would increase the chances of her receiving a legal abortion. Overall, Weddington’s version of the story is crisp and generally unemotional. Though she claimed that McCorvey’s “hard-luck stories touched a sympathetic cord,” her understanding of McCorvey's involvement in the case is framed around the low-level of commitment that would be expected of her. Weddington stated that being the plaintiff required “a minimal amount of time.... she never had to answer written or oral questions for the opposition lawyers. She did not attend any of the court hearings. Second, no money. Linda and I were donating our time, and we were covering the expenses.” Weddington does not seem to fathom the very real burden that McCorvey would have to bear if she became their plaintiff: a child. McCorvey tried her best to avoid this aspect of being the Roe plaintiff. According to her memoir, she asked the lawyers point blank whether or not they knew of a place where she could receive an abortion during their meeting at Colombo’s. Weddington claimed that she did not know, a statement that smarted years later when Weddington revealed that she had had an illegal abortion before even conceiving of the Roe case (not to mention her close relationship with the Austin abortion referral project). While Faux went to great lengths to assure the reader that McCorvey was fully informed of the unlikelihood that she would receive an abortion due to taking on the role of plaintiff in the case, neither Weddington nor McCorvey’s memoirs corroborated this assertion. In Garrow’s account of the case in Liberty and Sexuality, which like Faux’s was based on extensive interviews with Coffee and Weddington, he notes that the two lawyers were “privately thankful” that McCorvey had no choice other than to complete her pregnancy."

"In an insightful study of the two memoirs, legal scholar Kevin McMunigal argues that Weddington did not adequately inform McCorvey that her chances of receiving an abortion as the Roe plaintiff were slim, thereby allowing the vulnerable McCorvey to believe that being the plaintiff in the case was her most likely ticket to a legal abortion. Doing so, McMunigal states, was a questionable ethical decision on Weddington’s part, as she treated McCorvey as a stand-in for pregnant women as a whole, not as a client with needs and interests of her own. Ultimately, McMunigal maintains that McCorvey should have been treated with comparable ethical standards as patients seeking out medical care or participating in medical research, namely, being provided with comprehensible information about the various strategies open to her from which she would then be able to choose."

"From McCorvey’s perspective, becoming the case’s plaintiff seemed like the best possible choice. After a few weeks of wondering what Coffee and Weddington would decide, the lawyers called McCorvey in to Coffee’s office to ask her to officially become “Jane Roe.” Following this meeting, McCorvey had little contact with the lawyers. Occasionally, she would peak with Henry McCluskey, who “got an earful” when he would try to discuss the possibility of helping McCorvey with adoption arrangements. She waited, fluctuating between boundless optimism and sinking depression. As she recalled in I am Roe: “When I was up, I was way up—I was the smartest thing on two legs... I'd gotten myself a pair of wonderful smart young lawyers, and I was going to win my case and be the first girl in Texas to get a legal abortion. But that great feeling didn't last long.” To assuage the anxiety she felt at the progression of her pregnancy, she escaped to Oaklawn, a Dallas hippie enclave, for weeks at a time. Here, no one pressed her for details of her pregnancy. In her words, “If I smoked enough dope and drank enough wine, it was possible to not think about being pregnant, which was good.” Escapism and addiction proved to be a viable refuge as the possibility of legal remedy came to seem more fantastical by the day. From the perspective of McCorvey’s lawyers, she had disappeared. In A Question of Choice, Sarah Weddington attributes the challenge of finding her to her “financial difficulties,” which led her to move frequently. By McCorvey’s own admission, she had been in Oaklawn living “in a crash pad with a bunch of friendly people” while the lawyers prepared Roe for its initial trial. The two women disagree on how McCorvey resurfaced—McCorvey claimed she called McCluskey, whereas Weddington remembered that “Mary Doe” (Marsha King) tracked her down. Regardless, she reconnected with the lawyers in time to sign the Roe affidavit before the case went to trial on May 22, 1970."

"In Faux’s opinion, the Roe affidavit stands as “one of the few definitive biographical statements about Norma McCorvey” as McCorvey was prone to telling reporters “different versions of her life.” The document is sparse in detail, written in clear but eloquent language. It conveys the facts of McCorvey’s situation, for example, that she was “an unmarried woman” and that “the inability to obtain an abortion... caused [her] to suffer emotional trauma.” Notably, the affidavit was primarily the work of Linda Coffee. As such, it raises inevitable questions about Faux’s use of the word “definitive,” particularly in light of the colorful, multifaceted versions of herself that McCorvey would later choose to reveal to the public eye. Who was considered an expert on McCorvey, and by extension, Roe v. Wade, would later become as integral a theme in McCorvey’s life as the case itself."

"As McCorvey was visibly pregnant at the time of the first trial, she and her lawyers agreed that it would be best if she were not to appear in court at all. McCorvey recalled that she waited “as Linda and Sarah made history in [her] name.” According to I am Roe, when the judges announced their decision on June 17, 1970, McCorvey was initially elated to learn that she had won the case. This joy immediately gave way to anguish as Linda Coffee delivered the horrible news: the state had issued an injunction, proclaiming its intent to continue upholding Texas’s anti-abortion statute. Regardless, McCorvey was already well into her third trimester of pregnancy, and therefore, both medically and legally unable to get an abortion. Joshua Prager’s 2013 account in Vanity Fair rebuts this claim, stating that McCorvey gave birth before finding out the first Roe decision. Whatever the facts of the situation are, it is clear that the lawyers were unconcerned by the fact that McCorvey had to give birth despite her role as their plaintiff. This moment merits a single sentence in Weddington’s memoir: “But it was too late for Jane Roe; she gave birth early in the summer and placed the baby for adoption through Henry McCluskey.” In McCorvey’s version, this news sets off a chain-reaction of events that would fundamentally alter the course of her life. There is a heavy-handedness to how McCorvey manages the initial shock of learning that she would have to give birth once again, as she realizes that “this moment was not really for me. It was about me, and maybe all the women who'd come before me, but it was really for all the women who were coming after me.” Published in 1994 and targeted towards a liberal-leaning audience, it is unsurprising that this caveat appears in the text. Nevertheless, it is followed by an unadulterated outpouring of emotion, as McCorvey later explodes: “I was nothing to Sarah and Linda, nothing more than just a name on a piece of paper. And without them, without their damn legal abortion, my soul was trapped and my body was in jail. I was hopeless. Worthless.” Whether this memory is recalled accurately or misremembered, this sense of betrayal would echo throughout McCorvey’s subsequent activism for the rest of her life."

"The Supreme Court announced Monday that it will review a restrictive Mississippi law that provides a clear path to diminish Roe v. Wade’s guarantee of a woman’s right to choose an abortion. Abortion opponents for months have urged the court’s conservatives to seize the chance to reexamine the 1973 precedent. Mississippi is among many Republican-led states that have passed restrictions that conflict with the court’s precedents protecting abortion rights, hoping for a chance to get a case before a Supreme Court that they think is more amenable to their arguments. In accepting the case for next term, the court said it would examine whether “all pre-viability prohibitions on elective abortions are unconstitutional.” That has been a key component of the court’s jurisprudence, and the announcement sounded ominous to abortion rights advocates. “Antiabortion politicians have exploited their power for this exact moment: the opportunity for the newly comprised Supreme Court to take away our right to abortion,” said Alexis McGill Johnson, president of the Planned Parenthood Action Fund."

"“This is a landmark opportunity for the Supreme Court,” Marjorie Dannenfelser, president of the Susan B. Anthony List, which works to elect antiabortion candidates, said in a statement. She noted that “state lawmakers acting on the will of the people have introduced 536 pro-life bills aimed at humanizing our laws and challenging the radical status quo imposed by Roe. It is time for the Supreme Court to catch up to scientific reality and the resulting consensus of the American people as expressed in elections and policy.” Abortion rights advocates said the court’s action should be greeted with “alarm bells.” “The Supreme Court just agreed to review an abortion ban that unquestionably violates nearly 50 years of Supreme Court precedent and is a test case to overturn Roe v. Wade,” said Nancy Northup, president of the Center for Reproductive Rights, one of the groups representing Mississippi’s only abortion clinic, Jackson Women’s Health Organization. “This is not a drill,” added Elizabeth Nash of the Guttmacher Institute, a research organization that favors reproductive rights. “The [Supreme Court’s] decision comes at a time when conservative politicians in over a dozen states are dismantling abortion rights and access with a vengeance and could eclipse even the record of enacted restrictions set in 2011.”"

"Mary Ziegler, a Florida State University law professor and the author of “Abortion and the Law in America: Roe v. Wade to the Present,” said it was “impossible to overstate” the threat to Roe. She added that the court does not have to actually overturn the decision to void its impact, by eliminating fetal viability as the point at which bans are allowed. Without viability, it is not clear whether the court will impose any limit on abortion bans,” Ziegler said."

"States around the country have been passing increasingly restrictive abortion laws that they acknowledge violate Supreme Court precedent anchored by Roe in 1973 and Planned Parenthood v. Casey 19 years later. The goal has been to get one of them to the high court. “The State chose to pass a law it knew was unconstitutional to endorse a decades-long campaign, fueled by national interest groups, to ask the Supreme Court to overturn Roe v. Wade,” Reeves wrote. The state argued that because the clinic challenging the law offered abortions only up to 16 weeks, the law was not affecting many women. The harm to the state, it said, was “requiring it to permit inhumane abortion procedures which cause a fetus to experience pain — a factor the Supreme Court has never explicitly addressed.” But the 5th Circuit said it was not the place of lower courts to challenge the Supreme Court. “In an unbroken line dating to Roe v. Wade, the Supreme Court’s abortion cases have established (and affirmed, and re-affirmed) a woman’s right to choose an abortion before viability,” Judge Patrick Higginbotham wrote for the appeals court. “States may regulate abortion procedures prior to viability so long as they do not impose an undue burden on the woman’s right, but they may not ban abortions.”"

"A 17th Century Judge Cited: Lord Matthew Hale, who wrote that women were contractually obligated to husbands, was cited eight times in Justice Samuel Alito’s draft opinion."

"The feminists had won legal abortion in New York. But the change in the law allowed the judges in Abramowicz to declare the case moot and throw it out. Without the New York case working its way through the courts, Stearns scrambled to start over. During the next two years, alongside other lawyers, she sued on behalf of women to strike down the abortion laws of New Jersey, Connecticut, and Rhode Island and helped others bring similar cases in Massachusetts and Pennsylvania. She kept pressing her claim that women had a right to abortion based on equal protection. She also sued based on a constitutional right to privacy, which the Supreme Court recognized in 1965, in Griswold v. Connecticut, to protect the use of contraception by married couples. But as Stearns worked on the East Coast, two lawyers, Sarah Weddington and Linda Coffee, who didn’t have strong ties to the feminist movement, pursued a challenge to Texas’ near ban of abortion that they filed in March 1970. Their case ended up being first on the Supreme Court’s docket, after Abramowicz was dismissed — and would wind up making history. It was called Roe v. Wade. As Weddington wrote in her memoir decades later: “We never thought we were filing what would become the Supreme Court case.” A New York assemblyman casting an unexpected vote, a court throwing out Abramowicz, the time it took for judges to rule in Stearns’s other cases — they are links in the long chain of reasons the country has arrived at a precarious moment for abortion rights."

"When they filed suit in Roe, Weddington and Coffee based their case on the right to privacy in Griswold. But Stearns still did her best to bring equal protection to the attention of the justices. The court scheduled the argument in Roe for December 1971, and she filed a friend-of-the-court brief (a supplemental submission that courts may or may not take into account). She sent me a copy of the pages. “The express guarantee of equal protection was originally designed to protect Black people,” Stearns wrote. “Since that time, its protection has been greatly extended.” Mbr> Stearns cited Supreme Court precedents that recognized the 14th Amendment rights of Chinese immigrants, Mexican Americans and poor people. Turning to her claims on behalf of women, she described the lack of protections for single mothers and employment policies that required pregnant women to take a leave of absence or quit their jobs. Stearns also pointed out that when Texas banned abortion in 1907, women did not have the right to vote."

"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.”"

"In law as in life, timing is everything. The court issued Blackmun’s opinion in Roe just days after Ruth Bader Ginsburg, then a 39-year-old lawyer, argued before the court for the first time in a landmark sex-discrimination suit. The court ruled in Ginsburg’s favor in that case a few months later and in a series of others in the years that followed. But at the time of Roe, “the court was only on the verge of constructing a jurisprudence of women’s rights,” Greenhouse and Reva Siegel, the Yale law professor, pointed out in an essay in the 2019 book “Reproductive Rights and Justice Stories.” The justices could have taken a leap toward equal protection in Roe. But they weren’t prepared to. It turns out, though, that Stearns and her fellow feminist lawyers got serious consideration from a court about equal protection in their Connecticut case, Abele v. Markle. Before the Supreme Court’s ruling in Roe, a three-judge panel heard their challenge to Connecticut’s near-ban on abortion, with more than 850 women as plaintiffs. Judge Jon O. Newman wrote the opinion for the majority. “I thought about invoking gender discrimination,” Newman, now 90, told me this month. “But I concluded I would not go down that road.” As a lower-court judge, he focused on Supreme Court precedent, which meant Griswold. “I thought, marital privacy is a part of liberty that the Supreme Court has told me exists,” Newman said, explaining why that was the justification he gave for striking down Connecticut’s law in September 1972. It’s hard to claim, with any certainty, that Roe would have proved less divisive if the right to abortion in America had a sounder constitutional basis from the start. Many who support bans and restrictions do so because they think abortion is murder. Maybe they agree that carrying an unplanned pregnancy can impose a huge cost. But unless the person’s life is physically at stake (the rare exception to almost every abortion ban), supporters of restrictions believe it’s right, at some point in a pregnancy, to make a woman carry the fetus to term."

"In important ways, the Supreme Court strengthened Roe decades ago. In June 1992, in the case Planned Parenthood of Southeastern Pennsylvania v. Casey, a new five-justice majority on the Supreme Court affirmed Roe’s central holding and addressed its weaknesses. The authors of Casey included Sandra Day O’Connor, the first female justice. They spoke in clear terms of gender equality, recognizing that the right to choose whether and when to have a child made it easier for women “to participate equally in the economic and social life of the nation.”"

"Casey satisfied Ely, and he wrote a letter to Blackmun supporting the decision. (“Blackmun never responded,” Greenhouse told me. “I think he was still very hurt.”) By then, however, Roe had other prominent critics, including Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who said sex discrimination would have been a stronger rationale for the decision in a 1985 article in The North Carolina Law Review. Nine months after Casey, Ginsburg made waves by giving a lecture at New York University’s law school in which she said that Roe “might have been less of a storm center” if it had taken her incremental approach to building a jurisprudence about gender discrimination. Ginsburg’s words troubled abortion rights leaders, some of whom questioned her nomination to the Supreme Court when Bill Clinton picked her in June 1993."

"Justice Ginsburg almost got a chance to fill in what she saw as Roe’s missing piece. In 2007, she wrote an opinion in Gonzales v. Carhart, a challenge to a type of late-term procedure, that squarely framed the constitutional right to abortion in terms of equal rights for women. But Justice Anthony M. Kennedy joined the court’s four other conservatives to form a majority, leaving Ginsburg with a dissent, which had the force of her ardent feminism but not of law. In 2009, when I interviewed Ginsburg for this magazine, she said her main concern about abortion was the lack of access for poor women (because the court decided, in 1980, that Congress could forbid the use of Medicaid for medically necessary abortions). I asked if repositioning Roe on the basis of women’s equality was on the feminist wish list. “Oh, yes,” she said."

"Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. dismissed the equality argument for abortion rights in the leaked draft majority opinion, published by Politico this month, which would overturn Roe. “The regulation of a medical procedure that only one sex can undergo,” he wrote, is constitutional unless it is a “mere pretext designed to affect an invidious discrimination.” Alito landed on this phrase by quoting a 1974 decision, Geduldig v. Aiello, which was a low point for feminists at the Supreme Court. In that case, six justices ruled that California could exclude women with pregnancy complications from receiving benefits from a state disability fund that covered other conditions. The state wasn’t discriminating against women — it was merely distinguishing between “pregnant women and nonpregnant persons,” the court said. Congress addressed the inequity by passing the Pregnancy Discrimination Act in 1978, and before Alito’s opinion, the Supreme Court had not relied on the Geduldig decision for 30 years."

"When I called Stearns to ask her about Alito’s opinion, she hadn’t yet brought herself to read it. But she had already gone with friends to a protest over the impending end of Roe. “We were the old ladies in tennis shoes,” she said. Stearns was thinking about the decades of backlash to Roe. Could anything have prevented it? “We made the argument,” she said. “It got lost for some people.” The feminists of the 1970s tried to give future generations freedom and equality, as they saw it. Now that era may end soon, Alito’s draft opinion suggests."

"Author of the abortion decision, Associate Justice Harry A. Blackmun said softly and slowly, as if restudying the phrase. We all pick up tags. I'll carry this one to my grave. When the Supreme Court legalized abortion 10 years ago, it used Justice Blackmun's words, carving his niche in American history. I knew it was a no-win case, but I didn't ask for the assignment, Justice Blackmun, in a rare on-the-record interview, said recently of how he came to write the opinion. I am mildly annoyed at those, law professors included, who personalize it, the Justice said of the landmark ruling in Roe v. Wade. It was a decision of the court, not my decision. There were seven votes."

"Justice Blackmun is convinced, however, that the Supreme Court was on solid legal ground when it ruled that a woman's constitutional right of privacy includes the right to end an unwanted pregnancy. I still think it was a correct decision, he said. We were deciding a constitutional issue, not a moral one."

"Justice Blackmun said he could not estimate how much time he had devoted to the ruling on Roe v. Wade, which was announced Jan. 22, 1973. A lot, he answered when he was asked the question. More than any other case I've ever handled. He said he could only guess why Chief Justice Burger picked him to write the decision, and he asked that his thoughts on that topic not be made public. For the record, he acknowledged that for many his role as author of the abortion decision will overshadow the rest of his work in a Supreme Court tenure dating back to 1970. In a voice betraying neither rancor nor remorse, Justice Blackmun said, So be it."

"Twenty-five years ago tomorrow, Justice Byron White wrote in his Roe v. Wade dissent, “as an exercise of raw judicial power, the Court perhaps has authority to do what it does today.” This seems correct, but also paradoxical. How can raw power possess or acquire the leigimacy authority? Justice White meant, I think, that the Court’s decision, though arbitrary, and thus in the worst sense political, would nevertheless be treated as the law of the land by the American people. Justice White was prophetic. Roe has been criticized more than any Supreme Court decision in history, but it has proved to be resilient and effective. How has the Court managed what seems such a great public relations victory? The main reason is the Court’s success last presenting itself as a uniquely principles tribunal, this pluralistic society’s last resort for settling in a non-arbitrary way our most volatile issues."

"Justice White’s prophecy still troubles. Is Roe a constitutional measurement, as the majority said it was, or is it raw power? With recent public access to Thurgood Marshall’s papers, we can see a little bit of what must have been the basis of Justice White’s charge. My colleague, Douglas Kmiec, as gone through those papers looking at the opinion drafts and interoffice memos in the run-up to January 22, 1973, and Kmiec testified over on the House side some months ago. His conclusion:: There is virtually no evidence of constitutional study or consideration. There is little other argument or discussion in the internal correspondence of the Roe Court touching the substance of constitutional law. So, did the Roe Court choose to recognize abortion rights based upon the predilections, pure and simple of the Justices sitting that term?"

"It is now almost 25 years since a prominent Harvard law professor, John Ely, wrote that, Roe is bad because it is bad constitutional law, or rather because it is not constitutional law and gives almost no sense of an obligation to try to be. Pro-choice scholars have, I think, tacitly conceded Ely’s criticism, for they have labored hard to supply the justification for Roe that the Roe Court did not. None of these scholarly attempts has, in my view, succeeded, and some of these efforts have been especially troubling. Some scholars, eager to support the legal historical claims relied upon by the Roe Court, has submitted briefs in the Supreme Court, notably the Webster case, which some scholars knew made false claims about the history of abortion law."

"Note well: if Ely’s indictment is well-founded-as momentarily I shall show it is-then Roe was indeed an arbitrary resolution of the abortion matter, no different in kind from the bare minimum that our politics could have supplied. The charge is an especially grave one. For if the charge is proved, then the Roe Court is guilty not only of false advertising, but of resolving this critical matter by standards which the Justices themselves say are unfit for a free people under this Constitution-by mere “predilection”. And if abortion is a question to which no just or principled answer is possible-a proposition I deny but which the Court evidently affirms then the question must be resolved according to someone’s “predilections.” By the Justice’s own account, that is the business of the people, acting through their elected representatives. We have, one might well say, a “principled” means under our constitution for settling inescapably arbitrary” matters-democracy, the ballot box. Can the Roe Court avoid this charge of arbitrariness? It cannot. I wish today to make that case by investigating a so far unnoticed future of the Roe opinion. I consider it dispositive evidence in favor of Justice White’s charge, seconded by Ely, that Roe represents power, pure and simple."

"Recall that the court, speaking through Justice Blackmun, said that there were two novel claims of right presented for decision. Both claims arose under the Due Process clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. They were “novel” in the sense that, again as Justice Blackmun saw it, neither had yet been recognized by the Supreme Court. These were, of course, the claim that unborn children-the “fetus”, per the Court-were “persons” with a right to “life” guaranteed by the Due Process Clause, and the female plaintiff’s claim that the “liberty” protected by that clause included a liberty to abort. The court recognized that both claims mattered much to those making them. But one had priority; the court said that if the unborn’s claim prevailed, the plaintiff’s case dissolved."

"Justice Blackmun in Roe resisted the unborn’s claim, so devastating to the appellant’s case, for several articulated reasons: (1) No case could be cited holding the fetus a person within the meaning of the Fourteenth Amendment; (2) none of the many uses of the term “person” in the Constitution indicated, “with any assurance, that it ha[d any possible pre-natal application; (3) abortion restrictions were “far freer” (Backmun’s phrase) when the Amendment was adopted “than they were today”, suggesting that the unborn were not “persons” in some whole sense he thought presupposed by counsel for the unborn. In this connection, Justice Blackmun took note of some alleged inconsistencies between Texas’ very restrictive law, and how even it fell short of the constitutional requirements which would be implied by a finding of fetal personhood. Specifically, abortion was not “murder” in Texas, but a lesser form of criminally punishable homicide. And, abortions were permitted to save the life of the mother. Blackmun cleaved closely to constitutional text, history contemporaneous with its enactment, and decided cases. He examined the “coherence” on controversial propositions asserted by the parties with settled principles of law. This is a good general approach to constitutional construction; indeed, it is originalism, or something very close to it."

"Had Justice Blackmun applied the same criteria to the woman’s assertion of right under the Fourteenth Amendment that he applied to the claim of fetal personhood, Roe would have come out differently. Were constitutional text, precedent, and nineteenth century legislative practices (as well as anomalies forces into contemporary legislative practice) the measure of the claim, an attorney who claimed that the Constitution required abortion-on-demand would face Rule 11 sanctions. If the method of the day was to be originalism, then the unborn were sure winners. Blackmun applied no such criteria to the woman’s claim. H marshaled some cases-Skinner, Pierce, Griswold, Eisenstadt-but admitted that the abortion situation was “inherently different” due to the presence of the fetus-from all of them. Blackmun noted the distress caused by an unwanted pregnancy, but only after asserting that “this right of privacy * * * is broad enough to encompass a woman’s decision whether or not to terminate her pregnancy.” The “distress” of abortion to the unborn was far greater, so much so that if recognized as a “person” with a right to life, the woman’s distress, by Justice Blackmun’s own account, would justify no abortion at all. Perhaps the only plausible interpretation of this part of Roe is that the woman’s distress caused, at least in part, the adverse treatment of the unborn. This is a tragically mistaken way to analyze the situation."

"This is the time to notice the weaknesses of Blackmun’s arguments, even without doubting the general validity of his (near) originalism. For example, what the constitution usually means by “person” is not dispositive of what it mean in each particular usage. Corporations are “persons” for some purposes but not for others. Context-especially the particular action, status, or adverse treatment which is the subject matter of a clause-is central to understanding what each clause means by “person.” “Person” can be and should be defined retail- not wholesale. It is obvious that much of the rhetorical force of Justice Blackmun’s listing of the various usages of “person” stems from the inapplicability of them to the unborn. His citations to the constitutional text proved way too much; almost all of his references not only applied “postnatally”, as he said, but way “postnatally”. His references to the qualification for elected office, extradition eligibility, emoluments, etc., apply only to adults."

"Justice Blackmun’s coherence arguments are severely undercut by his naïve assumption that “personhood” means no abortions at all. He noted some features of the law of homicide which would be anomalies if the unborn were truly persons. It is certainly the case that abortion has been distinguished as a particular form of homicide, punishable approximately as manslaughter, with the important caveat that women procuring abortions were rarely prosecuted at all. Abortion has not been a class of applications of murder prohibitions. What does all this show? Not nearly what the Roe Court thought it showed. Justice Blackmun examined the case for “fetal personhood” under the Fourteenth Amendment’s Due Process Clause. It says. “[N]or shall any state deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; !* * *.” He seems to have thought that a successful argument for fetal personhood would constitutionally prohibit all abortions. He said that if fetal personhood could be established, the case for abortion liberty “of course, collapses, for the fetus’s right to life is then guaranteed specifically by the Amendment.”"

"Has the arbitrariness of Roe v. Wade been overcome since 1973? No. Here the discussion must focus on the 1992 decision of the Court in “Planned Parenthood v. Casey”, which reaffirmed “the central holding” of Roe. In Casey we hear the Court (the “joint opinion” of Justices Kennedy, Souter, O’Connor) note the disagreement among us about the “profound moral and spiritual implications” of abortion. “[B]ut that cannot control our decision. Our obligation is to define the liberty of all, not mandate our own moral code.”"

"Were the matter not so deadly serious the Justices’ attempts to supply the principles rationale Roe lacked would be subject of sport. The Justices said that “liberty” includes the “right to define one’s own concept of existence, of meaning, or the universe.” Really? Does the law which prohibits killing have no point of view? Besides, how does this “mystery passage” tell us who counts as a person with such an expansive right? Elsewhere in Casey the Justices said that the right o bear children depends upon the right to abort. All of us, regardless of our views about abortion, exercise the same right, and thus all of us can and should support abortion rights. Except, of course, those who draw a principled distinction between killing and nurturing life. Much has been written of these feeble attempts to mask judicial arbitrariness, and I have written some of it. But, I submit, the real “rationale” of Casey is, simply, Roe itself and the passage of time. Casey: An “entre generation has come of age free * * * to make reproductive decisions,” including the decision to abort.” Roe was based on a constitutional analysis –[sic] which we cannot now repudiate.” Roe v. Wade was indeed “raw judicial power”. And so it should surprise no one that the reaffirmation in Casey, has not silenced its critics. Tomorrow’s march here in D.C. will evidence the Court’s failure to persuade. And the march will again be testimony to the decency and law abidingness of our people. They will wonder tomorrow about the Casey retreated into the status quo. Some of the people marching tomorrow will remember Brown v. Board of Education, the decision handed down in 1954. Some of them will know that John W. Davi, who represented the segregationist states, made more than one argument, but his most forceful one was this. Davis cited the Court to its own holding nearly sixty years before, in Plessy v. Ferguson, and to six succeeding cases which, David said, affirmed Plessy. “Separate but equal”, Davis said in so many words, may not be all that the law should be, but it was the Court’s word, and the fact was that an entire culture-the South and parts of the North-had grown up around segregation. Plessy should not now be repudiated. The difference between Davis’ argument and the argument of the Casey Court is approximately one generation. The moral truth prevailed in 1954. We should hope and pray that we do not wait another generation until the truth about the unborn is finally heard, and heeded, in our highest Court."

"Although Harry claimed to be unsure of his wife’s position on abortion, Dottie told one of his law clerks (a young male attorney who favored laissez-faire abortion) that she was doing everything she could to further the cause. “You and I are working on the same thing,” she told the law clerk. “Me at home and you at work.” To write his opinions, Harry retired to the Justices’ second-floor library, where he spent most of his waking hours in silent solitude, laboriously working at a long mahogany desk. Months passed, As the winter snows melted into spring and D.C.’s cherry blossoms burst into bloom. Harry remained squirreled away in the library. When at last in mid-May Harry showed a draft of his Roe opinion for the first time to one of his politically leftist law clerks, the clerk claimed to be “astonished” the draft was so crudely written and poorly organized. When he circulated the draft on May18, 1972, to the other justices, Harry’s more liberal colleagues on the bench-Justices William Douglas, William Brennan, and Thurgood Marshall-were disappointed, whereas conservative Justice Byron White strongly dissented. Why were Douglas and Marshall so disappointed? Catholic feminist Mary Meehan suggests one possible reason. Meehan reports, “Justices Douglas and Marshall had been lacking in sexual restraint-to put it mildly-well before the ‘60s, and the problems of both were aggravated at times by heavy drinking. Perhaps they realized that legal abortion could be extremely helpful to men-enabling them to escape paternity suits, years of child support, social embarrassment, and the wrath of betrayed wives. But none of this, of course, would be mentioned in the Court’s opinions.” Meehan reports that in 1961 Justice Douglas had also written to Population Bomb pamphleteer Hugh Moore, saying, “I have seen some of the literature… all of which I thought was excellent.” In any case, when harry failed to produce a competent pro-abortion draft of his opinions, he got flak from his colleagues. Having vowed to do his best “to arrive at something which would command a court,” Harry withdrew the draft, asking that all copies be returned to him. He planned to do more work on his opinions over the summer. In late July 1972, Harry flew to Rochester to immerse himself in research at the Mayo Clinic medical library. Meanwhile, his politically liberal, $15,000-a-year law clerk George Frampton Jr., age twenty-eight, volunteered to stay in Washington until early August to help research and draft the opinions. The two talked by phone almost daily."

"An early draft Henry wrote on the history of abortion in his small, cramped longhand reveals he was still struggling. Writing is difficult, and Harry wasn’t much of a writer. On the subject of abortion, Harry was finding it hard to think clearly. Young George, on the other hand, was an excellent writer. He’s graduated from Harvard Law School in 1969 (where he was managing editor of the Harvard Law Review), and he had at his fingertips an extraordinarily handy resource-a high persuasive book entitled “Abortion: The first authoritative and documented report on the laws and practices governing abortion in the U.S. and around the world, and how-for the sake of women everywhere-they can and must be reformed..” Yes, indeed. It was Larry Lader’s masterpiece of propaganda, the same book that had so greatly impressed Betty Friedan. Lader’s masterpiece of propaganda supplied much of the historic background Blackmun’s opinion had previously lacked. But more important Lader’s book provided a coherent form or template that tied together the many disconnected fragments of thought that had previously kept Blackmun’s abortion opinions from working. In all-new sections on the history of abortion written by George and dated August 10, 1972, Lader’s book suddenly appears in the footnotes for the first time."

"In a lengthy five-page, single-spaced letter, typed on legal-size paper, which he sent to Harry along with the draft, George made an unusual suggestion. He suggested that Harry consider circulating this new draft before it was cite-checked by a clerk. Cite-checking it detailed fact-checking to ensure that a judicial decision is sound. Why would a junior law clerk suggest circulating a draft that hadn’t been cite-checked? George was eager for Harry to circulate his draft before oral arguments were reheard in October-for three reasons: He wrote that circulating the revised draft before oral argument would “nail down [Blackmun’s] keeping the assignment,” “should influence questions and thinking at oral argument,” and “might well influence voting.” Though George stated he would not recommend delayed cite-checking “as standard operating procedure,” he thought that in this particular case the benefits strongly outweighed the disadvantages."

"We don’t know when or even if the history section in Blackmun’s abortion opinions was ever cite-checked. But we do know that if it happened, the fact-checking was faulty. For when Blackmun accepted Larry Lader, a mere magazine writer, as a reliable authority on history, philosophy, and theology, he became as a blind man following a blind guide. Despite his best efforts, Harry failed to see he had embraced a well-crafted verbal mirage, mistaking it for the truth. Let us be very clear about what happened here. The picture that emerges from Blackmun’s papers, available for public inspection at the U.S. Library of Congress, is that of a justice who, in the words of Pulitzer Prize-winning, pro-abortion historian David J. Garrow, “ceded far too much of his judicial authority to his clerks.” It is plain from an inspection of Blackmun’s papers that his clerks made “historically significant and perhaps decisive contributions to Roe and Doe”-a degree of involvement Garrow calls “indefensible.”"

"Lader set himself up as an authority on centuries of abortion legal history and also on two millennia of Catholic teachings about abortion-and Blackmun and his clerk fell for the ruse. In the final version of the Roe v. Wade decision, Lader’s masterpiece of propaganda is cited at least seven times, and Cyril Chestnut Means’ scholarly papers are cited another seven times. Cyril Means, you’ll recall from Chapter 4, was the NARAL attorney who falsified abortion legal history, fabricating his own version almost entirely out of whole cloth. Lader, of course, was just a clever wordsmith-certainly no expert on history. And yet as the late Notre Dame theologian father James Burtchaell observed, it is “clear in the record that Justice Blackmun was indebted for the innards of his argument to two of the major strategists of the abortion movement”-Means and Lader."

"In any case, Harry was deceived by Lader’s propaganda, six other black-robed men on the bench went along with the ruse and the tragic result was the U.S. Supreme Court’s most controversial decision since the Dred Scott v. Sandford decision denied personhood to black Americans in 1857."

"”The immediate academic response to Roe v. Wade,” observed New York Times pro-abortion reporter Linda Greenhouse, “ranged from tepid to withering.” The first critiques came from the left."

"Americans in general and lawmakers in particular have not considered fully the legal implications of a serious reformulation or wholesale destruction of Roe. If the day does come when such a decision is handed down, Americans, whether they commiserate or celebrate, will have to wake up the next morning and decided what to do. And one need look no further than our state legislatures, which in response to ‘’Webster’’ have enacted legislation strikingly similar to pre-Roe law, to realize the impact of such a Supreme Court ruling."

"The Supreme Court’s 1973 decisions in “Roe v. Wade” and “Doe v. Bolton” created a constitutional regime for abortion, fencing off, as a matter of constitutional law, much of the ground on which state abortion laws had tread for over one hundred years. These decisions affected state abortion legislation in two ways. First, while not prohibiting all criminal sanctions for abortion, they removed abortion, for all practical purposes, from the realm of criminal conduct. Second, while the Court ended the era of criminal abortion, it also left the door open for the states to promulgate regulations concerning abortion, ushering in a new era. “Roe’s” landmark holding declared that the fundamental constitutional right to privacy includes the right to have an abortion and that any state legislation limiting that right must be justified by a compelling state interest. In particular, the “Roe” Court found that Texas’s abortion statute, typical of the nineteenth-century criminal-abortion laws, violated that fundamental right. In “Doe”, the Court declared that Georgia’s statute, a typical 1960s “reformed” law patterned after the Model Penal Code, also violated the newly established constitutional right. As a result, the Court had rendered virtually every abortion statute passed since Connecticut started the enterprise in 1821 unconstitutional. For practical purposes, criminal abortion was dead. While states retained considerable regulatory leeway, abortion no longer could be branded a crime, at least for the first and probably also the second trimester of pregnancy. “Roe” also recognized, however, that states retained a compelling interest in the health of the mother after the first trimester. The Court further acknowledged a compelling state interest in fetal life as of the third trimester. States, then, were free to pass laws reasonably related to the furtherance of those interests. While states theoretically could have responded to the Court’s instructions by enacting new criminal laws barring “unhealthy’ abortions in the second trimester and all abortions after viability, for the most part they did not do so. The longstanding criminal-abortion statutes had been deemed unconstitutional because they flatly violated a fundamental right. The entire enterprise of criminalizing conduct related to abortion thus was called into question by the Supreme Court’s rulings To criminalize at certain stages of pregnancy the very conduct declared constitutionally protected at other stages of pregnancy would have challenged too directly the new understanding of abortion advanced by the Court. Instead, states wishing to limit the exercise of abortion rights launched a new enterprise, one which “Roe” explicitly invited: they restricted access to abortion by strictly regulating it rather than by branding it criminal."