1973

"In the documents for Jane Roe’s case, Coffee also included a seven-point statement of facts. Facts one through five were specific to McCorvey’ssituation. They stated that Roe was an unmarried pregnant woman who, due to economic hardship and the social stigma of having an illegitimate child,wanted to end her pregnant with an abortion performed by a licensed physician in safe circumstances. Because her life was not threatened by her pregnancy, she could not secure a legal abortion under Texas law and did not have the funds to travel to a location outside of the state where she could obtain a safe abortion. facts six and seven were more general: 6. An abortion performed by a competent, licensed physician under hospital or clinic conditions is a safe and simple procedure whish presents less danger to the pregnant woman than ordinary childbirth. 7. An abortion performed outside of the clinical setting by unqualified personnel is extremely dangerous and often results in death, maiming, sterility, r serious infection."

"On the evening of March 2, 1970, Coffee and Weddington made a few final changes to the documents. The following day, March3, Coffee walked to the federal courthouse in Dallas, paying $30 of her own money to file the two cases. Roe’s case was docketed as ccase number 3-3690-B. By naming as their defendant the highest-ranking official responsible for law enforcement in Dallas Country, Texas-District Attorney Henry Wade-the case took on the title Roe v. Wade."

"On March 19, two Dallas attorneys-Fred Brunter and Roy L. Merrill Jr.-asked to have a third plaintiff added to the Roe case. The attorney’s client, James Hallford, was a doctor who had performed baortions for years and had been indicted under the Texas abortion law for performing an illegal abortion. Bruner and Merril argued that the stat e statute was so vague and difficult to interpret that Hallford could not determine when a woman’s life was in danger. Weddington and Coffee were glad to add the physician’s case to theirs, believing it made Roe stronger. The request was granted. Coffee and Weddington had always imagined their case affecting more than McCorvey, their Jane Roe, including the many women facing unwanted pregnancies. The two young lawyers considered the case a good candidate for a class action."

"Norma McCorvey was the "Jane Roe" of Roe v. Wade. Early in 1970 Norma Mccorvey claimed that she had been gang-raped and became pregnant. Attorneys Sarah Weddington and Linda Coffee, newly graduated from the University of Texas Law School, needed a "client" in order to challenge Texas' 100-yearold law that banned abortions. They convinced Norma that she should be seeking an abortion. The case was subsequently argued all the way to the Supreme Court which resulted in legalizing abortion in all SO states in 1973. In the meantime, Norma's baby was born and released for adoption. In 1987, McCorvey admitted that the gang-rape was a lie. In August 1995, she joined Operation Rescue stating that she was tired of being exploited by the pro-abortionists. While Roe v. Wade legalized abortion, on the same date, Doe v. Bolton provided for abortion-on-demand for the entire nine months of pregnancy and was the legal vehicle which provided Court sanction for the over 2200 abortion mills across the country."

"Sandra Cano was "Mary Doe" of Doe v. Bolton Sandra Cano now says she was an unwitting participant in fraud on the highest court in the land. Sandra was a young expectant mother with three children facing a divorce from a husband who was in jail for child molestation. Cano's three children had been taken from her by family service workers. They were being shunted from one bad environment to another. Cano loved her children dearly. She was almost insane with grief when she turned to Legal Aid Services for help. The offer of N.O.W. lawyers to take the whole mess off her hands, obtain a divorce and regain custody of her children sounded too good to be true. When the attorneys hinted that they would like to strike a deal which would include abating the child Sandra was carrying she made it very clear that she could never do that Yet, her attorneys ignored her objections and ran roughshod over her. When she realized her case had been used to obtain abortion-on-demand she said, "...why would I stretch my imagination to include a plan so bizarre that it would give people in a civilized society permission to kill their own babies?...I surely never thought they would tie my personal anxieties about retrieving my children to a scheme to make abortion-on-demand legal." Ironically, the Cano baby, like the McCorvey baby, was carried to term and relinquished fa adoption. Yet, 30,000,000 other babies have lost their lives to abortion because of these two cases."

"Sarah Weddington was the Attorney Sarah Weddington, the attorney who argued Roe v. Wade before the U.S. Supreme Court, gave a speech at the Education Ethics Institute in Oklahoma. She explained why she defended the sketchy story and false rape charge of a Texas waitress "Jane Roe" all the way to the Supreme Court: "My behavior may not have been totally ethical. But I did it for what I thought were the right reasons." Tulsa World 5/24/93."

"Hugh Heffner, founder of Playboy claims to have done one great thing for women: "Playboy probably had more to do than any other company with Roe v. Wade. We supplied the money for those early cases and actually wrote the amicus curiae for Roe.""

"The U.S. Senate will next week take up S.1975, the so-called Women’s Health Protection Act (WHPA). Its backers want everyone to believe that it will simply protect by statute the right to abortion that the Supreme Court defined in its Roe v. Wade decision. They know this is a lie, and the rest of the American people need to know it too."

"In Roe v. Wade, the Supreme Court said it should because of the “detriment” that prohibiting abortion “would impose upon the pregnant woman.” That, however, is a policy decision that courts do not have authority to make. The Supreme Court, therefore, said that the 14th Amendment protects a “right to privacy” that “is broad enough” to include abortion. Since the Court made no attempt to actually interpret the 14th Amendment, though, that did not fool anyone, and no constitutional scholar of any ideological stripe even tries to defend it. But that’s where we have been for the past five decades. Roe v. Wade got the job done, making legislative efforts to protect life before birth all but impossible, a policy more permissive than all but ones in seven other nations. Yet the Court now has before it a case, Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, in which it may finally acknowledge that Roe v. Wade is an indefensible distortion of the Constitution and overrule it. That would once again put state and local governments in primary charge of abortion policy."

"The WHPA’s two most glaring defects are that Congress has no authority to dictate how state and local legislatures may handle abortion and, even if it did, the WHPA is far more radical than even Roe v. Wade itself. The WHPA refers repeatedly to the “constitutional right to terminate a pregnancy.” Congress does have authority to “enforce, by appropriate legislation, the provisions” of the 14th Amendment. Those provisions, of course, say nothing about privacy or abortion and, if the Supreme Court overrules Roe v. Wade, no one will be able even to pretend otherwise. There will nothing for Congress to enforce."

"Roe v. Wade, for example, recognized that “[t]he pregnant woman cannot be isolated in her privacy.” The “developing young in the human uterus” makes abortion “inherently different” from other privacy rights. In fact, the Court said, abortion may not have a “close relationship” to those other rights at all. The child in the womb, in other words, changes everything. In Roe, the Supreme Court referred to the unborn “child,” “prenatal life,” “fetus,” “embryo,” and “unborn children.” These were not simply casual or random references. The state, Justice Harry Blackmun wrote, has an “important and legitimate interest” in protecting human beings before birth. Only four years after Roe, the Supreme Court held that the right to abortion “implies no limitation on the authority of a State to make a value judgment favoring childbirth over abortion, and to implement that judgment” through certain kinds of legislation. The WHPA repudiates, rather than codifies, that aspect of Roe v. Wade. The bill, in fact, tries mightily to erase, avoid, or deny any suggestion, hint, or whisper that a second human being exists at all. It even drops the definition of “abortion” found in previous versions of the WHPA because that definition referred to “a live birth” (of what?) and a “dead fetus” (that must once have been alive). The WHPA’s proponents apparently believe that abortion focuses too much, even in death, on the unborn child. Instead, the current WHPA refers only to “abortion services” which, it claims, “are essential health care” and, therefore, focus exclusively on the pregnant woman."

"In a 1983 essay titled “Abortion and the Conscience of the Nation,” President Ronald Reagan wrote that “[w]e cannot diminish the value of one category of human life—the unborn—without diminishing the value of all human life.” The “real question,” he wrote, “is not when human life begins, but, what is the value of human life?” The Supreme Court’s answer in Roe v. Wade was that human life has almost no value before birth. The WHPA scoffs even at that, denying that human life exists at all before birth. Senators will give their answer when they take up the bill next week."

"Abortion on demand was legal in a few states in 1970. Not until the 1973 Supreme Court decision in Roe v. Wade was legalized abortion available nationally."

"The story that emerges from these data is that the availability of legalized abortion services had a significant effect on fertility, but marginal changes in the distance to a legal provider had less of an effect. In other words, Roe v. Wade was arguably less important for unintended childbearing than was access to services in California, the District of Columbia and especially New York in the years before Roe."

"This Court has decided that the Constitution protects certain rights of privacy on the part of a woman arising from the marital relationship which cannot be unjustifiably interfered with by the State. NRLC believes that the genesis of such rights, to the extent such rights may exist, must be found among the “penumbral” personal liberties protected by the Due Process Clause of the Fifth Amendment. Yet equally unchallengeable is the proposition that an unborn child’s right not to “be deprived of life,” to quote the words of the Due Process Clause itself, is also a fundamental personal right or liberty protected by that same amendment and entitled to the traditional searching judicial scrutiny and review afforded when basic personal liberties are threatened by state action, whether legislative or judicial in character. Therefore, it is very clear that this case is not one, as the appellants would portray it, which involves merely the balancing of a right of personal liberty (i.e., a married woman’s privacy) against some competing, generalized state interest of lower priority or concern in an enlightened scheme of constitutional values, such as the state’s police power. Here, the Court must choose between a nebulous and undefined legal “right” of privacy on the part of a woman with respect to the use of her body and the State’s right to prevent the destruction of a human life. That election involves the determination as to whether the State’s judgment that human life is to be preferred is a prohibited exercise of legislative power."

"Because the Texas abortion law has the clear effect of denying disadvantaged citizens access to safe hospital abortions, without any justification, it violates the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment."

"Certain assumptions must be made and constitutionally accepted to find that there is a basis of rationality to the exclusion of the above-mentioned classes of women from the statute’s protection. One is that human-life begins with fertilization of egg by sperm. Another is that this “life” is equivalent to the life of the woman, and the life-saving exception to the abortion law is a rational balancing of interests by the state, analogous to the laws of self-defense. It is remarkable that the existence of a one-day-old fetus is to be equaled with the life of a grown woman. The woman is—beyond doubt—a human being, one upon whom other human beings (husband, children, etc.) depend in a variety of ways essential to the sanctity of the family, and whose impaired health may be critically disruptive to that family; or one who may not have consented to sexual intercourse made felonious by the state, yet who is forced to bear the consequences of that same felonious act. This equivalency of interest between a microscopic embryo and the woman who bears it must be assumed in the Texas law, however, since that statute draws no lines, such as viability, as the time to invoke the state’s protection."

"The Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment requires the states to “exercise their powers so as not to discriminate between their inhabitants except upon some reasonable differentiation fairly related to the object of regulations.” The challenged statute operates to deny equal protection to women with compelling reasons for receiving therapeutic abortion, concurred in by their physicians, but whose physicians cannot advance as “medical advice” that the abortion is necessary to “save” their lives. Women so excluded are those who would suffer a serious impairment of physical or mental health from carrying a pregnancy to term, those whose pregnancies are the result of rape or incest, those whose fetuses will, with high medical certainty, be born with gravely disabling physical or mental defects, and those who are financially unable or emotionally incapable of supporting a child, or of adding another child to a family whose limited resources are already strained by their devotion to raising children in being. [T]he fundamental interest involved in the case of each of the excluded classes of women is as deserving of constitutional protection as the “saving” (whatever it may mean) of the mother’s life. Compelling a woman to give birth to a child which is the product of rape or incest, or which will be born deformed, or whose birth will damage the woman’s own health or capacity to be a mother to the child or to her existing family, may be as unbearable to the woman as a vague threat to her life itself. That compulsion also puts her physician in the ethically questionable position of having to decide just how much injury he must allow her to bear, despite his obvious ability to prevent that injury, before he can confidently say to the prosecutor that he ultimately acted to save her life."

"The Texas Abortion Law, While Permitting Abortion to Save a Woman’s Life, Irrationally Excludes From Its Protection Women Whose Health May Be Seriously Threatened, Who Bear a Deformed Fetus, Who Have Been Victims of Sexual Assault, Who Are Financially, Socially or Emotionally Incapable of Raising a Child and Whose Family Tranquility and Security Would Be Seriously Disrupted by the Birth of Another Child, Exclusions Which Bear Most Heavily on the Poor and Non-White, and Which Do Not Serve Any Compelling or Reasonable State Interest, Denying to These Women the Equal Protection of the Law."

"In sharp contrast to the above data has been the experience in New York State since July 1, 1970, when categorical restrictions on abortion were eliminated. On April 5, 1971, New York City health officials reported that the city’s public hospitals, which restricted abortions to city residents, were performing an average of 511 a week, and that the “vast majority” of those women would be unable to afford abortions in private hospitals. It is clear from this evidence that where the law has eliminated restrictions on the obtaining of abortions, the poor and non-white women who were previously unable to exercise the financial and other kinds of leverage required to have a “therapeutic” abortion, are able to obtain medically safe abortions on an equal basis with all other women, and they do obtain them to at least the same extent as their more privileged sisters. One result has been a drop in the maternal mortality rate: New York City hospitals now report treating far fewer victims of “botched” illegal abortions than they did in years past."

"Criminal abortion has been described as the greatest single cause of maternal mortality in the United States; it is one of the greatest cause of disease, infection, and resulting sterilization as well. The poor and the non-white suffer disproportionately from the “back-alley” abortionists, whose services they seek out in lieu of the medically safe hospital abortions generally denied them. California, the only state known to officially compile such figures, notes that approximately 7 percent of that state’s non-white female population subjected themselves to criminal abortion in 1968, as opposed to only 1.5 percent of the state’s white female population. The often tragic results of these abortions are also documented. In their New York study, Drs. Gold, et al. noted that the ratio of criminal abortion deaths per 1,000 live births was 4.0 for white women and 16.2 for non-whites. Likewise, Dr. Hall’s 1960–62 study led him to conclude that approximately half of the puerperal deaths among New York’s Negroes were due to criminal abortions as opposed to only a quarter of the puerperal deaths among white women."

"Because the poor rely primarily upon public hospitals for their medical services, denials or delays at those institutions are tantamount to a denial of prompt medical care solely because these women are without funds. A partial explanation for the marked disparity in these figures appears to lie in the far lower incidence of abortions performed for psychiatric reasons among poor and non-white women. While socioeconomic conditions never per se legally warrant therapeutic abortion, socioeconomic status nevertheless frequently determines whether or not an abortion will be performed, and if performed, whether that self-same abortion will be therapeutic or criminal."

"Presumably, therefore those women who qualify for a legal abortion according to the terms of the statute should be able to obtain one, regardless of their race or socio-economic status. There is nothing demonstrable in the differences of skin color or economic condition which suggests that a substantially smaller proportion of the poor or the non-white fall into this category than that of the white and the non-poor, or that the poor and non-white have a substantially different moral attitude on abortion. On the contrary, a recent study of births occurring between 1960 and 1965 led investigators to conclude that one-third of Negro (as contrasted with one-fifth of white) births were unwanted. Unwanted births were in general more than twice as high for families with incomes of less than $3,000 as for those with incomes of over $10,000; this differential was "particularly marked among Negroes." The results indicated, in the view of the investigators, that there is a "coincidence of poverty and unwanted births rather than a propensity of the ‘poor’ to have unwanted children." One explanation for this high level of unwanted births among the poor and the non-white is surely the fact that they do not have equal access to abortions. Data demonstrate that the poor and the non-white do not receive this medical treatment on the same terms as do others. They thus suffer a particularly harsh and adverse effect from the operation of this statute, as they do from that of the other restrictive abortion laws which have existed and currently exist in the United States...."

"While amici contend that to receive proper medical care in the form of an abortion approved and performed by a physician is, by itself, a fundamental interest protected by the Constitution, it is not necessary for abortion to be declared a constitutional right to hold that its discriminatory denial violates guarantees of equal protection. The State of Texas has prohibited all abortions except for “the purpose of saving the mother’s life.” On its face, this permits treatment in the case of all women whose lives are similarly endangered, and excludes from treatment all others."

"The State Has No Interest in Increasing Its Population; on the Contrary, Its Interest, if Any, Is in Limiting Population Growth. In view of the increasing public concern over our rapidly multiplying population, any supposed state interest in increasing the number of lives in being can hardly be raised as a justification for the prohibition of abortion. Indeed, the growing emphasis of both federal and state agencies upon preplanning of families and limitation of their size makes manifestly inconsistent treating the termination of pregnancy as a crime, while birth control devices are not merely permitted but are openly promoted and encouraged by the government...."

"These organizations share the view that restrictive state abortion laws, such as the Texas statute here under review, have a negative effect on the health and wellbeing of American women, and have a particularly severe impact on the nation’s poor and non-white populations. It is the poor and non-white who suffer most from limited access to legal abortion, and it is they who incur greatly disproportionate numbers of deaths and crippling injuries as a result of being forced to seek criminal abortion...."

"The National Right to Life Committee is a non-sectarian, interdisciplinary organization that is committed to informing and educating the general public on questions related to the sanctity of human life. Protecting the right to life of the unborn child is of central concern for NRLC. The Committee believes that proposals for total repeal or relaxation of present abortion laws represent a regressive approach to serious human problems. NRLC is in favor of a legal system that protects the life of the unborn child, while recognizing the dignity of the child’s mother, the rights of its father, and the responsibility of society to provide support and assistance to both the mother and child...."

"It is respectfully submitted that the unborn is a "person" within the meaning of the 5th and 14th Amendments. Consequently, the unborn's life can be taken only with due process of law, and its life is entitled, like all other persons’ lives, to equal protection under the law."

"[O]ne must recognize that the performance of legally induced abortion upon healthy women is not the practice of medicine at all, but rather another example of the violence of our times; the use of one more technological skill to destroy human life...."

"The obstetrician has two patients: mother and child. It is deplorable to think that discussions of mortality can so easily exclude the child. The court should recognize that the mortality to the child is nearly 100%. Only an occasional child has the strength to survive. Let us not forget that abortion kills children of varying ages and stages in development. The unheard voices of these little ones are our concern, and we deplore this violent trend which is turning the healing art of medicine into a source of efficient swift and sure destruction of human life. A trend which will yield a "body count" unlike any we have seen in our nation’s history. We deplore the condition of a society which calls physicians to exercise their art as a tool of death for those yet unborn...."

"The medical hazards of legally induced abortion are all too often compared to the safety of a tonsillectomy or the “proverbial tooth extraction.” (See Texas Appellant’s brief.) Data presented from Eastern European mortality statistics have often been used to produce such claims as "it is X-times safer to have an abortion than to carry the child to term." These claims have been widely published in newspapers and lay periodicals; when made by the non-professional, they are forgivable; when made by "medical experts," one can only assume that these "experts" have allowed a desire for "social change" to fog their ability to distinguish first-rate from second- rate medical care. The world’s medical literature does not support such claims. The medical hazards of legal abortion should be presented to the Court in their total perspective through an analysis of this literature. It is imperative to note that when one focuses only on the legal abortion mortality rates from selected countries around the world, one can only see the risks of legal abortion through tunnel vision. The total medical picture cannot be understood without a look at the early and late physical and psychological complications. Indeed, these are the complications which affect the greater number of people and result in what a World Health Organization scientific group said was "a great amount of human suffering.""

"An expansion of the right to privacy to include the right of a woman to have an abortion without considering the interests of the unborn person decides this question against the unborn. The necessary consequence of that expansion would be a direct and unavoidable conflict between the unborn person’s right to life and the woman’s extended right of privacy. Assuming such a conflict, it is the position of the amici that the more fundamental and established of the conflicting rights must prevail where they clash. The right to life is most certainly the most fundamental and established of the rights involved in the cases facing the Court today."

"Today, this country’s population has moved far beyond its needed growth, and current government policy is to encourage population control. Anti-abortion laws have outlived their purpose if regarded in historical perspective. Rights of the individual pregnant woman can no longer be ignored. The Thirteenth Amendment’s promise of freedom has long provided to male citizens the sovereign control of their own bodies."

"....A state cannot seriously contend today that restrictions on abortion are justified by an overriding state interest in increasing population. See Ehrlich, The Population Bomb, 1968. On the contrary, it is accepted government policy to limit family size and to encourage family planning. Such state interest is expressed in Population and the American Future, The Report of the President’s Commission on Population Growth and the Future (March, 1972) p. 192: Recognizing that our population cannot grow indefinitely, and appreciating the advantage of moving now toward the stabilization of population, the Commission recommends that the nation welcome and plan for a stabilized population."

"Abortion laws alone compel the contribution of one individual’s organs, blood, breath and life support system for another individual, either fully or partially formed.... If the pregnant woman, as potential donor, and the fetus, as potential donee, come before the law as equal “persons,” one may not command involuntary servitude of the other; and so the potential donor retains her sovereignty over her body and her right to refuse. Therefore, it follows that the fetus, a potential person, can have no greater right over a potential donor. Unless the state has some other compelling interest in forcing the donation of the pregnant woman’s body to the service of the fetus, the state must stand aside in the abortion conflict; it cannot legitimately intervene in preventing the pregnant woman from withholding her life force from the fetus...."

"Let us assume, for the time being, that the pregnant woman and the fetus she carries within her body have come before the law as equal “persons.” The woman desires an abortion. May the state legitimately intervene to prevent the abortion? At the present stage of medical knowledge and ability to control human incubation, the fetus cannot survive and develop into a separate self-sustaining person without contribution of the bodily force of the single female individual who carries that particular fetus within her body. Yet the laws prohibiting and regulating abortion, unlike all other laws in respect of persons, compel this pregnant woman to breathe, process food and donate blood for the sustenance of another human entity, either fully or partially developed. In no other instance does the law compel one individual to donate his/her bodily force to another individual. In no other instance does the law give another human—even a fully developed human—a right to life beyond that which the person himself can sustain."

"The women who bear children and the medical experts who assist them testify that pregnancy and childbearing are indeed labor. The fact that many women enter into such labor voluntarily and joyfully does not alter the fact that other women, under other circumstances, find childbearing too arduous, become pregnant through no choice of their own, and are then forced to complete the pregnancy to term by compulsion of state laws prohibiting voluntary abortion. It is the purpose of the Thirteenth Amendment to prohibit a relationship in which one person or entity limits the freedom of another person. In the absence of a compelling state interest or due conviction for a crime, the state’s forcing the pregnant woman through unwanted pregnancy to full term is a denial of her Thirteenth Amendment right to be free from “a condition of enforced compulsory service of one to another.” This is the very essence of involuntary servitude in which the personal service of one person is “disposed of or coerced for another’s benefit.”"

"A wife has no legal power to refuse to participate in the intimacies of married life. If she refuses her husband’s forced attentions, there is no law to intervene in her behalf. She cannot charge her husband with rape. Indeed, if a married woman attempts to practice abstinence, the laws of most states treat her behavior as a denial of the marital right of the husband.... Under present law, a married woman has two choices: she can attempt to refuse to fulfill the sexual obligations of the marriage and thus risk termination of her marriage; or she can participate in normal marital relations and risk unwanted pregnancy and childbirth. With a choice of either alternative, she risks the consequence of a legally imposed penalty. The woman is left with no non-punishable course of action."

"The average married woman expects to bear two to three children, yet coitus takes place between a couple married during the period of the woman’s reproductive years (age 18 to 43) an average of 2,535 times. The frequency of coitus stated in the Kinsey Report is average behavior between married couples. If the woman wishes to remain free of pregnancy once her desired family size is reached, her only sure method of remaining so free of pregnancy is complete abstinence from sexual intercourse. If she embarks on such a course, will the law uphold her decision?"

"Contraceptives are never foolproof. Any act of intercourse between a fertile man and woman constitutes some risk of conception, no matter what contraceptives are used.... If 100,000 women who do not wish to become pregnant take the pill, three will probably die within the year and 1,000 will become pregnant. Under the present state of contraceptive failure, a woman does not have the option of remaining free of pregnancy by making careful use of contraceptives. She is at some risk in using the most effective methods of contraception available."

"During pregnancy estrogen levels exhibit severe increase, this phenomenon accounting for the symptoms of nausea and vomiting occurring in one-half or more of all pregnant women. If this condition is prolonged, hospitalization is required. Evacuation of the contents of the uterus results in immediate and dramatic relief of symptoms. In severe cases blood protein may be destroyed. Bodies of women who have died from this condition exhibit the symptoms of starvation, acidosis, dehydration and multiple vitamin deficiencies. The excess progesterone produced by the placenta causes fluid retention, increase in blood pressure, weight gain, irritability, lassitude, severe emotional tension, nervousness, inability to concentrate, and inability to sleep. At least 40 per cent of pregnant women have symptomatic edema, distorting the hands, face, ankles and feet. A woman’s lungs respire 45 per cent more air than normal in an attempt to obtain the needed oxygen, but oxygen absorbed is less than normal despite the extra effort of the crowded lungs. Because the conceptus utilizes almost twice as much calcium as the pregnant woman can assimilate from administered and dietary calcium, extra calcium must be drawn from a woman’s calcium stores, mostly from her long bones. Thus, the pregnant woman is likely to suffer leg cramps. In young women, permanent bone deformation results. Total loss of a woman’s iron stores during pregnancy and delivery is measured at 680 mg. Thus anemia of pregnancy is high and almost all pregnant women, especially those having repeated pregnancies, require supplementary iron. Efforts to correct this condition may fail because many pregnant women cannot tolerate iron supplements. With such extensive effects, can pregnancy be considered as merely a “natural” state of being?"

"During pregnancy, enlargement of the uterus within the abdominal cavity displaces and compresses the other abdominal contents including the heart, lungs and gastrointestinal tract. The resulting pressure has a direct effect on circulation of the blood and increase in venous pressure, sometimes leading to irreversible varicose veins and hemorrhoids and, with predictable frequency, to disabling thrombophlebitis. The gastrointestinal tract experiences functional interference causing constipation and displacement of the urinary tract, thus urinary tract infections occur in six to seven per cent of all pregnant women and such infections, in turn, lead to kidney infections. During the second and third months, bladder irritability is quite constant. Tearing and overstretching of the muscles of the pelvic floor occurs frequently during delivery, causing extensive and irreparable damage to the pelvic organs and their supporting connections. Surgery is often required to return these organs to position. Bladder control may be permanently lost. The weight of the contents of the uterus causes sacroiliac strain accompanied by pain and backache, with the effects of the pressure being felt as far as the outermost extremities of the woman’s body. The weight causes such pressure on the cervical spine as to result in numbness, tingling and proprioceptive acuity reduction in the hands."

"Pregnancy is not a mere inconvenience. “The physical and functional alterations of pregnancy involve all the body systems,” displacing body parts, depleting the body of its necessary elements and changing its chemical balance. The pregnant woman’s body is in a state of constant service, providing warmth, nutrients, oxygen and waste disposal for the support of the conceptus. These activities are always to the detriment of the woman’s body. They are performed for the benefit of the conceptus alone unless an interest of the pregnant woman is also served thereby, that is, unless the pregnant woman defines the pregnancy as wanted."

"From the outset, the Amendment has been interpreted by this Court to apply to all persons without regard to race or class, and to guarantee universal freedom in the United States.... It is the purpose of this brief to show that anti-abortion laws, which force an unwillingly pregnant woman to continue pregnancy to term, are a form of involuntary servitude without the justification of serving any current national or public need."

"MR. STEWART: I don't think it was squarely at issue, Your Honor. Again, it's -- it's a little hard not to take the Court at its word when it emphasized that viability -- the -- that viability is -- is the central part of Roe -- Roe's holding and saying that it is reaffirming that, so we kind of take that as it -- as it stands. But the Court has not – it did not face a law like this certainly, Mr. Chief Justice."

"JUSTICE SOTOMAYOR: Counsel, there's so much that's not in the Constitution, including the fact that we have the last word. Marbury versus Madison. There is not anything in the Constitution that says that the Court, the Supreme Court, is the last word on what the Constitution means. It was totally novel at that time. And yet, what the Court did was reason from the structure of the Constitution that that's what was intended. And, here, in Casey and in Roe, the Court said there is inherent in our structure that there are certain personal decisions that belong to individuals and the states can't intrude on them. We've recognized them in terms of the religion parents will teach their children. We've recognized it in -- in their ability to educate at home if they choose. They just have to educate them. We have recognized that sense of privacy in people's choices about whether to use contraception or not. We've recognized it in their right to choose who they're going to marry. I fear none of those things are written in the Constitution. They have all, like Marbury versus Madison, been discerned from the structure of the Constitution."

"JUSTICE KAGAN: I guess what strikes me when I look at this case is that, you know, not much has changed since Roe and Casey, that people think it's right or wrong based on the things that they have always thought it was right and wrong for."

"JUSTICE KAGAN: I mean, it strikes me that people -- some people think those decisions made the right balance and some people thought they made the wrong balance, but, in the end, we are in the same exact place as we were then, except that we're not because there's been 50 years of water under the bridge, 50 years of decisions saying that this is part of our law, that this is part of the fabric of women's existence in this country, and that that places us in an entirely different situation than if you had come in 50 years ago and made the same arguments."

"Julie Rikelman: In Casey, this Court carefully examined and rejected every possible reason for overruling Roe, holding that a woman's right to end a pregnancy before viability was a rule of law and a component of liberty it could not renounce. The question then is not whether Roe should be overturned but whether Casey was egregiously wrong to adhere to Roe's central holding."

"Casey and Roe were correct. For a state to take control of a woman's body and demand that she go through pregnancy and childbirth with all the physical risks and life-altering consequences that brings is a fundamental deprivation of her liberty. Preserving a woman's right to make this decision until viability preserve -- protects her liberty while logically balancing the other interests at stake."