1973

"In discussing early American law pertaining to abortion, the Supreme Court stated that “most of [the] initial statutes dealt severely with abortion after quickening but were lenient with it before quickening.” The Court also emphasized the fact that the Connecticut Legislature did not amend its 1821 antiabortion statute to proscribe pre-quickening abortions until 1860. These statements are quite misleading. At the end of 1868, twenty-seven of the thirty states with antiabortion statutes prohibited attempts to induce abortion “before” quickening."

"It thus appears that the mansion of constitutionalized abortion law, constructed overnight in Roe v. Wade, must be disassembled doorjamb by doorjamb, and never entirely brought down, no matter how wrong it may be.")"

"To the extent indicated in our opinion, we would modify and narrow Roe and succeeding cases."

"While rape was never an issue in the case, public opinion was considered swayed by the media accounts detailing what McCorvey claimed was a gang rape by three men and a woman while she worked for a circus in Georgia. 'I found out I was pregnant through what I thought was love,' McCorvey said in the interview with Carl Rowan. 'When I came back to Texas ... I went to my doctor. ... I told him I wanted an abortion, that I did not want to carry the child because of economic reasons. ... He told me that abortions were illegal in the state of Texas and that I would have to go to another state in order to obtain a legal abortion.' In the interview with the Washington CBS affiliate, McCorvey said, 'How dare them tell me that I couldn't abort a baby that I did not want ... and couldn't have control over my own body.' McCorvey said she had the baby and put it up for adoption, then told the rape story to the lawyers who took her case to the Supreme Court."

"Sarah Weddington, the Austin, Texas, lawyer who represented McCorvey, told United Press International Tuesday, 'The issue of how Jane Roe became pregnant is irrelevant to the case. There was nothing in any of the papers filed with the court or in any of the oral arguments made that related to the cause of the pregnancy. 'Rather, the case was about a young woman who was pregnant, who didn't want to be pregnant, and who had been denied an abortion because of the provisions of the Texas anti-abortion statute. All of these facts are true. No fact was ever presented to the court unless I was certain we could prove it,' she said."

"WASHINGTON -- The woman whose famous abortion case led to the Supreme Court's Roe vs. Wade decision said in an interview released Tuesday she lied when she told lawyers her unwanted pregnancy was the result of a gang rape. Norma McCorvey, the woman called 'Jane Roe' in the famous 1973 decision that said women had a constitutional right to an abortion, told WUSA-TV in an interview to be broadcast Sept. 13 that she fabricated the rape story to get around a Texas law that banned abortions except to save the mother's life."

"Today, we follow the principle announced by the Supreme Court nearly fifty years before the right to an abortion was found in the penumbras of the Constitution and hold that Mississippi may not shift its obligation to respect the established constitutional rights of its citizens to another state. Such a proposal would not only place an undue burden on the exercise of the constitutional right, but would also disregard a state’s obligation under the principle of federalism—applicable to all fifty states—to accept the burden of the non-delegable duty of protecting the established federal constitutional rights of its own citizens."

"Given that the Supreme Court long ago determined that the Constitution protects a woman’s right to choose an abortion, the ultimate issue in this appeal is whether the State of Mississippi can impose a regulation that effectively will close its only abortion clinic. The State of Mississippi, however, argues that Mississippi citizens can obtain an abortion in Tennessee, Louisiana, or Alabama without imposing an undue burden upon Mississippi citizens in the exercise of their constitutional rights."

"And in Roe v. Wade and Doe v. Bolton, when the Court had its most dramatic opportunity to express its supposed aversion to substantive due process, it carried that doctrine to lengths few observers had expected, imposing limits on permissible abortion legislation so severe that no abortion law in the United States remained valid."

"“One of the most curious things about Roe is that, behind its own verbal smokescreen, the substantive judgment on which it rests is nowhere to be found.”"

"Roe AND Rodriguez: THE CHALLENGE Last year in these pages, Gerald Gunther proposed a revitalized enforcement of the constitutional requirement that legislative means substantially further legislative ends. For the pragmatic reason that “due process carries a repulsive connotation of value-laden intervention for most of the Justices, of the Burger Court as well as the Warren Court,” Professor Gunther suggested that the inquiry could “best be carried forward under the banner of equal protection than due process . . . .” But in San Antonio Independent School District v. Rodriguez, its major opportunity this Term to scrutinize a means-end relationship."

"UNLIKE Yeats’ “rough beast, its hour come round at last,” substantive due process may yet enjoy an auspicious second coming. For the Supreme Court’s 1972 Term points the way toward a conception of substantive due process that may avoid the fate of that doctrine’s earlier incarnation in American constitutional law. This Foreword will venture a tentative exploration of the “widening gyre” implicit in several of the Court’s recent decisions."

""It's the legal equivalent of a nuclear bomb," NPR's Nina Totenberg, the dean of Supreme Court reporters, noted, adding that it's possible this ruling opens the door for the potential "for undoing other areas of personal autonomy," from contraception to interracial marriage."

"The Supreme Court came close to virtually overturning Roe v. Wade, according to papers of the late Justice Harry Blackmun being released today. NPR's Nina Totenberg was the only broadcast journalist granted advance access to 1,576 boxes of his files and 38 hours of oral history tapes. In the first of a series of reports, Totenberg examines shifts within the court that allowed the Roe ruling to be maintained. The Blackmun papers reveal that the court's first vote was to overrule Roe in all but name, Totenberg reports on Morning Edition. But as the issue came to a head, Chief Justice William Rehnquist and the court's three other anti-Roe justices were blindsided by three centrist justices who worked together in secret to preserve a woman's right to an abortion. The 1992 abortion case was Planned Parenthood v. Casey, in which the first Bush administration was pushing hard for the reversal of Roe, the landmark 1973 ruling authored by Blackmun. Justice Anthony Kennedy initially voted with the anti-Roe conservatives, giving them a majority of five, but he subsequently changed his vote to support, not eviscerate Roe, the Blackmun papers show. The switch came even as Rehnquist, was circulating a so-called majority opinion that would have left Roe a meaningless shell, Totenberg reports."

"Roe v. Wade was sort of conjured up out of very general phrases and was recorded, even by most liberal scholars like Archibald Cox at the time, John Harvey Link—just to name two Harvard scholars—as kind of made-up constitutional law."

"What led the Supreme Court in 1973 to legalize abortion during the first trimester of a pregnancy was the privacy doctrine articulated in Griswold v. Connecticut (1965) and its extension via the equal-protection clause in Eisenstadt v. Baird (1972). Griswold v. Connecticut (1965) was a birth control case in which contraceptive use was declared to be a privacy right inferred from various provisions of the Bill of Rights and the language of the Ninth Amendment, which reads: “the enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.” Neither privacy nor abortion is mentioned anywhere in the constitution or the Bill of Rights, so Justice Douglas in Griswold v. Connecticut (1965) resorted to finding “penumbras” and “emanations” from the First, Third, Fourth, Fifth, and Ninth Amendments. As he declared: [Prior] cases suggest that specific guarantees in the Bill of Rights have penumbras, formed by emanations form those guarantees that help give them life and substance. . . . various guarantees create zones of privacy. The right of association contained in the penumbra of the First Amendment is one, as we have seen The Third Amendment in its prohibition against the quartering of soldiers “in any house” in time of peace without the consent of the owner is another facet of that privacy. The Fourth Amendment explicitly affirms the “right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures.” The Fifth Amendment in its Self-Incrimination Clause enables the citizen to create a zone of privacy which government may not force him to surrender to his detriment. The Ninth Amendment provides: “The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.”"

"The argument of this chapter is that there is a fundamental difference between what the U.S. Supreme Court did in its 1973 Roe v. Wade decision and what the Supreme Court of Canada subsequently did in its 1988 ruling in Morgentaler v. The Queen. In the United States the high court created a constitutional right to an abortion, thus barring any governmental regulation unless it could withstand the highest judicial standard of strict scrutiny (and few could), whereas in Canada the high court declared the existing statute unworkable and, furthermore, invited Parliament to rework that legislation. To say that today both countries have legalized abortion as an elective procedure is to miss the point. In the United states elective abortions during the first trimester have been constitutionalized as a right; in Canada elective abortions are legal only because Parliament thus far has refused to act. If Congress wanted to overturn Roe v. Wade, it would have to garner two-thirds votes in the House and Senate and then obtain the approval of three-fourths of the states for a constitutional amendment. Parliament, to reverse the effect of Morgentaler v. The Queen (1988), would need only to enact new legislation (which presumably also would be challenged in court). In other words, the legal status quo in Canada is the result of legislative default-the failure of Parliament to act in the affirmative."

"The Washington Post reports on an interesting new analysis by the National Campaign to Prevent Teen Pregnancy. The campaign, noting that U.S. teen birthrates fell 30% between 1991 and 2002, calculates that if those rates had instead remained constant, there would be some 406,000 additional children living below the federally defined poverty line and some 428,000 living in households with single mothers. Since 1991 was exactly 18 years after Roe v. Wade, we got to wondering if the Roe effect might have something to do with all this. The Roe effect would predict that the effect of a reduction in birthrates would be greatest in liberal states, where pregnant teenagers would be more likely to exercise their "right to privacy" and thus less likely to carry their babies to term. The campaign's numbers seem to bear this out."

"What I think is that it just doesn’t have the stable status of Brown or Miranda because it’s been under internal and external assault pretty much from the beginning…. As a constitutional matter, I think Roe was way overreached. I wouldn’t vote to overturn it myself, but that’s because I think it’s good to preserve precedent in general, and the country has sufficiently relied on it that it should not be overruled."

"In the Court’s first confrontation with the abortion issue, it laid down a set of rules for legislatures to follow. The Court decided too many issues too quickly. The Court should have allowed the democratic processes of the states to adapt and to generate sensible solutions that might not occur to a set of judges."

"As a constitutional matter, I think Roe was way overreached. I wouldn’t vote to overturn it myself, but that’s because I think it’s good to preserve precedent in general, and the country has sufficiently relied on it that it should not be overruled."

"What I think is that it just doesn't have the stable status of Brown or Miranda because it's been under internal and external assault pretty much from the beginning."

"The child whose conception was the genesis of the lawsuit that became Roe v. Wade is now a 51-year-old woman ready to tell her story. Shelley Lynn Thornton has come forward after decades of secrecy to publicly identify herself as the "Roe baby" in the new book "The Family Roe: An American Story" by Joshua Prager, which will be released on Sept. 14 and was excerpted in The Atlantic on Thursday. “My association with Roe started and ended because I was conceived," Thornton is quoted saying in the excerpt. Her birth mother's lawsuit became the landmark 1973 Supreme Court case that secured the right for women to legally have an abortion across the country, even though she never went through with the procedure. "In his majority opinion, Justice Harry Blackmun noted that a 'pregnancy will come to term before the usual appellate process is complete,'" Prager writes. Still, the Dallas waitress' challenge to the Texas law resulted in a sweeping change of the laws across the country."

"Protecting access to the full range of reproductive health care, including abortion, is a critical business issue. Efforts to further restrict or criminalize that access would have far-reaching consequences for the American workforce, the U.S. economy and our nation’s pursuit of gender and racial equity."

"In 1973, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the state’s important and legitimate interest in potential life becomes “compelling” at the point of fetal viability. After viability, the state’s interest allows it to regulate and eve n prohibit all abortions, with the exception of those necessary to preserve the life or health of the mother. Viability was signified as the point at which the fetus is “potentially able to live outside the mother’s womb albeit with artificial aid,” and presumably capable of “meaningful life outside the mother’s womb.” The Court indicated that this point, at that time, “is usually placed” at about 7 months or 28 weeks, but may occur earlier (see CRS Issue Brief 95095). The Court further ruled that a state may regulate the abortion procedure in ways that reasonably relate to preserving and protecting maternal health during the gestation period following approximately the end of the first trimester (after 12 weeks of gestation). However, for the period before this point (up to 12 weeks), the abortion decision and its effectuation must be left to the pregnant patient and the medical judgement of the her attending physician."

"In a recent opinion concurring in part and dissenting in part from the Supreme Court’s decision to affirm the constitutionality of an Indiana law requiring the humane disposition of fetal remains following abortion and decline to review the constitutionality of that state’s ban on abortions solely for reasons of genetic, racial, or sex discrimination, Justice Ginsburg stated explicitly: “A woman who exercises her constitutionally protected right to terminate a pregnancy is not a ‘mother.’” Box v. Planned Parenthood, 139 S.ct. 1780, 1793 n.2 (2019) (Ginsburg, J., concurring in part). She was responding to Justice Thomas’s use of the word to refer to a woman who has obtained an abortion, so it is possible that she meant after an abortion is completed, a woman is no longer a mother. But it is also possible she meant to say that is solely the intention to parent that determines parenthood rather than a biological reality. It is this latter notion that the anthropology of embodiment rejects."

"Roe v. Wade (1973) made substantial use of that lack of protection for procreation in modifying the law on abortion."

"In a separate blog post on Tuesday, Schenck said he hoped people would watch “AKA Jane Roe.” “You’ll see me express profound regret for how movement leaders (like me) mistreated Norma,” he wrote in the blog. “Her name and photo would command some of the largest windfalls of dollars for my group and many others, but the money we gave her was modest. More than once, I tried to make up for it with an added check, but it was never fair.”"

"The Rev. Robert Schenck, one of the evangelical pastors who worked with McCorvey after her conversion to Christianity in the mid-1990s, looked stunned as he was shown her interview as part of the documentary. Schenck said the anti-abortion movement had exploited her weaknesses for its own ends and acknowledged she had been paid for her appearances on the movement’s behalf. “What we did with Norma was highly unethical,” Schenck said in the documentary. “The jig is up.”"

"I will strike down Roe v. Wade, but I will also strike down a law that is the opposite of Roe v. Wade. You know, both sides in that debate want the Supreme Court to decide the matter for them. One wants no state to be able to prohibit abortion and the other one wants every state to have to prohibit abortion, and they’re both wrong . . . that’s how I read the Constitution."

"These facts should give conservative opponents of Roe pause. Can it be that they have misunderstood the central tenets of their own philosophy? Do they have a good account of why this philosophy should apply to all sorts of other choices, but not to the choices made by women about whether to bear a child? Many anti-Roe activists would no doubt respond that the abortion decision is different because it is not merely self-regarding. The rights of another entity-the fetus-are at stake. If this were true-if the fetus were an appropriate rights bearer-this argument would have considerable force. But some Roe supporters deny that it is true. One thing that has persisted for the quarter-century since Roe was decided-and is likely to persist for the indefinite future-is moral disagreement among intelligent and well-intentioned people about the moral status of the fetus. Some conservative opponents of Roe claim that this moral disagreement serves to undermine Roe. If people disagree about abortion, they argue, and if the disagreement cannot be settled by reference to the text of the Constitution or the intent of the framers, should not the disagreement be settled by the political process? Does not Roe therefore reflect indefensible judicial activism?"

"The title of Worst Joke in Legal History belongs to one of history's highest-profile cases. Defending Texas's abortion restrictions before the Supreme Court, attorney Mr. Jay Floyd decided to open oral argument with a sexist joke. Arguing against two female attorneys, Floyd begins: “It’s an old joke, but when a man argues against two beautiful ladies like this, they are going to have the last word.” The joke is demeaning and (as Floyd himself admits) unoriginal, but it also lacks the saving grace of at least being funny. A recording of the oral argument, which can be listened to here, demonstrates just how badly the joke bombed with the Supreme Court. Painful silence endures for just over three seconds. Not captured on the recording are the physical reactions of the justices. According to the later recollection of one of the “beautiful ladies” arguing against Floyd, Chief Justice Warren Burger was so furious that he almost rushed down “right off the bench at him. He glared him down.” Dr. Ryan Malphurs, a scholar of Supreme Court humor (yes, there is such a thing), describes how “Floyd struggled to gain momentum through the rest of his argument.” A flustered Floyd responds to Justice Thurgood Marshall’s questioning with the stunning admission that these are “unanswerable questions,” a response that earns derisive laughter. (Thurgood Marshall replies, “I appreciate it.”) Floyd apologizes for his “artless statement,” which garners even more laughter. The man who had attempted to begin with a joke ends as the object of comedy. When the Supreme Court requested re-argument on Roe v. Wade eleven months later, Floyd was gone. Floyd’s disastrous “beautiful ladies get the last word” is the greatest failed joke in U.S. legal history, and some claim it is the worst joke of all time, in any setting. It occurred on the highest possible stage, in a high-profile case, while also (here’s the spoiled icing on the collapsed cake) managing to be a sexist joke during a landmark women’s rights case. But did the failed Roe v. Wade joke actually affect the Court’s eventual 7-2 ruling? This seems highly unlikely. The only justice who conceivably could have been affected by Floyd’s argument was Chief Justice Burger. Burger was a conservative who later voted to restrict abortions – and yet he voted with the Roe v. Wade majority. So was Burger swayed to vote for abortion rights based on Floyd’s calamitous oral argument? Probably not – most scholars have explained Burger’s vote in Roe as a simple strategic move. (So long as he voted with the majority, Burger, as Chief Justice, could control who wrote the majority opinion in Roe, and thus partially control what that opinion said.)"

"Recently, in Roe v. Wade, 410 U. S. 113, 410 U. S. 152-154 (1973), the importance of procreation has, indeed, been explained on the basis of its intimate relationship with the constitutional right of privacy which we have recognized. Yet the limited stature thereby accorded any "right" to procreate is evident from the fact that, at the same time, the Court reaffirmed its initial decision in Buck v. Bell. See Roe v. Wade, supra, at 410 U. S. 154."

"Importantly, public opinion also mirrors the conceptual framework used in the 1973 landmark Roe v. Wade abortion decision. Under that historic ruling, the interests of the mother are paramount in the first trimester, but the state has an interest in protecting the fetus after viability. In the words of the decision: "For the stage subsequent to viability the State, in promoting its interest in the potentiality of human life, may, if it chooses, regulate, and even proscribe, abortion except where necessary, in appropriate medical judgment, for the preservation of the life or health of the mother." The wording of Roe v. Wade aligns almost perfectly with where Americans stand on late-term abortions -- keep them legal to save the life of the mother and in cases of rape and incest, but not for other reasons. Where Americans seem to depart from the decision is in supporting certain restrictions on first-term abortions, particularly those performed because of Down syndrome or solely at the woman's discretion. Roe v. Wade took the power of outlawing abortion out of states' hands, making it legal throughout the country. But its invitation to regulate abortion in ways focused on the health of the mother, as well as to protect the "potentiality of human life" after viability, has enabled states to pass numerous laws limiting how and when abortion can be legally performed. Many of these restrictions are likely consistent with Americans' sensitivities to abortion, but that alignment could change."

"Those people who insist that no statute should limit Roe in any way, those who believe that we must follow Roe without change, without dotting another “i” or crossing another “t”-those advocates should read that decision and the others that follow in its wake. The decision is not about protecting women; it is about protecting doctors."

"In a very brief opinion, the Menillo Court simply stated that “Roe teaches that a State cannot restrict a decision by a woman, with the advice of her physician, to terminate her pregnancy during the first trimester.” 423 U.S. at 10-11, 96 S.Ct. at 171 (emphasis added.) Prosecution of a non-physician for performing an abortion, “[e]ven during the first trimester of pregnancy” infringes “upon no realm of personal privacy secured by the Constitution against state interferences.” 423 U.S. at 11, 96 S.Ct, at 171. A woman has no right to choose a non-doctor to perform an abortion, even though a woman can choose a non-doctor, such as a midwife, to deliver a full-term baby. Later cases have confirmed that Roe was primarily drafted to protect doctors, not their patients. Thus, the Court has said, in Colautti v. Franklin, 439 U.S. 379, 99 S.Ct. 2831, 49 Led.2d 586 (1979), that “neither the legislature nor the courts” can define viability objectively, “be it weeks of gestation, or fetal weight, or any other single factor,” because the judgment of the doctor must control."

"The Supreme Court issued its first abortion opinion on January 22, 1973. That opinion, Roe v. Wade, 410 U.S. 113, 93 S.Ct. 705, 35 L.Ed.2d 147 (1973) has ushered in a quarter century of criticism by many academic commentators. In so doing, the Supreme Court created a right to abortion (essentially abortion on demand) that was broader than the abortion rights granted by almost any other western nation. It also federalized the abortion issue, an issue that had been left in the custody of the states for nearly two centuries. Though a fragmented Court itself later backtracked on Roe in Planned Parenthood of Southeastern Pennsylvania v. Casey, 505 U.S. 833, 112 S.Ct. 2791, 120 L.Ed.2d 674 (1992), it did not overrule all of Roe because, as the O’Connor-Kennedy-Souter plurality candidly stated, it was important to respect precedent. Thus we are left with Roe and the new right that it created, even though a majority of the Justices on the Court today acknowledge that Roe should be accepted simply because it is precedent, not because it is grounded in our constitution."

"Stevens says he thinks if Roe v. Wade had been written more narrowly, the court might have avoided some of the criticism that ensued. “In all candor,” he told me, “I think Harry [Blackmun] could have written a better opinion. I think if the opinion had said what Potter Stewart said very briefly” — namely that the right to marital and family privacy previously recognized by the court included a right to choose abortion — “it might have been much more acceptable, instead of trying to create a new doctrine that really didn’t make sense.” When he went through the confirmation process in 1975, just two years after Roe, Stevens recalled, he was not asked a single question about it. Only later, because of the reaction that followed Roe, did abortion become a central issue in national politics. “I’m really not sure that it’s fair to blame the court for the hostility that’s come on, but I do think that a better opinion might have avoided some of the criticism.”"

"I asked whether Stevens thought the right to abortion recognized in Roe v. Wade would survive in his lifetime. “Well, it’s up to Justice Kennedy,” he replied. “I don’t know about the two new justices” — Roberts and Alito — “but I kind of assume it may well be up to him.” Abortion rights supporters may take solace in the fact that Stevens indicated that Kennedy seemed to view the regulation of so-called partial-birth abortions as consistent with Planned Parenthood v. Casey, which upheld the central holding of Roe v. Wade. “I don’t think he thinks this” — the recent abortion opinion — “requires him to change his views at all,” Stevens said. “We’ll have to wait and see. I suppose there are a lot of people out there praying I get out of the way.”"

"No opinion with such deficiencies could be expected to provide a sound basis for resolution of a hotly contested social issue, and indeed, Roe has aged poorly. The current Supreme Court has all but explicitly discarded the constitutional methodology on which it rests. The idea that unelected judges should consult their inner oracles to decide whether a particular activity unmentioned in the Constitution deserves to be elevated to the pantheon of "fundamental rights" was always problematic. Beginning in 1986, when it refused to create constitutional protection for homosexual sodomy, the court started to hint that it was out of the fundamental rights business. Most recently, refusing to recognize a right to physician-assisted suicide in 1997, the court did not even mention Roe. The era of judicially created fundamental rights is over. The fact that there are constitutional arguments in favor of not overruling Roe doesn't mean the opinion should be celebrated, at least not as anything other than a historical artifact. Roe is an increasingly creaky anachronism, and anyone who cares about a woman's right to choose should seek a sounder constitutional basis for that right. Such arguments have been put forth frequently in the scholarly literature, and most tend to cast the abortion controversy as a question not of liberty but of equality. Unlike the fundamental rights jurisprudence that produced Roe, the right to equal protection of the laws is alive and well in the Supreme Court. This perspective offers a way to go forward."

"[I]t is time to admit in public that, as an example of the practice of constitutional opinion writing, Roe is a serious disappointment. You will be hard-pressed to find a constitutional law professor, even among those who support the idea of constitutional protection for the right to choose, who will embrace the opinion itself rather than the result. ... This is not surprising. As constitutional argument, Roe is barely coherent. The court pulled its fundamental right to choose more or less from the constitutional ether. It supported that right via a lengthy, but purposeless, cross-cultural historical review of abortion restrictions and a tidy but irrelevant refutation of the straw-man argument that a fetus is a constitutional 'person' entitled to the protection of the 14th Amendment. ... By declaring an inviolable fundamental right to abortion, Roe short-circuited the democratic deliberation that is the most reliable method of deciding questions of competing values."

"Minutes after the Supreme Court voted to overturn Roe v. Wade last summer, a group of West Wing aides raced to the Oval Office to brief President Biden on the decision. As they drafted a speech, Mr. Biden was the first person in the room to say what has been his administration’s rallying cry ever since. Passing federal legislation, he told the group, was “the only thing that will actually restore the rights that were just taken away,” recalled Jen Klein, the director of the White House Gender Policy Council. But if the prospect of codifying Roe’s protections in Congress seemed like a long shot a year ago, it is all but impossible to imagine now, with an ascendant far-right bloc in the House and a slim Democratic majority in the Senate."

"To the extent this betrayal of the confidences of the Court was intended to undermine the integrity of our operations, it will not succeed. The work of the Court will not be affected in any way. We at the Court are blessed to have a workforce – permanent employees and law clerks alike – intensely loyal to the institution and dedicated to the rule of law. Court employees have an exemplary and important tradition of respecting the confidentiality of the judicial process and upholding the trust of the Court. This was a singular and egregious breach of that trust that is an affront to the Court and the community of public servants who work here. I have directed the Marshal of the Court to launch an investigation into the source of the leak."

"Claim: You want to ban women's "constitutional right" to abortion. Answer: This is a "spurious" or false "right" - having no basis in the constitution. The U.S. Supreme Court claims to have discovered a "privacy" right in the "penumbra" of the Constitution ("penumbra" definition: a partly lighted area around an area of full shadow). Court decisions (Roe v.Wade and Doe v.Bolton) are aberrations (deviations from truth) and do nothing more than grant temporary license to kill children in the womb, the most dangerous place of residence. This license is tenuous and could be over-ridden by reversal or an amendment to the U.S. Constitution. Indeed, to guarantee the permanent freedom of the slaves and establish rights for all U.S." persons" the 14th Amendment to the Constitution was passed. It states, "...No state shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States: nor shall any state deprive any person of life, liberty, or property without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the law." (emphasis added). In Roe v.Wade the Court determined that unborn children are not "persons" even though they have the right to inherit properly and many other rights. Some states have entire sections of law outlining Crimes Against Unborn Children in which they, from conception on, are protected from negligent or willful harm or death."

"Cruel and harmful."

"It is possible that the Supreme Court itself may overturn its abortion rulings. We need only recall that in Brown v. Board of Education the court reversed its own earlier "separate-but-equal" decision. As we continue to work to overturn Roe v. Wade, we must also continue to lay the groundwork for a society in which abortion is not the accepted answer to unwanted pregnancy. Pro-life people have already taken heroic steps, often at great personal sacrifice, to provide for unwed mothers."

"As a nation today, we have not rejected the sanctity of human life. The American people have not had an opportunity to express their view on the sanctity of human life in the unborn. I am convinced that Americans do not want to play God with the value of human life. It is not for us to decide who is worthy to live and who is not. Even the Supreme Court's opinion in Roe v. Wade did not explicitly reject the traditional American idea of intrinsic worth and value in all human life; it simply dodged this issue."

"Make no mistake, abortion-on-demand is not a right granted by the Constitution. No serious scholar, including one disposed to agree with the Court's result, has argued that the framers of the Constitution intended to create such a right. The decision by the seven-man majority in Roe v. Wade has so far been made to stick. But the Court's decision has by no means settled the debate. Instead, Roe v. Wade has become a continuing prod to the conscience of the nation."

"In Roe v. Wade,' the Supreme Court concluded that the abortion decision of a female is protected by the penumbral right of privacy. The Court noted, however, that this right to abort is not absolute. Rather, the right to terminate one's pregnancy must be weighed against compelling state interests. Two such interests found by the Court in Roe were the protection of the pregnant woman's health and the protection of potential life. The Court in Roe considered the right of an adult female to an abortion. When the issue is the abortion decision of a minor, the courts must also contend with the additional interest of the parents. In Danforth, the state advanced the parents' interest in raising their children as they see fit as a compelling state interest to justify the parental consent provision. These parental consent requirement statutes, however, have not met with favorable receptions in other courts. In fact, the decisions of several courts have cast considerable doubt on their validity."

"Norma had told the press that she was Jane Roe way back in 1973. But not until 1987-when she recanted the lie that she had been raped-did the press take much notice of her. And it was two more years before Norma was famous, lifted from the veil of a pseudonym by five weeks of press in the spring of 1989."