"My criticism of Roe v. Wade is that the Court failed to establish the legitimacy of the decision by not articulating a precept of sufficient abstractness to lift the ruling above the level of a political judgment based upon the evidence currently available from the medical, physical and social science. Nor can I articulate such a principle unless it be that a state cannot interfere with individual decisions relating to sex, procreation, and family with only a moral or philosophical state justification, a principle which I cannot accept or believe will be accepted by the American people. The failure to confront the issue in principled terms leaves the opinion to read like a set of hospital rules and regulations whose validity is good enough this week but will be destroyed with new statistics upon the medical risks of child birth and abortion or new advances in providing for the separate existence of a fetus. Neither historian, layman, nor lawyer will be persuaded that all the details prescribed in Roe v. Wade are part of either natural law or the Constitution. Constitutional rights ought not be created under the due process clause unless they can be stated in principles sufficiently absolute to give them roots throughout the community and continuity over significant periods of time and to lift them above the level of the pragmatic political judgments of a particular time and place."
January 1, 1970