"It is hardly surprising that critics of a constitutional right to abortion would find much to criticize in Blackmun’s original opinions in Roe and Doe. But supporters of the abortion right over the years have also found them wanting. Part of the problem stems from Justice Blackmun’s altogether too cursory attempts to justify and defen the abortion right, the compromises between the Jutices that led to the trimester system, and the Justices’ inability to imagine abortion as a question of sex equality as well as a question of liberty. To be sure, Blackmun’s opinion in Roe does advance from a purely medical model of abortion, which had dominated the conversation for decades. But that conversation was already changing rapidly by 1973, moving in a short space of time from the rights of doctor’s to the procreative liberty of women to the larger question of women’s equal citizenship. The Justices were simply not able to traverse two revolutions in thpught in a single opinion. Moreover, the question of abortion rights is legally difficult and morally complex, bringing together issues of life and death, humanity, equality, and liberty. The problems the Justices faced in Roe were as trying in their own way as any set of questions that come before the courts. Given the legal and moral difficulty of the issues and the inevitable need to make compromises, it was perhaps too much to expect that the Court would get it right the first time, under almost anyone’s standards of what “getting it right” might mean. That suggests that Justice Brennan’s initial instincts were probably correct and that the Court should have been more reluctant to offer hard and fast rules in Roe and Doe. It might have developed its ideas more fully over a course of decisions, perhaps in tandem with its sex-equality jurisprudence. That would probably not have prevented the emergence of a powerful pro-life movement or made abortion uncontroversial. But it might have produced a fairer, more flexible, and more democratically acceptable set of legal doctrines. Finally, although the Justices clearly understood that abortion was a controversial question, they failed to recognize sufficiently, as they had in Brown v. Board of Education, that whatever they did would cause a significant upheaval in American politics. In hindsight, they probably should have written the opinions in Roe and Doe with a much greater degree of care about winning public support and assuaging criticism. Chief Justice Warren’s decision in Brown is a model of eloquence and understatement, brief and statesmanlike, fully aware of its political context and deliberately designed to avoid confrontation and to conserve the Court’s legitimacy. Blackmun’s opinions in Roe and Doe, by contrast, although filled with scholarship and medical history, are long-winded and devote a very significant amount of space to technical legal issues. Warren’s opinion in Brown was written so that it could be republished in newspapers. Blackmun’s opinion in Roe was so complicated that Blackmun himself at one point contemplated writing an addendum explaining its meaning."