"Perhaps Roe’s most important shortcoming was not its failure to “get it right” but its relative inattention to the interactions between courts and politics and to how courts, whether they like it or not, always work in conversation with the political branches in developing constitutional norms. Defenders of constitutional rights often argue that courts exist to protect rights from political interference. But the actual process of constitutional development is much more complicated. Courts do recognize rights and defend them from legislative abridgement. But those rights also arise out of politics; they are tested by politics, and they are modified by courts as a result of politics. The work of courts, important as it may be, is always an intermediate and intermediary feature of a much longer process of legal development that stretches back into the past and forward into the future. Despite the attention that has been paid to Roe, the constitutional right to abortion, as it exists today, is not solely the work of the federal judiciary. Like all important constitutional ideas, it is the work of a dialectical process that engages all of the major institutions of American lawmaking, and it has been fashioned through controversy and strife, through trial and error-and with many mistakes and hesitations along the way-out of the raw materials of American politics."