"Although Harry claimed to be unsure of his wife’s position on abortion, Dottie told one of his law clerks (a young male attorney who favored laissez-faire abortion) that she was doing everything she could to further the cause. “You and I are working on the same thing,” she told the law clerk. “Me at home and you at work.” To write his opinions, Harry retired to the Justices’ second-floor library, where he spent most of his waking hours in silent solitude, laboriously working at a long mahogany desk. Months passed, As the winter snows melted into spring and D.C.’s cherry blossoms burst into bloom. Harry remained squirreled away in the library. When at last in mid-May Harry showed a draft of his Roe opinion for the first time to one of his politically leftist law clerks, the clerk claimed to be “astonished” the draft was so crudely written and poorly organized. When he circulated the draft on May18, 1972, to the other justices, Harry’s more liberal colleagues on the bench-Justices William Douglas, William Brennan, and Thurgood Marshall-were disappointed, whereas conservative Justice Byron White strongly dissented. Why were Douglas and Marshall so disappointed? Catholic feminist Mary Meehan suggests one possible reason. Meehan reports, “Justices Douglas and Marshall had been lacking in sexual restraint-to put it mildly-well before the ‘60s, and the problems of both were aggravated at times by heavy drinking. Perhaps they realized that legal abortion could be extremely helpful to men-enabling them to escape paternity suits, years of child support, social embarrassment, and the wrath of betrayed wives. But none of this, of course, would be mentioned in the Court’s opinions.” Meehan reports that in 1961 Justice Douglas had also written to Population Bomb pamphleteer Hugh Moore, saying, “I have seen some of the literature… all of which I thought was excellent.” In any case, when harry failed to produce a competent pro-abortion draft of his opinions, he got flak from his colleagues. Having vowed to do his best “to arrive at something which would command a court,” Harry withdrew the draft, asking that all copies be returned to him. He planned to do more work on his opinions over the summer. In late July 1972, Harry flew to Rochester to immerse himself in research at the Mayo Clinic medical library. Meanwhile, his politically liberal, $15,000-a-year law clerk George Frampton Jr., age twenty-eight, volunteered to stay in Washington until early August to help research and draft the opinions. The two talked by phone almost daily."