"f) The majority has anchored the ruling in the woman’s right to privacy, encompassing her decision whether or not to terminate the pregnancy. At the same time, however, under both “Roe v. Wade’’, and ‘’Doe v. Bolton’’, a major role in the process o decision-making is to be played by the woman’s physician. “[f]or the period of pregnancy prior to this compelling point, the attending physician in consultation with his patient, is free to determine, without regulation by the state, that, in his medical judgment, the patient’s pregnancy should be terminated.” (“Roe v. Wade”, p, 163). Similarly, in “Doe v. Bolton”, the court held that the physician’s medical judgment may be exercised in the light of all factors… All these factors may relate to health. This allows the attending physician the room he needs to make his best medical judgment” (p. 198). If so, is the woman really free to decide whether to terminate her pregnancy? Was the Court correct in abdicating the whole responsibility to physicians?; g) Was the Court right in assuming that a physician would (should?) act as a “medical counselor” or was the Court simply naive about how the medical profession would implement the “Roe v. wade” scheme? Both opponents and proponents of abortion agree that today most abortions are performed in special abortion clinics, that a doctor sees each patient just before the procedure, and counseling by a doctor takes place very rarely (Appleton, p.201; Wardle, p.24); h) The “Roe” trimester approach was based on the state of medical knowledge and practice in existence in the beginning of the 1970s. At least two dramatic changes have taken place since then which seriously undermine the basic premise of the decision. First, in the early 1970s, infants generally were not considered viable before twenty-eight weeks of gestational age and under 1000 grams of fetal weight. Today, due mainly to advances in neonatal care, infants become viable much earlier, occasionally at 23 weeks. Survival rates for infants weighing even less than 750 grams are increasing and some experts are of the opinion that it is arguable whether any lower limit of viability is medically appropriate (Rhoden, p. 1465). As viability occurs much earlier now, abortions may be prohibited at earlier and earlier stages of pregnancy. By this ironic twist of events “Roe v. Wade: may one day become a “right0to-life” decision (Rhoden, p. 1454). But, in the late 1980s, second0trimester abortions are safer than they were in the early 1970s. If the same trend continues, at some time in the future maternal health interest will become compelling much later than the Court decreed in “Roe v. Wade”. In other words: abortions become safer and the line drawn by the Roe majority at the end of the first trimester must be thus moved further toward the birth. But in view of the advances in prenatal care, the viability marker, fixed in 1973 at the end of the second trimester, must be moved back toward the conception. It is probable that in the future the lines will pass each other “creating an overlap and (constitutionally) a hopeless contradiction within Roe) (Wolfe, p.308)"