"How did the Roe Court avoid the strong historical basis for considering prenatal life “persons” protected by the Fourteenth Amendment? Besides relying on the inaccurate Means brief, Justice Blackmun examined: (1) narrow exceptions to the common law rule against abortion, such as to save the life of the mother; (2) varying degrees of punishment for the crime of abortion, including occasional immunity for women who procured abortions; and (3) the supposed lack of contemporary consensus about the status of preborn humans, to determine that human beings in utero were never “recognized in the law as persons in the whole sense.” These arguments against constitutional personhood for the preborn have been repeated by advocates of a state-by-state approach to abortion."