"John Tolle was left with a touchy task: in fifteen minutes he had to pick up the pieces of his co-counsel’s shattered defense and build a solid case for the state. He had put considerable time and effort into the preparation of this case, and like Floyd, he believed that the state had a right to protect fetal life. Unlike Floyd, he had limited his examination of abortion to the purely legal issues. That he now planned to do the same thing with his oral argument would prove to be his greatest strength. Tolle’s argument would be the most intellectually enticing, if not ultimately the most persuasive, that would be heard in the courtroom that day. He wasted no time disputing the plaintiff’s right to sue, nor did he attempt to refute Weddington and Coffee’s arguments directly; rather, he tried to make the court see them in a different light. He began with the difficult issue of states’ rights. Noting that he did not disagree with Weddington’s statement that no one knows when life begins, he went on to say that even in the absence of answers to this difficult question, the state still had “a right to protect life . . . in whatever stage it may be in . . . and if there is no absolute fact as to when life occurs, then it becomes, I think, a legislative problem as to when they’re going to set an arbitrary time.” Finally the state had scored a point. The idea that abortion was most legitimately a concern of the state and not the federal government had to have been on the minds of the judges that day."