"Indeed, despite Tolle’s claim that the matter of abortion properly belonged in a state legislature, the three judges still thought they had a “federal: question to deal with-namely, whether or not the present Texas law denied women a basic constitutional right. Goldberg pointed out that protecting life at any stage of development seemed not to have been the intention of the framers of the Texas abortion law. Seeing room for a possible compromise, he asked Tolle, as he had Coffee and Weddington, whether striking the phrase “to save the life of the mother” might not make this law viable. Tolle replied, as they had, that he did not think this would be true to the original intention of the law. But where the two women had argued that the law could not be saved because it was so unconstitutional, Tolle said he felt the law was constitutional the way it was written, thereby eliminating any need to remove anything from it. Tolle pressed harder, saying, “I believe that we’re talking about rights. I think that the most persuasive right that the plaintiffs urge, as was held in the Babbitz case, and all the cases refer to it quite heavily, is the right of privacy, for want of a better term, and there you get to the point where the state had to regulate conflicting rights-whether the state has to regulate conflicting rights-whether the state had got an interest in the life of the unborn child sufficient to regulate the woman’s right to privacy. This is a very difficult question, and I think that it is properly a legislative question. “I don’t think the state has to have a law at all regulating abortion. I believe the field is such that it can regulate it constitutionally. I personally think, and I think the state’s position will be and is, that the right of the child to life is superior to that woman’s right to privacy.” Tolle’s argument was as good a defense as would be offered of the state’s compelling interest in regulating abortion: the state had to balance two rights, that of the fetus to survive and that of the woman to privacy. In doing so, it could certainly find that the woman’s right to something called privacy-a wrd Tolle diminished simply by the way he said it-was inferior to that of the fetus to life."