"The procedural complexities meant that the lawyers and the Justices spent so much time on procedure during the first round of arguments in December 1971 that precious little time was left for the substantive, constitutional questions. In the first argument in roe on December 13, 1971, Justice Stewart posed the second question of the morning to Sarah Weddington, emphasizing that “a good many threshold questions . . . of jurisdiction” needed to be addressed. According to Woodward and Armstrong’s account, the jurisdictional issues didn’t take a backseat to the question of a right to abortion until after the first oral argument, when the Justices met in conference* to vote on Thursday, December 16, 1971. Mitchum v. Foster, a case with a “similar question of jurisdiction,” was argued on the same Monday as the abortion ases, and the Justices discussed Mitchum before Roe and Doe that Thursday. The discussion of Mitchum among the seven justices present at that conference (Justices Powell and Rehnquist did not join the Court until January 1972) ended with a vote of Stewart, Douglas, Brennan, and Marshall for “taking jurisdiction” in Mitchum. Woodward and Armstrong recorded what was apparently Douglas’s conclusion that day: Since the jurisdiction question here was the same as in the abortion cases, the Court had effectively decided the abortion jurisdiction issue as well. The Court did have jurisdiction. Suddenly, unexpectedly, the Court fund itself faced with the underlying constitutional issue in the abortion cases. Did women have a right to obtain abortions? If the Court had jurisdiction, and such federal challenges to state laws could be filed in federal court, the Justices should have limited the decisions in Roe and Doe to the jurisdictional issue, and looked for new abortion cases with a factual and medical record. Though this oversight seems minor, it was a blunder that skewed the Justices’ consideration of abortion for the next thirteen months. By crushing aside these procedural questions, and deciding the abortion issue with no factual record, the Justices stumbled into an enduring controversy."