"In Roe, Blackmun’s initial impulse was also avoidance. Although the conference had voted to invalidate the abortion statute on privacy grounds, Blackmun’s early draft opinion relied not on any substantive right, but on-wait for it-void-for-vagueness doctrine. Unlike feminists’ claims that abortion laws violated women’s fundamental rights, doctors’ claims against abortion laws often sounded in void-for-vagueness. Under laws prohibiting all abortion but those necessary for the “life” or “health” of the mother, doctors argued that they chanced a felony every time they guessed that a particular abortion came within such exceptions. Blackmun, the former resident counsel for the Mayo Clinic, was sympathetic to these professional concerns. Moreover, he hoped that void-for-vagueness would help him to avoid the more controversial issue of when life began that he feared a fundamental rights approach would ultimately require. Brennan and Douglas found that approach unsatisfying. In response to Blackmun’s draft, they urged Blackmun to reach “the core issue” of privacy rather than rely on vagueness. These interchanges between Justices in Roe offer further support for the conclusion Amsterdam had offered a decade before-that vagueness was at least in part an avoidance mechanism, denying and shielding the Justice’s substantive commitments. Afraid to embrace fully the implications of Griswold and wade too deeply into the abortion issue, Blackmun thought he could escape the problem by using void-for-vagueness."