"Justice Blackmun’s files also contained articles from the American Journal of Public Health (several of which are excerpted in parts I and II), depicting abortion reform as inevitable and highly desirable. This was not the only voice of the medical community the Court heard; among the Roe v. Wade briefs was a strongly worded one from dissenting obstetricians and gynecologists arguing for upholding the Texas law (see page 295). Further, the justices may well have viewed organized opposition to the legalization of abortion as based almost exclusively on Catholic religious conviction, as it primarily was when Roe v. Wade first arrived on the Court’s docket. The only Catholic justice then sitting on the Supreme Court was William J. Brennan, Jr., a liberal whose full support for an expansive right to abortion may have served to emphasize significant differences of opinion about the criminalization of abortion within the American Catholic community, and so undercut the weight of the Catholic opposition."