"In 1973, political forces were still vigorously debating abortion. Most states had prohibited abortions, except to save a woman's life, since the nineteenth century, but a movement was afoot to relax that restriction. In the five years immediately preceding Roe, thirteen states had revised their statutes to resemble the Model Penal Code's provisions, which allowed abortions not only if the pregnancy threatened the woman's life, but also if it would gravely impair her physical or mental health, if it resulted from rape or incest, or if the child would be born with grave physical or mental defects.11 Four states had removed all restrictions on the permissible reasons for seeking an abortion before a pregnancy passed specified lengths. Furthermore, as the Supreme Court noted in Roe, both the American Medical Association and the American Bar Association had only recently changed their official views on abortion (and not without opposition). The abortion debate was not merely one of how far to relax restrictions, however. At least one of the states whose restrictive statutes were judicially invalidated had in 1972 reaffirmed its determination to prohibit abortions unless necessary to save the woman's life. And since several of the pre-Roe constitutional challenges were raised by defendants in state abortion prosecutions, it is clear that at least those states had not allowed their abortion statutes to lapse into desuetude. In short, the political process in many states had yet to decide on abortion. But Roe's sweeping rejection of Texas's statute voided almost every other state's as well."