"Especially given the absence of a firm constitutional footing for deciding the question, the Court could sensibly have refrained from stepping into the debate when it did. Of course, the Court might never decide anything if it always waited for the last political word, and had Roe been a soundly reasoned opinion, the Court would surely never have been criticized for being a bit hasty. Indeed, because several states had liberalized their abortion statutes, some might argue that the Court should nudge the rest of the nation toward recognizing the right those states had found. But the second traditional axiom should still have warned the Court not to decide Roe: the dispute had not sufficiently steeped in the lower courts. Allegations that abortion statutes violated a constitutional right of privacy were new to the courts. As late as mid-1968, the New Jersey Supreme Court flatly rejected two defendants' claim that the state statute's exception for abortions with "lawful justification" included abortions to end unwanted pregnancies: "It is beyond comprehension that the defendants could have believed that our abortion statute envisioned lawful justification to exist whenever a woman wanted to avoid having a child. The statutes of no jurisdiction in this country permit such an excuse for an abortion." The court's construction of "lawful justification" was undoubtedly correct; the significant point is that the court gave no hint of even considering that a right of privacy might justify such an excuse. The landmark case of People v. Belous, apparently the first case to consider a right-of-privacy challenge to an abortion statute and certainly the first reported case to endorse one, was decided only in September 1969, less than two years before the Supreme Court decided to hear Roe. Between 1970 and 1972, a flurry of constitutional challenges hit the courts, but of the seventeen courts that decided right-of-privacy claims, twelve were three-judge district courts whose judgments allowed direct appeal to the Supreme Court. Thus, when the Court had Roe before it and looked, as the axiom has it, to the lower-court deliberations, it found not one federal decision that had received intermediate appellate consideration, and only four decisions of state supreme courts,24 none of which offered particularly illuminating analysis."