"At his retirement ceremony two decades after Roe, Blackmun portrayed the case as a pioneering advance in a difficult climate, "a step that had to be taken as we go down the road toward the full emancipation of women." Certainly the climate in Roe's day was difficult: Men dominated legal scholarship, and anxiety about feminism was rising. During the court's deliberations, President Nixon condemned "abortion on demand." Burger, who was preoccupied with fathers' rights, echoed Nixon in a concurrence insisting that Roe didn't require abortion on demand. Greenhouse interprets Nixon's remark as a gesture to pro-lifers, but phrases such as "on demand" and "for convenience" sent a more precise message: that women should not have too much control when deciding whether to have abortions. How could a right to abortion be established in such a climate? By emphasizing the supervisory role of doctors. That was the headline of the poll found in Blackmun's files: "ABORTION SEEN UP TO WOMAN, DOCTOR." It was also the implicit advice of the moderate Powell and the wily Brennan. Powell urged Blackmun to frame abortion as "a medical problem broadly defined," and Brennan proposed to strike down the Georgia law because it "overrides a good faith determination by the attending M.D." A male clerk of Blackmun's at the time advised the justice that he would be most likely to succeed if he reasoned "not that the woman's right is so strong but that to permit other criteria in these statutes [other than the doctor's view of the best course for the patient] is in the end to restrict medical judgment about what is best for each woman." Did these external constraints force Roe's emphasis on doctors rather than women? That's what Blackmun told himself later. Greenhouse finds in Blackmun's files a 1993 article excerpting a lecture in which Ruth Bader Ginsburg, then an appellate judge, faulted Roe's focus on doctors. On the article, Blackmun had penned, "She picks at Roe. Better to have been decided on equal protection. With all respect, could not have been done.""