"As a psychiatrist, I am in the unusual position on insisting that we take the Justice’s words as their face value. Of course, the Chief Justice turned out to be completely wrong: the consequences predicted by the dissent were as accurate as any judicial prediction can be. As Justice White correctly interpreted the decision, “any woman is entitled to an abortion at her request if she is able to find a medical advisor willing to undertake the procedure.” As Justice White predicted, abortion has become a routine alternative method of birth control. If we take Justice Blackmun’s and Burger’s words about medical judgment at face value, we can only assume that they were quite misled about the medical profession, its medical standards, and the medical judgments that were and would be applied to abortion. It was Blackmun and Burger who were out of touch with reality if they honestly believed that they wrote. My point is not that the abortion decisions were wrong or right as a matter of law or morality. My point is that to the extent these opinions involved factual inferences about medical standards and medical practice-inferences which suggested a context for the decision, inferences which suggested more limited consequences of the decision, inferences which suggested the realities of medical practice-to that extent the decision was quite misleading. I claim that such misleading statements about medical realities are not uncommon when judges make medical decisions. I also claim that the result of such misleading statements by judges is costly. The credibility of the courts is undermined in the eyes of the medical profession, and the credibility of the medical profession is undermined in the eyes of the public. The result is greater public distrust of both law and medicine. A loss of faith in both professions is the result of the vicious circle of counterproductive moves set in motion by these flawed decisions."