"By the time that Michael Taylor sent out his communiqué, pro-life lawyers had been preparing legal arguments in Roe and its companion case Doe v. Bolton for more than a year. When the Supreme Court heard initial oral arguments in 1971, pro-life advocates submitted several amici curiae briefs outlining their standard constitutional arguments on fetal rights, and they thought that they had a good chance o persuading the Court to give them a favorable verdict. As Fr. Paul Marx remarked in a private letter in May 1971, “It would be difficult to imagine that the United States Supreme Court would declare it a personal civil right of every woman to abort.” In both cases, the attorneys for the plaintiffs sought a sweeping declaration that a woman’s constitutional right to privacy gave her a right to an abortion, and that all anti-abortion laws, as well as the ALI-style therapeutic abortion statutes, were unconstitutional. In the spring of 1970, when the cases were filed, this was still a bold claim, though it was rapidly winning public support. The Texas and Georgia district courts that initially heard these cases ruled in favor of the plaintiffs, which bolstered their confidence when the cases reached the Supreme Court in the fall of 1971."