"Ellen McCormack’s Long Island-based organization, Women for the Unborn, which now had 2,000 members, submitted a brief arguing that “permissive abortion constitutes an infringement on the rights and interests of women as well as of unborn children,” because abortion did not solve women’s problems or make them happier. The laws against abortion deterred women from making a choice that would likely ruin their lives, and women would suffer if that safeguard were taken away. “Most women seeking to take the life of their unborn baby, like most people seeking to take their own life, desire to be stopped by someone,” Women for the Unborn claimed. This argument posited a view of gender that might have appealed to the Supreme Court of the early twentieth century, but it seemed distinctly out of step with the opinions of a Court that had just affirmed the equality of men and women under the law in cases such as Reed v. Reed (1971). Perhaps for that reason, the justices did not refer to its arguments. Juan Ryan and other attorneys in the NRLC hoped their brief would have a greater effect. In sixty-one pages, they attempted to dismantle every abortion rights argument that they thought would appeal to the justices. They offered detailed arguments against the claims that legalized abortion would help the poor or that anti-abortion laws discriminated against women or inappropriately interfered with the work of doctors. They sought to demonstrate that the abortion statues at issue in Roe and Doe were not “unconstitutionally vague.” Most importantly, they offered a detailed list of cases in which lower courts had affirmed the value of fetal life, a view, they said, that was rooted not only in traditional constitutional interpretation but also in the English common law tradition the NRLC lawyers argued that if the fetus had inalienable rights under the Constitution, the “right to privacy” that the justices had asserted in Griswold could not be used to deprive the fetus of those rights, which meant that the right to privacy did not apply to abortion. The original purpose of the late nineteenth-century anti-abortion Texas statute that was at issue in Roe was to protect the life of the fetus, the lawyers argued. That purpose was just as valid in the 1970s as it had been in the 1880s, and the Supreme Court would therefore be wrong t strike down the law."