"Blackmun was both pleased and frightened by the assignment. It was a no-win proposition. No matter what he wrote, the opinion would be controversial. Abortion was too emotional, the split in society too great. Either way, he could be hated and vilified. But from Blackmun’s point of view, the chief had had little choice but to select him. Burger could not afford to take on such a controversial case himself, particularly from the minority. Douglas was the Court’s mischievous liberal, the rebel, and couldn’t be the author. Any abortion opinion Douglas wrote would be widely questioned outside the Court, and his extreme views might split rather than unify the existing majority. Lastly, Blackmun had noticed a deterioration in the quality of Douglas’s opinions; they had become increasingly superficial. Brennan was certainly as firm a vote for striking down the state abortion law as there was on the Court. But Brennan was the Court’s only Catholic. As such, Blackmun reasoned, he could not be expected to be willing to take the heat from Catholic anti-abortion groups. Marshall could not be the author for similar reasons: an opinion by the Court’s only Black member could be unfairly perceived as specifically designed for Black people. That left only Stewart. Blackmun believed that Stewart would certainly relish the assignment, but he clearly had trouble going very far. Blackmun was convinced that he alone had the medical background and sufficient patience to sift through the voluminous record for the scientific data on which to base a decision. He was deeply disturbed by Douglas’s assumption that the chief had some malicious intent in assigning the abortion cases to him. He was “not” a Minnesota Twin."