"Roe acknowledged powerful arguments about race that had informed debate inside and outside of the Court, but the justices made no other reference to concerns about race, poverty, abortion access, or equal protection. Indeed, a few years later, in Maher v. Roe (1977) and Harrisv. McRae (1981), the Court upheld laws denying public funding for abortion, rendering seemingly irrelevant any constitutional claim that abortion restrictions disproportionately impacted poor women. By describing abortion as a medical matter or a private decision belonging to the woman and her doctor, the Roe Court hoped to set itself above the political fray surrounding abortion and race. This choice proved to be consequential. On the one hand, by neglecting questions involving poor, non-white women's lack of access to reproductive health care, Roe set the stage for later opinions that held that abortion funding bans did not violate the Constitution. Within a few years, Maher and Harris would translate Roe's silence on the questions of race and access to care into a conclusion that the abortion right protected women only from undue burdens on the ability to choose abortion rather than guaranteeing them access to the procedure."