Roe V Wade Supreme Court Quotes

When the Supreme Court legalized abortion in Roe v. Wade three years later, President Nixon professed there were only two “times when an abortion is necessary”: “when you have a black and a white or a rape.”10

Never trust a Republican.

Justice Harry Blackmun’s majority opinion in Roe v. Wade was all about privacy, but the most private parts of a woman’s body and the most private decisions she will ever make have never been more public. Everyone gets to weigh in. Even, according to the five conservative Catholic men on the Supreme Court, her employer.

With the fate of Roe v. Wade now hanging in the balance, I'm calling for a special 'pro-life tax.' If the fervent prayers of the religious right are answered and abortion is banned, let's take it a step further. All good Christians should legally be required to pony up; share the financial burden of raising an unwanted child. That's right: put your money where your Bible is. I'm not just talking about paying for food and shelter or even a college education. All those who advocate for driving a stake through the heart of a woman's right to choose must help bear the financial burden of that child's upbringing. They must be legally as well as morally bound to provide the child brought into this world at their insistence with decent clothes to wear; a toy to play with; a bicycle to ride -- even if they don't consider these things 'necessities.' Pro-lifers must be required to provide each child with all those things they would consider 'necessary' for their own children. Once the kid is out of the womb, don't wash your hands and declare 'Mission Accomplished!' It doesn't end there. If you insist that every pregnancy be carried to term, then you'd better be willing to pay the freight for the biological parents who can't afford to. And -- like the good Christians that you are -- should do so without complaint.

Is it only a coincidence that the same arc of time defining this reinvigorated clerical corruption about sexuality has seen the rise of the fervently political Catholic Church crusade against abortion? It is as if the 1973 war Roe v. Wade decision by the U.S. Supreme Court threw a lifeline to the morally discredited Catholic hierarchy.

majority described the pressure on the Court and explained why “principles of institutional integrity” required that Roe v. Wade be reaffirmed. A “terrible price would be paid for overruling,” the three justices wrote, adding that such a step “would seriously weaken the Court’s capacity to exercise the judicial power and to function as the Supreme Court of a Nation dedicated to the rule of law.

During the 1980s, however, the Court came under increasing pressure to repudiate Roe v. Wade. First the Reagan administration and then the administration of President George H. W. Bush asked the Court to overturn the decision, on five separate occasions. In 1980 the Republican party’s platform had called for the first time for the appointment of judges “who respect traditional family values and the sanctity of innocent human life.

Since the legally and morally despicable decision of the Supreme Court in Roe v. Wade in 1973, American women have aborted some 56 million children. The vast majority of these children have been aborted for reasons that have nothing to do with rape, incest or the health of the mother. We have destroyed an entire generation of children purely for self-worship. Children are difficult; therefore, they can be done away with. Children are burdensome; therefore, they don’t exist in the womb.

Even the most mundane, establishment-oriented law schools routinely teach that important legal cases lag far behind the social movements that create them,' writes Judith Brown, a 1968 women's liberation founder who became a lawyer. She continues: 'Supreme Court cases bob along behind social reality like little rowboats towed behind huge gun-ships... When we celebrate Roe v. Wade we celebrate--not the legal opinion of nine men in D.C.--but the thousands of women who forced a change so that what was once illegal became legal.

The political reaction against Roe v. Wade built slowly. The first justice to join the Court after the January 1973 decision was John Paul Stevens, named by President Gerald Ford in December 1975. Yet remarkably enough, the nominee was not asked a single question about abortion during his confirmation hearing. If the senators’ questions during a Supreme Court confirmation hearing provide a reliable window onto the country’s law-related concerns, then it is reasonable to conclude that abortion had not yet become a national political issue nearly three years after the Court’s decision.

People Vs Supreme Court (The Sonnet) When the Supreme Court behaves prehistoric, Every human must become an activist. When the gatekeepers of law behave barbarian, Every civilian must come down to the street. When people are stripped off their basic rights, By some bigoted and shortsighted gargoyles. We the people must take back the reins, And put the politicians in their rightful place. We need no guns and grenades, we need no ammo, Unarmed and unbent we stand against savagery. Till every woman obtains their right to choice, None of us will sit quiet in compliant apathy. Every time the cradle of justice becomes criminal, It falls upon us civilians to be justice incorruptible.

The real catalyst for the Religious Right was a court decision, but it was not Roe v. Wade. It was a lower court ruling in the District Court for the District of Columbia in a case called Green v. Connally. On June 30, 1971, the court ruled that any organization that engaged in racial segregation or racial discrimination was not by definition a charitable institution, and therefore it had no claims on tax-exempt status. The Supreme Court’s Coit v. Green decision upheld the district court, and the Internal Revenue Service then began making inquiries about the racial policies of so-called segregation academies as well as the fundamentalist school Bob Jones University, in Greenville, South Carolina, which boasted a long history of racial exclusion.

On a Sunday this January, probably of whatever year it is when you read this (at least as long as I’m living), I will probably be preaching somewhere in a church on “Sanctity of Human Life Sunday.” Here’s a confession: I hate it. Don’t get me wrong. I love to preach the Bible. And I love to talk about the image of God and the protection of all human life. I hate this Sunday not because of what we have to say, but that we have to say it at all. The idea of aborting an unborn child or abusing a born child or starving an elderly person or torturing an enemy combatant or screaming at an immigrant family, these ought all to be so self-evidently wrong that a “Sanctity of Human Life Sunday” ought to be as unnecessary as a “Reality of Gravity Sunday.” We shouldn’t have to say that parents shouldn’t abort their children, or their fathers shouldn’t abandon the mothers of their babies, or that no human life is worthless regardless of age, skin color, disability, or economic status. Part of my thinking here is, I hope, a sign of God’s grace, a groaning by the Spirit at this world of abortion clinics and torture chambers (Rom. 8:22–23). But part of it is my own inability to see the spiritual combat zone that the world is, and has been from Eden onward. This dark present reality didn’t begin with the antebellum South or with the modern warfare state, and it certainly didn’t begin with the Roe v. Wade Supreme Court decision. Human dignity is about the kingdom of God, and that means that in every place and every culture human dignity is contested.

We've known for a long time that this day would come. Today, an illegitimate Supreme Court-- stacked with justices who have been credibly accused of sexual harassment and assault, installed by presidents who took power via undemocratic sleights of hand-- ratified their cause of eroding the 14th amendment and the right to bodily autonomy. The decision to overturn Roe v. Wade will be lethal to Americans - particularly, Black women and queer people - who now will lose their already limited access to abortions. If establishment Democrats sit back and allow this Court to continue to dismantle every right protecting marginalized people, this decision won't just cost lives - it also will cost us our democracy. Our leaders in Washington must recognize how the tyranny of the minority, white supremacy, misogyny and bigotry brought us to this dark day. And they must act now to protect voting rights and enshrine the right to an abortion into federal law -- before it's too late.

After that preacher told me to quit thinking, I began thinking harder. I did my research. Turns out, the memo he was trying to pass me—“A good Christian bases her faith on disapproving of gays and abortion”—started being issued only forty years ago. In the 1970s, a few rich, powerful, white, (outwardly) straight men got worried about losing their right to continue racially segregating their private Christian schools and maintaining their tax-exempt status. Those men began to feel their money and power being threatened by the civil rights movement. In order to regain control, they needed to identify an issue that would be emotional and galvanizing enough to unite and politically activate their evangelical followers for the first time. They decided to focus on abortion. Before then—a full six years after the Roe v. Wade Supreme Court decision—the prevailing evangelical position was that life began with the baby’s first breath, at birth. Most evangelical leaders had been indifferent to the Court’s decision in Roe, and some were cited as supporting the ruling. Not anymore. They wrote a new memo using freshly feigned outrage and rhetoric calling for “a holy war…to lead the nation back to the moral stance that made America great.” They sponsored a meeting of 15,000 pastors—called The Religious Roundtable—to train pastors on how to convince their congregations to vote for antichoice, antigay candidates. This is how they disseminated the memo down to evangelical ministers, who passed it down to pews across America. The memo read, To be aligned with Jesus, to have family values, to be moral, one must be against abortion and gay people and vote for the candidate that is antiabortion and antigay.

In a fascinating admission, the Supreme Court in Roe v. Wade acknowledged that under another, separate common law rule, an unborn child has inheritance rights. (Roe v. Wade, page 162). What they failed to mention (for obvious reasons) was that the common law clearly says these inheritance rights exist from the moment of conception! (Blackstone, Commentaries on the Law of England ,Vol. 1, pg. 126 (1765)). Doesn’t it seem ironic—as well as exceedingly illogical—that an unborn child would have his property rights better protected from the moment of conception than his life?

When asked if he believes it’s realistic to think that the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision of the U.S. Supreme Court legalizing abortion could be overturned in his lifetime, Barron is cautiously optimistic. Probably not in our lifetime, but I wouldn’t rule it out. I’d make a comparison with slavery. At a certain point in American history, nobody would have imagined the possibility of slavery being overturned. Very smart people, very morally plugged-in people, were defenders of slavery in 1830, 1840, including Christians at a very high level. Politicians at the highest level didn’t think slavery could be overturned in 1820 or 1840, and yet now slavery is unthinkable. It’s the same with civil rights. In the 1930s and ’40s, a lot of very high-placed people, including religious people, wouldn’t have imagined the overturning of Jim Crow, but now it’s a fact. I find that, by the way, from a theoretical standpoint, fascinating, how that happens in a society. How at one point something is commonly accepted, and fifty years later it’s unthinkable. I don’t rule out that, at some point, the same could happen with abortion. I hope, in God’s providence, it will become unthinkable that we’re murdering children at the rate of millions per year. I don’t know if it will happen in our lifetimes, because you and I don’t have that much longer to go! But I also don’t rule it out.

I’d like to be known just as a good worker in the vineyard who held his own and contributed generally to the advancement of the law.” Harry Blackmun, Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States of America, 1970–1994, author of the Roe v. Wade decision. Section 5, Lot 40-4, Map Grid V/W-36, Arlington National Cemetery.

Though many other nations, but not all, also allow abortion, it has been America which has led in the abortion movement. Once Roe v. Wade was handed down by the Supreme Court of the world’s leading nation, the number of abortions took off in nations across the globe. Prior

Contemporary conservatives often make Roe v. Wade the turning point in the story. In this account, the Religious Right emerged out of opposition to abortion. But the facts don’t really fit that story particularly well. Conservative white Protestants did not become pro-life until the late 1970s. Before that, Protestants were divided on the question and abortion was seen as a “Catholic” issue. The rightward turn of white evangelicals actually began a quarter-century earlier with another Supreme Court case: Brown v. Board of Education. The political architects of the Religious Right—Paul Weyrich and Richard Viguerie—were quite clear on this point. Opposition to racial integration was the real catalyst for the rise of the Religious Right.

[…] she taken turpentine and she taken too much, I guess, and she died. She bled to death and died”. She was not alone. Prior to the 1974 Roe v. Wade U.S. Supreme Court decision that a woman’s right to personal privacy gave her the right to decide whether or not to have an abortion, large numbers of women who died from illegal abortions were Black. In New York, for example, during the several years preceding the decriminalization of abortions, 80 percent of the women who died from illegal abortions were Black or Puerto Rican.

Many abortion-rights supporters insist that they don’t want to be called “pro-abortion.” Rather, they prefer the label “pro-choice.” But in practice, the most vocal supporters of abortion rarely support options that enable expectant mothers to make any choice other than abortion. Since the Supreme Court created a right to abortion in Roe v. Wade, pro-lifers across the country have sustained pregnancy-resource centers, sometimes known as crisis-pregnancy centers, to help pregnant mothers in need welcome their babies into the world.

Mann had an abortion shortly after the Supreme Court’s 1973 decision in Roe v. Wade invented a constitutional right to abortion.

In the 1970s, a few rich, powerful, white, (outwardly) straight men got worried about losing their right to continue racially segregating their private Christian schools and maintaining their tax-exempt status. Those men began to feel their money and power being threatened by the civil rights movement. In order to regain control, they needed to identify an issue that would be emotional and galvanizing enough to unite and politically activate their evangelical followers for the first time. They decided to focus on abortion. Before then—a full six years after the Roe v. Wade Supreme Court decision—the prevailing evangelical position was that life began with the baby’s first breath, at birth. Most evangelical leaders had been indifferent to the Court’s decision in Roe, and some were cited as supporting the ruling. Not anymore.

In honor of today's abysmal SCOTUS decision, let's talk a little bit about why companies hire gorgeous, wonderful, amazing, genius women like Ketanji Brown at the most inopportune moments. It's called the 'glass cliff,' where they literally will hire women, and particularly women of color, where the company is in such dire straits that it really doesn't matter anymore. If the company fails, they blame it on their scapegoat, of their minority hire, their minority choice. And if it succeeds, now they have somebody that they can elevate and raise on their shoulders, and look like they are super accepting, and then hand it over to somebody that they typically would hire. . . So obviously I'm ecstatic that we got Ketanji on the Supreme Court, but what Supreme Court is she walking into? What will she be able to do with this much opposition?

The blame for the overturning of Roe v Wade does not fall upon the overzealous, vindictive evangelical—either in a pew or judge’s robe—anymore than it does the bruised-knee legislator and his Plus-1, the campaign-financing lobbyist: All are boorish cultural phenomena, buoyed by society’s currents, political inertia determining their every direction. Instead, history will shake its head in disappointment at those who stood idly by and did nothing.

In later unenumerated rights cases the Supreme Court has, for whatever reason, shied away from Justice Goldberg’s suggestion. That has not prevented it from using tests looking to “traditions” and the like for “fundamental rights” worthy of its protection, such as in famous unenumerated rights cases like Roe v. Wade (abortion), Troxel v. Granville (parents’ right to direct the upbringing of their children), or Lawrence v. Texas (right of same-sex intimate sexual conduct).59 But in none of those or related cases has it invoked the Ninth Amendment beyond, at best, a passing reference. Thus, Justice Goldberg’s undeveloped but interesting thoughts on the matter are the only more than transitory statements on the Ninth Amendment from the nation’s highest court.

The Bush administration caught a break when the Supreme Court handed down a compromise on June 29. Ruling 5–4, the justices preserved key portions of the Pennsylvania law but also upheld Roe, striking down the portion of the Abortion Control Act that placed an “undue burden” on the mother’s efforts to seek an abortion, which was just the spousal notification requirement. The court also overturned the trimester standard governing abortion restrictions in favor of the looser concept of “viability.” Sandra Day O’Connor, writing the majority opinion, expressed a degree of exasperation with the Republican administration’s continued efforts to attack Roe: “Liberty finds no refuge in a jurisprudence of doubt. Yet 19 years after our holding that the Constitution protects a woman’s right to terminate her pregnancy in its early stages, Roe v. Wade, 410 U. S. 113 (1973), that definition of liberty is still questioned. Joining the respondents as amicus curiae, the United States, as it has done in five other cases in the last decade, again asks us to overrule Roe.” Justice O’Connor’s opinion also included a good deal of concern for the institutional damage that would happen if the court were politically whipsawed to overturn the settled precedent of Roe: “A decision to overrule Roe’s essential holding under the existing circumstances would address error, if error there was, at the cost of both profound and unnecessary damage to the Court’s legitimacy, and to the nation’s commitment to the rule of law. It is therefore imperative to adhere to the essence of Roe’s original decision, and we do so today.” In his dissent, Chief Justice William Rehnquist complained that the court had rendered Roe a “facade” and replaced it with something “created largely out of whole cloth” and “not built to last.” “Roe v. Wade stands as a sort of Potemkin village,” Rehnquist wrote, “which may be pointed out to passers-by as a monument to the importance of adhering to precedent.

Many American boys that fought in WWII had been sterilized under eugenic laws passed by the the United States Supreme Court under the 1927 case of Buck v. Bell. Over 80,000 Americans would be forcibly sterilized under that legal precedent. Coincidentally, Buck v Bell is also the legal precedent cited in Roe v. Wade, the famous abortion rights case.

The Supreme Court was beyond their constitutional power when they handed George W. Bush the victory in 2000 by ruling that if all the votes were counted in Florida, as that state’s supreme court had ordered, it would “cause irreparable harm to petitioner [George W. Bush].” They were beyond their constitutional power every single time they struck down a law passed by Congress and signed by the president over the years. And most important, the Supreme Court was way beyond their constitutional authority every single time they created out of whole cloth new legal doctrines, such as “separate but equal” in Plessy v. Ferguson, “privacy” in Roe v. Wade, or “corporations are people” in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission. But in the fine tradition of John Marshall, today’s Supreme Court wants you to believe that they are the über-overlords of our nation. They can make George W. Bush president, without any appeal. They can make money into speech, they can turn corporations into people, and the rest of us have no say in it. And they’re wrong. It’s not what the Constitution says, and it’s not what most of our Founders said. Which raises the question: If the Supreme Court can’t decide what is and what isn’t constitutional, then what is its purpose? What’s it really supposed to be doing? The answer to that is laid out in the Constitution in plain black-and-white. It’s the first court where the nation goes for cases involving disputes about treaties, ambassadors, controversies between two or more states, between a state and citizen of another state, between citizens of different states, and between our country and foreign states. Read Article 3, Section 2 of the Constitution—it’s all there. Not a word in there about “judicial supremacy” or “judicial review”—the supposed powers of the court to strike down (or write) laws by deciding what is and what isn’t constitutional. President Thomas Jefferson was pretty clear about that—as were most of the Founders—and the court didn’t start seriously deciding “constitutionality” until after all of them were dead. But back in the day, here’s what Jefferson had to say: The Constitution has erected no such single tribunal, knowing that to whatever hands confided, with the corruptions of time and party, its members would become despots. It has more wisely made all the departments co-equal and co-sovereign within themselves… When the legislative or executive functionaries act unconstitutionally, they are responsible to the people in their elective capacity.177 Their elective capacity? That’s a fancy presidential-founder way of saying that the people can toss out on their butts any member of Congress or any president who behaves in a way that’s unconstitutional. The ultimate remedy is with the people—it’s the ballot box. If we don’t like the laws being passed, then we elect new legislators and a new president. It’s pretty simple.

Anti-abortion activists hope the 20-week abortion ban will be their opening to challenge and ultimately overturn Roe v. Wade, the Supreme Court's landmark abortion rights decision.

In 1973 in Roe v. Wade, the Supreme Court took jurisdiction over this question.

If Trump’s prosperity gospel made sense—if only because the Republican Party had preached it for so long—so Latino conservatives would adhere to it blindly, utterly perplexing was the idea that a twice-divorced, marital infidel, accused sexual abuser, spokesperson for whatever the opposite of personal responsibility was, could somehow be the pious defender of religious freedom. Yet that was exactly the argument that Trump’s faithful Latino supporters made during his four years in office. Even if Trump was not the best personal representative of morality, his Latino supporters whose politics were guided by their faith concluded that Trump was the candidate who best supported their interests, especially by pushing the Supreme Court far enough to the right that Roe v. Wade might be overturned.

Miss said in class she hoped they understood who was to blame for this rib: the monsters in Congress who passed the Personhood Amendment and the walking lobotomies on the Supreme Court who reversed Roe v. Wade. “Two short years ago,” she said—or, actually, shouted—“abortion was legal in this country, but now we have to resort to throwing ourselves down the stairs.

Among those who would block the right of rape victims to choice, none is more determined than David C. Reardon,48 founder of the Elliott Institute. There is no eponymous Elliott; the institute’s website explains that the name was selected to sound official and impartial. Starting in the early 1980s, some pro-life advocates opposed abortion even for rape victims on the basis that it could lead to a condition they named ‘postabortion syndrome’,49 characterised by depression, regret and suicidality – a condition formulated as evidence that the Supreme Court had been wrong, in Roe v. Wade, when it averred that abortion was a safe procedure. The ultimate goal of the Elliott Institute is to generate legislation that would allow a woman to seek civil damages against a physician who has ‘damaged her mental health’ by providing her with an elective abortion. On the topic of impregnated survivors of rape and incest, Reardon states in his book Victims and Victors, ‘Many women report that their abortions felt like a degrading form of “medical rape.”50 Abortion involves a painful intrusion into a woman’s sexual organs by a masked stranger.’ He and other anti-abortion partisans often quote the essay ‘Pregnancy and Sexual Assault’ by Sandra K. Mahkorn, who suggests that the emotional and psychological burdens of pregnancy resulting from rape ‘can be lessened with proper support’.51 Another activist, George E. Maloof, writes, ‘Incestuous pregnancy offers a ray of generosity to the world,52 a new life. To snuff it out by abortion is to compound the sexual child abuse with physical child abuse. We may expect a suicide to follow abortion as the quick and easy way to solving personal problems.

... there are clear parallels between the Supreme Court's language describing black slaves in the infamous Dred Scott v. Sandford slavery case, and the court's language describing unborn babies in Roe v. Wade (1973) and Planned Parenthood v. Casey (1992).

Contrary to myth, when the Supreme Court handed down its decision on Roe v. Wade, many secular and religious conservatives responded with delight. Here is what W. Barry Garrett, Washington bureau chief of the Baptist Press, a wire service run by the Southern Baptist Convention, wrote upon the announcement: “Religious liberty, human equality, and justice are advanced by the Supreme Court abortion decision.”50 Garrett’s position wasn’t exceptional. The 1971 convention of the Southern Baptists endorsed a resolution calling for the legalization of abortion to preserve the “emotional, mental, and physical health of the mother” as well as in cases of rape, incest, and “deformity.” The convention

RBG’s image as a moderate was clinched in March 1993, in a speech she gave at New York University known as the Madison Lecture. Sweeping judicial opinions, she told the audience, packed with many of her old New York friends, were counterproductive. Popular movements and legislatures had to first spur social change, or else there would be a backlash to the courts stepping in. As case in point, RBG chose an opinion that was very personal to plenty of people listening: Roe v. Wade. The right had been aiming to overturn Roe for decades, and they’d gotten very close only months before the speech with Planned Parenthood v. Casey. Justices Anthony Kennedy, David Souter, and Sandra Day O’Connor had instead brokered a compromise, allowing states to put restrictions on abortion as long as they didn’t pose an “undue burden” on women—or ban it before viability. Neither side was thrilled, but Roe was safe, at least for the moment. Just as feminists had caught their breath, RBG declared that Roe itself was the problem. If only the court had acted more slowly, RBG said, and cut down one state law at a time the way she had gotten them to do with the jury and benefit cases. The justices could have been persuaded to build an architecture of women’s equality that could house reproductive freedom. She said the very boldness of Roe, striking down all abortion bans until viability, had “halted a political process that was moving in a reform direction and thereby, I believe, prolonged divisiveness and deferred stable settlement of the issue.” This analysis remains controversial among historians, who say the political process of abortion access had stalled before Roe. Meanwhile, the record shows that there was no overnight eruption after Roe. In 1975, two years after the decision, no senator asked Supreme Court nominee John Paul Stevens about abortion. But Republicans, some of whom had been pro-choice, soon learned that being the anti-abortion party promised gains. And even if the court had taken another path, women’s sexual liberation and autonomy might have still been profoundly unsettling. Still, RBG stuck to her guns, in the firm belief that lasting change is incremental. For the feminists and lawyers listening to her Madison Lecture, RBG’s argument felt like a betrayal. At dinner after the lecture, Burt Neuborne remembers, other feminists tore into their old friend. “They felt that Roe was so precarious, they were worried such an expression from Ruth would lead to it being overturned,” he recalls. Not long afterward, when New York senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan suggested to Clinton that RBG be elevated to the Supreme Court, the president responded, “The women are against her.” Ultimately, Erwin Griswold’s speech, with its comparison to Thurgood Marshall, helped convince Clinton otherwise. It was almost enough for RBG to forgive Griswold for everything else.

The next time you hear someone say that Roe v. Wade or Obergefell v. Hodges are the law of the land, remind them that they are not; they are the opinions of the supreme Court just like Dred Scott v. Sanford (slaves are property) and Korematsu v. United States (Japanese internment during WWII). The court was wrong in the past, it is frequently wrong today, and will almost certainly be wrong in the future.

The most popular origin story of Christian nationalism today, shared by many critics and supporters alike, explains that the movement was born one day in 1973, when the Supreme Court unilaterally shredded Christian morality and made abortion ‘on demand’ a constitutional right. At that instant, the story goes, the flock of believers arose in protest and through their support to the party of ‘Life’ now known as the Republican Party. The implication is that the movement, in its current form, finds its principal motivation in the desire to protect fetuses against the women who would refuse to carry them to term. This story is worse than myth. It is false as history and incorrect as analysis. Christian nationalism drew its inspiration from a set of concerns that long predated the Supreme Court decision in Roe v. Wade and had little to do with abortion. The movement settled on abortion as its litmus test sometime after that decision for reasons that had more to do with politics than embryos. It then set about changing the religion of many people in the country in order to serve its new political ambitions. From the beginning, the ‘abortion issue’ has never been just about abortion. It has also been about dividing and uniting to mobilize votes for the sake of amassing political power.

The Supreme Court also, and very dramatically, decriminalized abortion in the famous case of Roe v. Wade (1973).28 This case legalized abortion, at least in the early months of pregnancy. It swept away almost all existing laws which either made abortion always or mostly a crime. Politically, the case was—and remains—a bombshell. Legally speaking, the case rested on the constitutional right to privacy—a concept (one must admit) that has only the flimsiest connection with the actual text of the Constitution, if it has any connection at all. The constitutional right to privacy made its debut, basically, in 1965, in Griswold v. Connecticut.29 Connecticut was a state—probably the only one—in which all forms of birth control were still essentially illegal. In Connecticut, to use a drug or device to prevent pregnancy was a crime; it was also a crime to aid or abet anyone in the use of contraception. Family-planning clinics were thus basically forbidden to operate in Connecticut.