"After the two abortion cases-Roe v. Wade and Doe v. Bolton-were first argued in December 1971, Burger had assigned the opinions to Blackmun to write, for reasons that Blackmun never entirely understood. He has spent the previous thirteen months working on multiple drafts of the opinions, pressured by Justices Douglas, Brennan, and Stewart to change and expand the scope of the decisions. Chief Justice Burger, too, was concerned about the abortion decisions, but for different reasons. He was due to sweat in Richard Nixon for a second term as president on Saturday, January 20. Contrary to the president’s antiabortion position, the Court was about to strike down the abortion laws of all fifty states based on a broad “right of privacy” that was nowhere in the words of the Constitution nor the Bill of Rights. Despite his reputation as a :strict constructionist” that got him named Chief Justice, Burger was going to sign onto Blackmun’s opinion, along with a third Justice whom Nixon had named to the Court, Lewis Powell. Concerned that the decisions, joined by three Nixon-appointed Justices, would embarrass him or the president, Burger kept telling Blackmun that Burger was writing an additional, concurring opinion, which he was able to delay until after the inauguration. Having more than once shared with his colleagues his fears that the Court would be criticized for the decisions, Justice Blackmun crafted a statement that Tuesday explaining the decisions that he proposed to release to the press. But when Blackmun distributed the draft among his fellow Justices, Justice William Brennan, known as a liberal champion of the Court, warned him that the Justices didn’t issue “press releases” that might be confused with the written opinions they issued. So Blackmun simply read his statement from the bench on Monday, January 22."
Roe v. Wade, 410 U.S. 113 (1973), was a landmark decision of the U.S. Supreme Court in which the Court ruled that the Constitution of the United States protected the right of pregnant women to choose to have an abortion before the point of fetal viability. The decision struck down many state abortion laws, and it sparked an ongoing abortion debate in the United States about whether, or to what ext
"The fact that a majority of the States reflecting, after all, the majority sentiment in those States, have had restrictions on abortions for at least a century is a strong indication, it seems to me, that the asserted right to an abortion is not ‘so rooted in the traditions and conscience of our people as to be ranked as fundamental...’"
"This right of privacy... is broad enough to encompass a womans decision whether or not to terminate her pregnancy....[T]he word person, as used in the 14th Amendment, does not include the unborn."
"Several decisions of this Court make clear that freedom of personal choice in matters of marriage and family life is one of the liberties protected by the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. . . . That right necessarily includes the right of a woman to decide whether or not to terminate her pregnancy."
"Presumably, therefore those women who qualify for a legal abortion according to the terms of the statute should be able to obtain one, regardless of their race or socio-economic status. There is nothing demonstrable in the differences of skin color or economic condition which suggests that a substantially smaller proportion of the poor or the non-white fall into this category than that of the white and the non-poor, or that the poor and non-white have a substantially different moral attitude on abortion. On the contrary, a recent study of births occurring between 1960 and 1965 led investigators to conclude that one-third of Negro (as contrasted with one-fifth of white) births were unwanted. Unwanted births were in general more than twice as high for families with incomes of less than $3,000 as for those with incomes of over $10,000; this differential was "particularly marked among Negroes." The results indicated, in the view of the investigators, that there is a "coincidence of poverty and unwanted births rather than a propensity of the ‘poor’ to have unwanted children." One explanation for this high level of unwanted births among the poor and the non-white is surely the fact that they do not have equal access to abortions. Data demonstrate that the poor and the non-white do not receive this medical treatment on the same terms as do others. They thus suffer a particularly harsh and adverse effect from the operation of this statute, as they do from that of the other restrictive abortion laws which have existed and currently exist in the United States...."
"On another level as well, abortion is a safe procedure: it is without clinically significant psychiatric sequelae. A number of recent studies confirm that abortion does not produce serious psychological side-effects damaging to the mental wellbeing of the patient."
"As a nation today, we have not rejected the sanctity of human life. The American people have not had an opportunity to express their view on the sanctity of human life in the unborn. I am convinced that Americans do not want to play God with the value of human life. It is not for us to decide who is worthy to live and who is not. Even the Supreme Courts opinion in Roe v. Wade did not explicitly reject the traditional American idea of intrinsic worth and value in all human life; it simply dodged this issue."