Adam Gorlick on Roe v. Wade

“In the days before the U.S. Supreme Court issued its rulings on two landmark abortion rights cases in early 1973, Justice Harry Blackmun braced for a flood of media response—and possible misinterpretation. "I anticipate the headlines that will be produced over the country when the abortion decisions are announced," he wrote to the court's other justices in a memo dated Jan. 16. "Accordingly, I have typed out what I propose as the announcement from the bench in these two cases. … It will in effect be a transcript of what I shall say, and there should be at least some reason for the press not going all the way off the deep end." The attached statement planned for release six days later with the rulings in Roe v. Wade and Doe v. Bolton made clear that "the Court does not today hold that the Constitution compels abortion on demand. It does not today pronounce that a pregnant woman has an absolute right to abortion. It does, for the first trimester of pregnancy, cast the abortion decision and the responsibility for it upon the attending physician."”

“He was one of two dissenting voices in Roe, a ruling he said distorted the Constitution. There is not much in the documents now available in the Hoover archives that amplify his feelings, but there are signs that he thought about the abortion cases outside of their legal boundaries. Along with draft opinions and memos that went back and forth among the justices over some fine points, Rehnquist kept newspaper and magazine clippings about the cases. Carefully tucked into a file labeled "abortion cases" is a flier produced by a pro-life group featuring gruesome images described as aborted fetuses, along with letters from a few people applauding Rehnquist's break with the majority. "May our dear Lord bless you for dissenting from the abortion-on-demand decision rendered by the Supreme Court yesterday," wrote Ellen Myers, of Wichita, Kan. "How horrible that we now have licensed the killing of our most innocent fellow human beings through the highest tribunal in our land?" There's no indication Rehnquist wrote back.”