Pro-Abortionists Harshly Criticize Roe.

It is no surprise that pro-life commentators and legal analysts skewered Roe v. Wade's and Doe v. Bolton's tissue-thin legal analyses. But what is more intriguing is the extent to which "pro-choice" analysts have hammered Justice Harry Blackmun's abominations.

Not that they necessarilyor everwanted protective laws restored. Mostly they threw daggers at Roe/Doe because the decisions' patent flimsiness and indifference to the interests of the unborn helped build the Pro-Life Movement. By moving too quickly and without a quasi-plausible legal basis, Blackmun left the "right" to abortion in perpetual jeopardy.

More recently, the motivation is strictly political. Most argue that unrelenting support for Roe is an electoral albatross around the neck of Democrats. They are convinced that Roe's reversal would provide them with a club to clobber pro-life Republicans.

Below is just a sampling of some old, but mostly newer criticisms from pro-abortionists critical of Roe/Doe. We start with the most famous.

Prof. John Hart Ely, Yale Law Journal (1973)

"What is frightening about Roe is that this super-protected right is not inferable from the language of the Constitution, the framers' thinking respecting the specific problem in issue, any general value derivable from the provisions they included, or the nation's governmental structure. Nor is it explainable in terms of the unusual political impotence of the group judicially protected vis-a-vis the interest that legislatively prevailed over it. ... At times the inferences the Court has drawn from the values the Constitution marks for special protection have been controversial, even shaky, but never before has its sense of an obligation to draw one been so obviously lacking."

Laurence Tribe, Harvard Law Review (1973)