Page:Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization.pdf/35

Rh been discredited, and it has come to light that even members of Jane Roe’s legal team did not regard them as serious scholarship. An internal memorandum characterized this author’s work as donning “the guise of impartial scholarship while advancing the proper ideological goals.” Continued reliance on such scholarship is unsupportable.

The Solicitor General next suggests that history supports an abortion right because the common law’s failure to criminalize abortion before quickening means that “at the Founding and for decades thereafter, women generally could terminate a pregnancy, at least in its early stages.” Brief for United States 26–27; see also Brief for Respondents 21. But the insistence on quickening was not universal, see Mills, 13 Pa., at 633; State v. Slagle, 83 N. C. 630, 632 (1880), and regardless, the fact that many States in the