Much comment by the press and public has been transpiring in the past week regarding the leaked draft opinion of Justice Samuel Alito which purports to overrule the 49-year old precedent of Roe v. Wade and its reaffirmation, with some changes, in Planned Parenthood v. Casey in 1992. As this is only a draft opinion circulated to the other members of the Court in February, 2022, it is both subject to change and, potentially, to becoming only a dissent, and so there is no sense presently in discussing its contents or reasoning in any detail. That which is striking, however, should the basic holding become the majority decision, is that it would be the first time in American history that a decision of the Supreme Court would have both overturned a major precedent decided so long earlier while also abrogating a previously determined Constitutional right. No prior decision has taken away a right, once established by precedent. It would be the most political move by the Court since Bush v. Gore in 2000, deplorably deciding the outcome of the 2000 election by ordering the State of Florida to cease its recount of votes because of the failure to include all of the counties in the procedure and to provide uniform standards for conducting the recounts, regarded by the five-Justice majority in that decision as a violation of Fourteenth Amendment Equal Protection and Due Process.

For decades, starting with Brown, the cry from the right has been to stop the Supreme Court from legislating from the bench. But to restrict a state's right to determine its own recount procedures in a presidential election ultimately decided by 500 votes in the State of Florida for the national popular vote loser, and now, 22 years later, should the draft opinion become the final holding, to overturn established precedents in a restrictive manner, is nothing short of legislating from the bench for the sake of a purely political agenda, not, in the latter instance, siding with "states' rights" but rather siding with the state over the individual citizen's right to make their own choices, in the former having set aside both principles.

Roe was based on sound reasoning, that viability of the fetus is the most readily discernible factor available to modern science in determining when there is a separate life of a fetus in the mother's womb, capable of self-sustaining life apart from the mother, thus giving ground for the state to have an interest in the health of the fetus, in addition to the health of the mother. The point of viability was established, through available scientific evidence in 1973, to be at approximately 23 weeks into pregnancy. The right to protect the mother's ability to choose whether to end her pregnancy prior to viability was determined to be, therefore, not a matter for the state to decide, but rather her own private choice, with the state entering the picture to protect and regulate practices for the life and welfare of the fetus, as well as the mother, only after the point of viability. The right of privacy, recognized in Griswold v. Connecticut in 1965, the rights of a couple in that case to purchase and use contraceptives, was the competing Constitutional right deemed to protect the mother's right of choice as against intrusion by the state, as opposed to having the government making the choice for her during the time prior to viability, and that after viability, the interest of the state was such that it supersedes the right of privacy and enables regulation for the protection of the life of the fetus and the mother. That presented, not contraposition to a states' rights argument, as it is often couched by the "pro-life" pundits and others, but rather a competition between the individual rights of the citizen versus the government, or prevention of government intrusion into the private life of the individual, of which the Second Amendment advocates are always so zealously protective and assertive when it comes to gun "rights"—but not so, typically, when it comes to the right to choose to terminate an unwanted pregnancy prior to viability of the fetus, the ability of that tiny, developing, partially formed extension of the mother to live independently of the mother's womb. Thus far, medical science has not been able in the past half-century to advance enough to assure viability much before 23 weeks, though there has been some incremental, albeit exceptional, advance toward potential earlier viability by a couple of weeks or so.

Mere detection of a heartbeat in the fetus, typically by the twentieth week, is not a reliable indicator or any indicator of viability in the sense that the fetus could survive independently of the womb. It only indicates viability in the sense that the fetus remains capable eventually of developing, within the womb, to a point where survival outside the womb would be possible. While the heart is considered by some to be the place where love resides and grows, that is a sentimental, poetic concept, allegorical in nature, not based on medical science. The heart is a pump, which circulates the blood through the body, but during the period prior to about 23 weeks of pregnancy, the heart and the other developing organs of the fetus remain dependent on the mother's body for the animating life force, without which, the fetus would cease to function, just as with an organ of the mother. (Analogy to these concepts might be found in the mechanical structure of an automobile, the original paradigm for which was obviously premised on knowledge of how the human body, and that of other mammals, functions.)

The overriding point, however, is that the pregnancy in question, that subject to a desired abortion, is one unwanted, for any number of reasons, and without the right to choose to terminate the pregnancy prior to viability, the mother loses control of her own body for the completion of the nine-month gestation period normal for giving birth, regardless of adoption and other means of dealing with an unwanted child at the conclusion of a successful pregnancy. There are many reasons why the matter is monstrous to consider, in the climate before Roe, that a state, like Mississippi will be in 2022 with its 2007 "trigger law" to become operative should Roe and Casey be declared no longer good law, could force a girl or woman who becomes pregnant, practically regardless of the means, to carry a fetus to term, in spite of her desire to terminate the pregnancy prior to the point of viability.

Because it has become such a political touchstone through time, generating concomitant emotion along the way, many people do not actually understand what Roe concerns, other than that it is the decision which permits abortions. Because of superstition and misinformation over the course of five decades, the practice has become associated somehow in the minds of many people with "murder" of a living being, premised on the mystical belief that life begins at conception or quickening, based on the cult of the Pythagoreans and their belief in transmigration of souls, developed 500 years before Christ and Christianity and 2,400 years or more before abortion came to be regarded by some Christians as being tantamount to killing a living being and thus acquired moral overtones, the outlawing of the practice in many jurisdictions during the 19th Century having been for the cause of high mortality rates among mothers in midwife-induced abortion practices of that era, before modern sanitary practices accompanied any form of surgery, not for moral concerns. Thus, came the superstitition and the political furor, fueled by emotion and misinformation, and stoked by political chicanery to gain votes by opposing the practice, just as with the Prohibition movement a hundred years ago.

We have heard some distort the record by suggesting that prior precedent has been overturned by the Supreme Court on many occasions, notably in Brown. For anyone to compare blithely the overturning of the precedent in Roe with the overturning of the separate-but-equal doctrine of Plessy v. Ferguson, established in 1896, by the 1954 Brown decision, holding segregation in the public schools no longer capable of being Constitutionally viable by separate but equal facilities under the Fourteenth Amendment Equal Protection Clause because true equality could never be achieved under segregation, communicates a profound misunderstanding of the law or intellectual dissembling by those who would know better. Brown involved the expansion of rights under the Constitution after the previous system of "separate but equal" facilities had proved not only unworkable in practice but so failing to provide equality in society that the consequent system had shocked the conscience. No such comparison can be made to overruling Roe, which would be eliminating a Federal Constitutional right, leaving it up to the states to determine, in what had already proved, prior to 1973, to be an unworkable system, producing a confused patchwork of laws, creating disunion and winding up producing bootleg abortions, compromising the health of the mother, resulting sometimes in death or rendering the mother incapable of child-bearing into the future. That was the tawdry backdrop to Roe which had beset the society for decades, of which the anti-abortion advocates now have lost sight in the half century during which the practice has been permitted under medically supervised conditions.

No one advocates abortion, only the right of the female bearing the fetus to be able to make the individual, private decision, up to the point of viability, to end the pregnancy when it is unwanted. Indeed, it is despicable for the anti-abortion commentators and their followers to use such loaded language to describe those who understand the issue, that it is not abortion advocacy but advocacy of an individual's right to choose, up to a point, what they do with their body, as long as it does not compromise their own health or safety. Nothing is more sacrosanct for protection from intrusion by the state than that.

The inevitable counter to Roe, though left unstated by the anti-abortion advocates, is that the state is mother-superior to the individual mother in determining how she must behave as soon as she becomes aware of her pregnancy, regardless of whether there is any medico-legally definable separate life yet in being within her womb.

The issue is not one of morality but rather the interest of the state in protecting life and adopting a uniform, medically recognizable standard for when that life begins so that the state can formally recognize that life in being. To say it is at the point of conception is fine poetically for the wanted child, but that can be carried back to the "twinkle in the eye", even before the point of physical conception, to the point of formation of the idea of undertaking the act to procreate. That is not susceptible of recognition by the law, as it is not based on modern science, any more than "leering" was in those state cases to the mid-Twentieth Century where it was deemed an assault, not susceptible of creating a recognizable uniform standard which still protects the sanctity of the individual's right of personal choice. In earlier times, preceding the age of rationalism, when people literally believed in witches and their ability to work evil spells, legislatures, courts and jurists fumbled in the dark with these issues and made up laws which would be unthinkable today, including the countenancing of burning of witches at the stake and trial by ordeal. (After all, resort to Old Testament law for guidance, would have one believe, if taken literally: "Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live," as commanded by Exodus 22:18. Thus, one would only need then to divine a method for determining who the "witch" is, and, voila, a perfect rationalization for justifiable homicide manifests itself.)

Thus to advert, as the draft opinion of Justice Alito did in February, to pre-Twentieth Century laws, before the age ushered in by the work of Louis Pasteur, Madame Curie, Alexander Fleming and other pioneers who contributed to modern medical practices we have taken for granted for a century and more, is to engage in little short of myopic cant, reaching for comfortable rationalization from within the dim, dark recesses of the law library, which, while making sense to a degree, perhaps, in some unchartered areas of the law, makes no sense in the premises when applied to issues of health and pregnancy or other matters transmuted through time by modern medical science, demonstrating, in so doing, a mind which is not thinking through the subject sensitively, as did Justice Harry Blackmun in 1973, but rather one responding either to political winds or a legacy of religious fervor, or a mixture thereof, neither having any place in legal jurisprudence.

We hope this draft opinion will not become the majority opinion, as it would be a dark day for the country and its democracy should it become so. As has been said many times in the last week, the most recent three appointees sitting presently on the Court, since 2017—the first and third of whom came to the Court through political machinations by the then-Senate Majority Leader, unheard of in the history of the country and utterly paradoxical and hypocritical in his claimed bases therefor—, all three of whom are presumed to be in agreement with the basic stance of the draft opinion last February, would have to be deemed, if those presumptions prove correct in the end, to have deceived the Senate and the American people in their confirmation hearings by repeatedly affirming, without qualification, that Roe is sound precedent and "established law". No mature, trained legal mind could possibly claim to have been changed on such a major, decades long well-publicized issue in such a short time as two to four years, and thus the American people could, in the event those Justices do ultimately vote to overrule Roe, justly consider such statements, made under oath, essentially a solemn pact made with the people, to have been untrue at the time they were made, rendering such Justices unfit to serve further in the courts. Judges can change their minds, of course, based on changed facts or new evidence presented in a case, or new and novel legal principles introduced by astute counsel arguing a particular case, but that has not occurred in this instance. The act by those Justices of overruling Roe would have to be deemed a betrayal of that solemn pact and pledge with the American people so recently, not just to the individual Senators to whom they made those statements in public hearings between 2017 and shortly before election day in 2020.

Parties of Wolfe readers had often amused themselves by imagining how certain scenes could be arranged and dramatized. One persistent reader had always wanted to begin by opening with the garret of a lonely writer, while another insisted on inclusion of a railroad train, with its exterior and interior filmed.

Some years earlier, Arthur Ripley of Hollywood had come to Chapel Hill to look over the alma mater of the writer, which he had dubbed "Pulpit Hill" in Look Homeward, Angel, and had acquired the film rights from the publisher, Scribner, had taken photographs of many campus scenes and classrooms, even getting some students to dress up in the clothes of the early 1920's, worn during Mr. Wolfe's student days. But Mr. Ripley had never been able to complete the project, and it was reported many years later that a Hollywood magazine had purchased the rights from him for $175,000. It was now being reported that Paul Gregory, who had produced the roadshow based on the Caine Mutiny, and William Goldman, had paid $300,000 for three later novels, with the rights to Look Homeward, Angel having been purchased by Paramount.

It concludes that those sums would have made Mr. Wolfe gasp.

Nevertheless, none of his novels have ever been, strictly speaking, committed to film, though the excellent dramatization of his life released in 2016, "Genius", necessarily conveyed semi-autobiographical scenes which derived from the novels, with the names and personages returned to their rightful owners, to the extent that they were actually roman à clef and not conflated, amalgamized characters in their inception, as most novel characters are, deriving inevitably from the artist's view of his or her surrounding environment, even if the setting of the novel is ostensibly on Mars, instead of in Pulpit Hill and Altamont.

Drew Pearson indicates that it had all but been announced that the President would give up the idea of defending the offshore islands of Quemoy and Matsu in exchange for a settlement of the Formosa situation, representing a triumph of his political advisers over his military advisers. A secret gathering of the White House braintrust had recently taken place, with the goal of impressing on the President the political implications of a war in the Far East. Included in the meeting were former Governor Thomas Dewey of New York, Attorney General Herbert Brownell, the President's Army crony, retired General Lucius Clay, the Vice-President, White House chief of staff Sherman Adams, and former Marshall Plan administrator Paul Hoffman. Led by Mr. Dewey, the group had reminded the President that he owed his election largely to the promise to end the Korean War and that it would be political suicide to present the voters with another Far Eastern war on the eve of the 1956 presidential election. They assured him that the China lobby, despite all of its noise, was in the minority and that the public did not want to fight a war over two remote islands off the Chinese mainland.