The Roe v. Wade decision was issued on January 22, 1973 by a Supreme Court quite different from the current one. It was of course all male, although — contrary to feminist theory — that didn’t stop the Court from voting 7-2 to legalize abortion largely unchecked through six months of pregnancy.
Indeed, perhaps the most ardently pro-abortion Justice, environmentalist mountain climber, William O. Douglas, was on his fourth wife. In his mid 60s, he’d married in rapid succession two 23-year olds.
Douglas is forgotten today. And the ardent civil libertarian would likely be cancelled in about 30 minutes now, but he was the largest personality on the Court in his time. He was constantly on book tours to promote the 30 books he published — I read one as a lad about mountains he’d climbed — and squabbling with his fellow Justices and his own law clerks. Although he served longer on the Supreme Court than anyone else at 36 years, he seemed to think a cruel fate had sidelined him to the Supreme Court and kept him out of the White House, thus wasting his life. He might have been right.
But the Supreme Court that legalized abortion also differed in that it had eight mainline Protestants and one Catholic, in comparison to the current one with six Catholics (five Republicans and Sonia Sotomayor), two Jews, and one Anglican who used to be Catholic.
Six of the nine judges who voted on Roe 49 years ago were nominated by Republican Presidents, but Eisenhower had picked Irish Catholic Democrat William J. Brennan Jr. in 1956 as a re-election gimmick, so only five were Republicans.
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