My mother told me to be a lady. And for her, that meant be your own person, be independent.

The emphasis must be not on the right to abortion but on the right to privacy and reproductive control.

The irony and tragedy is any woman of means can have a safe abortion somewhere in the United States. But women lacking the wherewithal to travel can't. There is no big constituency out there concerned about access restrictions on poor women.

The impact of all these restrictions is on poor women, because women who have means, if their state doesn't provide access, another state does. ... It makes no sense as a national policy to promote birth only among poor people.

..the United States is subject to the scrutiny of a candid world ... what the United States does, for good or for ill, continues to be watched by the international community, in particular by organizations concerned with the advancement of the rule of law and respect for human dignity.

Generalizations about the "way women are" and estimates of what is appropriate for most women no longer justify denying opportunity to women whose talent and capacity place them outside the average description.

Every constitution written since the end of World War II includes a provision that men and women are citizens of equal stature. Ours does not.