The briefs each approach Roe v. Wade or Webster from a slightly different perspective, but they share three principal characteristics. The first characteristic has to do with customary court protocol. The briefs frame their arguments with reference to legal precedent (including Supreme Court decisions) and (above all) to the U.S. Constitution, consistent with Article III, which defines Supreme Court interpretive jurisdiction in terms of constitutional issues. While a particular morality or a particular professional point of view may be said to inform a given brief, the manifest argument appears meant to prevail by reason of connection to a constitutional point. The second characteristic, related to the first, is the shared perspective of antichoice advocates. Despite idiosyncratic perspectives of the briefs, distinguishing them each from the other, certain of their arguments overlap and converge, chiefly, as might be expected, in the view that an unborn fetus has constitutionally protected rights. The third characteristic, again related to the other two, has to do with argumentative content of RTL rhetoric as analyzed by Solomon (54-5), specifically the assertion of an unmediated continuum of human life from conception to birth, and attached to the view that the state has a compelling interest in assuring that the continuum will

Hagan, Michael R. "Roe v. Wade: The Rhetoric of Fetal Life." Central States Speech Journal 27 (1976):192-99.

Solomon, Martha. "Redemptive Rhetoric: The Continuity Motif in the Rhetoric of Right to Life." Central States Speech Journal 31 (Spring 1980): 52-62.

WB straightforwardly asserts that the Court constitutionally erred in considering abortion liberty as a right of privacy and in limiting state jurisdiction over prenatal life (WB 237) and that precedents were wrongly used by the Court in Roe. WA says "the strict standard of scrutiny employed for fundamental rights should be abandoned" (WA 874), and the abortion issue should be turned back to state legislatures and the political process, where it belongs. This view is echoed in WB, which says that legislative, not judicial, bodies are suited to "weighing competing social, ethical, and political factors in reaching a judgment as to how much regulation is appropriate in this highly sensitive area" (WB 237). The issue of a rights equation is not even reached by WB, which dismisses out of hand any notion that abortion liberty is a valid construal of privacy rights.

---. "Order and Disorder in Antiabortion Rhetoric: A Logological View." Quarterly Journal of Speech 70 (November 1984): 425-443.

Recall Hagan's observation that the majority opinion in Roe entailed selective use of arguments that tending to support its conclusion (Hagan 192), which he sees as evidence of a rhetorical agenda. The same can be said for certain RTL argumentation. RB's analogy between property and fetal life rights leaves out the fact that righ