Class News

Nick Danforth ’64 revives his 1973 Roe v. Wade efforts

May 24, 2022

With the publication in Politico of the SCOTUS Draft Opinion on Roe v. Wade, a number of classmates offered perspectives.

Nick Danforth ’64 has spent most of his life studying and teaching about reproductive rights. Recently he wrote “as the director of the small foundation in New York from 1970-73 which took an unknown test case called Roe v. Wade to the Supreme Court and won it 50 years ago — the case which will probably be reversed soon. This is a terrible judicial setback, reinstating draconian and unconstitutional laws forcing countless American women back to the old days of forced, compulsory pregnancy.” No doubt Nick will be following this case and adding more perspectives.

Howard Gillette ’64 chronicled the role Nick played in the case in his book Class Divide: Yale ’64 and the Conflicted Legacy of the Sixties (pp. 172-181).

Pete Putzel ’64 emailed: “My dad was the Reporter of Decisions for Roe v. Wade. I was shocked to learn of the leak, far more shocked than at the opinion itself. My father would have been appalled. This does enormous damage to the institution. Difficult to figure out who did this. I can’t believe that any justice would have leaked the opinion, and I can’t imagine a law clerk who would dare to do it. We may well never know. No lawyer who ever clerked for a judge — at any level — can fail to grasp the importance of confidentiality within judicial chambers. By the way, I’m pretty sure that Tom Rowe ’64 clerked for a SCOTUS justice. Certainly, John Nields ’64 did.”

Paul Steiger ’64, an expert in news media as a longtime editor of The Wall Street Journal and founder of ProPublca (and member of the New York Journalism Hall of Fame), emailed: “I also think Politico is terrific, and in fact they got an amazing scoop today about the Supreme Court's draft decision to overturn Roe v. Wade. The founders of Politico are two friends of mine — Jim VandeHei and John Harris. I was the founder of ProPublica, the non-profit investigative reporting outfit. Actually, Jim once worked for me, when I was the managing editor of The Wall Street Journal and he was a reporter in our Washington Bureau. Jim then went to the Washington Post, where he and John Harris became pals and left to form Politico, which quickly became a very smart and profitable news organization. Jim later left to form another news organization called Axios, while John stayed at Politico and expanded into Europe, adding Politico Europe and related entities to their US operations. More recently, John and his colleagues sold a major interest in the global Politico to Axel Springer, which is the largest news organization in Germany, for a reported $1 billion. I retired last year from ProPublica.”