Romney will never even GET the opportunity to overturn Roe v. Wade BECAUSE IT WAS ALREADY ATTEMPTED 7 YEARS AGO, AND THE SUPREME COURT REFUSED TO EVEN HEAR THE CHALLENGE."

"That bill" to ban abortions will never reach ANY President's desk, no matter what Obama's ads say. They are flat out wrong and they're just reaching really low to try to scare you with outright lies. Obama's a lawyer. He DOES know he's lying.

I was involved in 2004-2005 with the motion to overturn Roe v.Wade. Intimately involved.

Roe v. Wade itself could only be directly challenged by the sole party to the case, Norma McCorvey, and she already tried, all those years ago.

In fact, a Supreme Court decision is more likely to be overturned from pressure brought by the states or groups (like the NAACP successfully did decades ago), not by the original plaintiff.

I'm not allowed to divulge how the Supreme Court judges voted on this; that was confidential information. However, I am able to share a few very telling details, directly from the attorneys representing Norma McCorvey:

1. The justices decided not to hear the arguments in 2005. They didn't reject the arguments, since they didn't even read them.
2. Norma McCorvey could have filed an appeal within 25 days, but did not.
3. If the justices had heard her motion at all, they also would have had to consider Doe v. Bolton, the companion case. They couldn't do that, since the latter case still was being considered by the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals in Louisiana at that time. If it EVER could be resurrected, the same stipulation would have to apply: consider both cases in tandem, a much bigger hurdle to overcome.
4. Roe v. Wade was not reaffirmed at that time. (This had been done in 1992, although then the "right to privacy" was weakened to be less than an "absolute" right, allowing positive developments such as 24-hour waiting periods.) There may have been enough votes to hear the case, but if the opposed justices told those in support that they'd vote against overturning regardless, then the court would have been forced to reaffirm it, since they would have accepted the case. So, it was a hollow comfort to those of us who are against abortions (especially those of us who've had them and since regret them), that it was very significant that they did not accept the case and thus did not reaffirm it.
5. Any state can pass a law to ban abortion, in part or completely. The Pro-choice Feminist Majority Foundation (a misnomer since it is neither truly "feminist" nor a "majority") wrote in 2004 that there were 30 states ready to pass laws banning abortion if Roe v. Wade was overturned: "21 states are at high risk of banning abortion, with nine other states at middle risk ... 18 states still have laws completely or partially banning abortion." South Dakota already came within one vote of passing such a ban. We learned that, most likely, if lower courts struck these laws down (some already had), then states would appeal through the court channels to the Supreme Court, thus reintroducing the arguments that Ms. McCorvey and the women of Operation Outcry: Silent No More made.

   The sad fact is that if any of those 30 states did pass abortion bans, they would likely be struck down and then appealed ultimately to the Supreme Court over the next 20 years, ending up perhaps the same way: upholding their overturning.

6. Likely the ONLY way any change in abortion laws would occur is if history repeated itself.

   For example, the NAACP, led by Thurgood Marshall and Charles Houston, peppered the nine Supreme Court justices from 1935 through 1954, almost 20 years, with case after case after case to overturn the racial segregation "right" that was created by the high court's Plessy v. Ferguson case. They just kept filing case after case until the critical mass of change had been reached incrementally and Brown v. Board of Education finally achieved justice.

   From the website of The Just The Beginning Foundation (about the contribution of African Americans to the federal judiciary):

   "The N.A.A.C.P.'s strategy for reaching its goals in education began by trying to undo the 1896 decision of Plessy v. Ferguson (163 U.S. 537), in which the Supreme Court said that segregation was valid if it was 'separate but equal.' The N.A.A.C.P.'s. legal committee decided that the only way to accomplish meaningful change was to attack Plessy, to [launch] a frontal assault on Plessy: separate was inherently unequal.

   "In 1935, Charles Houston suggested that the N.A.A.C.P. adopt a strategy of litigating planned test cases to secure favorable legal precedents, thereby laying the foundation for later, fuller attacks on racial discrimination and segregation. The cases were to have a 'sharply defined legal issue' that could be 'supported by demonstrable evidence.'"

Romney would LONG be gone from the White House over the next 20 or 30 years.

If, and ONLY if a critical mass of lawsuits were reached, such as those in the successful NAACP strategy, could there be any change in abortion laws.

Change of heart has got to come first. The kind of change of heart exemplified by acknowledging the facts of which Judge Edith Jones, Chief Judge of the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, spoke when she wrote the decision to pass Roe v. Wade up to the Supreme Court:

"The perverse result of the [Supreme] court's having determined through constitutional adjudication [i.e., Roe v. Wade] this fundamental social policy, which affects over a million women and unborn babies each year, is that the facts no longer matter. This is a peculiar outcome for a court so committed to 'life' that it struggles with the particular facts of dozens of death penalty cases each year...That the court's constitutional decision making leaves our nation in a position of willful blindness to evolving knowledge should trouble any dispassionate observer not only about the abortion decisions, but about a number of other areas in which the court unhesitatingly steps into the realm of social policy under the guise of constitutional adjudication."

What were "the facts" and "evolving knowledge" Jones referred to?

This evidence included 1,000 affidavits from women who've had abortions and claim they have suffered long-term emotional damage. It also offered studies by scientists finding that women can be damaged physically and emotionally by having an abortion.

"In sum, if courts were to delve into the facts underlying Roe's balancing scheme with present-day knowledge, they might conclude that the woman's 'choice' is far more risky and less beneficial, and the child's sentience far more advanced, than the Roe court knew," wrote Jones...

My affidavit was one of those thousand.