Alito's final opinion mirrored points made in the leaked draft, evaluating abortion from a historical standpoint and arguing that the Fourteenth Amendment covers only those rights that were "deeply rooted" at the time of its ratification in 1868, which did not include abortion. He referenced common law as far back as 17th-century English law, which had established that abortion was illegal after quickening, the point when fetal movements are detectable, about 16 to 22 weeks of gestation. Alito subsequently pointed to a wave of laws introduced in the U.S. in the 19th century that outlawed pre-quickening abortions, and claimed "abortion couldn't be constitutionally protected. Until the latter part of the 20th century, such a right was entirely unknown in American law. When the Fourteenth Amendment was adopted, three quarters of the States made abortion a crime at all stages of pregnancy." Some historians say that Alito's view skews the history of abortion in the U.S. and creates a flawed basis for overturning Roe. Patricia Cline Cohen, a professor emeritus at the University of California, Santa Barbara, said that these laws had come about not because society saw abortion as a crime, but from a small group of white male doctors from Boston who had taken it upon themselves to prove to the rest of the county that pre-quickening abortion should be seen as a crime. The doctors used flawed math to convince the American Medical Association to accept that pre-quickening abortion should also be outlawed, leading to the raft of state laws banning abortion in the latter half of the 19th century.
