The Assosciated Press Dowdifies Roberts.

Dowdify - To eliminate or alter the meaning of a quotation through selective editing. For Maureen Dowd, New York Times, a polished practitioner.

DAVID ESPO
The Associated PressWednesday, August 17, 2005; 2:58 AM
In material released Monday, Roberts emerged as an attorney serving in the Reagan White House who held views generally in line with those of other conservatives. He was sympathetic to prayer in public schools, dismissive of "comparable worth," referred to the "tragedy of abortion" and took a swipe at the Supreme Court for being too willing to hear multiple appeals from death row inmates.
"Those papers that we have paint a picture of John Roberts as an eager and aggressive advocate of policies that are deeply tinged with the ideology of the far right wing of his party, then and now," Leahy said in his statement.

Espo combines a dowdified quote referring to the tragedy of abortion with Senator Leahy's comment that Robert's views represent view deeply tinged by the ideology of the far right.
But in reducing the entire reference memorandum to the "tragedy of abortion", the entire context is removed. It was however available from the AP the day before:


Associated Press Updated: 9:33 p.m. ET Aug. 16, 2005
WASHINGTON - As a young lawyer in the Reagan White House, Supreme Court nominee John Roberts concluded that a group’s memorial service for aborted fetuses was “an entirely appropriate means of calling attention to the abortion tragedy.”
Roberts wrote the advice in an October 1985 memo after he was asked to review a proposed telegram from President Reagan to the memorial service promoted by the California Pro Life Medical Association.
“The president’s position is that the fetuses were human beings, or at least cannot be proven not to have been, and accordingly a memorial service would seem an entirely appropriate means of calling attention to the abortion tragedy,” wrote Roberts.

The memorial service came at the end of a three-year battle over how to dispose of some 16,000 fetuses discovered in February 1982 in sealed plastic bags of formaldehyde and stored in a bin outside the California home of a man who had managed a medical laboratory. The then-closed laboratory routinely examined aborted fetuses for clinics and hospitals.

I believe any one unable to recognize the tragedy of abortion represented in 16,000 fetuses could have no moral claim to a seat on a court dedicated to Equal Justice under Law.