Supporters of abortion should not read this.

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THE TYRANNY OF THE SUPREME COURT
Weaving the Tangled Web

January 2001By Joseph Collison

Their works are evil works, and they make haste to shed innocent blood. - Isaiah 59:7

One October morning in Las Vegas, a teenage girl, five months pregnant, checked into Humana Sunrise Hospital to undergo a prostaglandin abortion. Prostaglandin abortion is a simple - but dangerous - procedure in which the pregnant mother is given a pill which causes her to go into labor and expel her baby. On this morning the girl’s labor was slow to commence and the abortionist ordered that she be given a second pill.

Editor Sherman R. Fredrick of the Las Vegas Review Journal described what happened next: “Later nurses heard a shriek, entered the room and found the girl screaming. She had given birth to ‘Adam,’ a one pound, four ounce crying arm-waving ‘fetus’-baby.” Since the abortionist was not present, nurses rushed Adam to the neonatal intensive-care unit.

“Returning,” wrote Fredrick, “the doctor discovered what had happened and, according to witnesses, turned pale. He left the floor and a short time later called the nurses from neonatal and told them that ‘doctor’s orders’ were to remove Adam from specialized care, take him off oxygen and send him back to his original ward.”

At first the nurses refused, but after some cajoling a nurse went to neonatal, took Adam off oxygen and brought him back to the abortion chamber where he lay gasping for breath for another hour. When he died he had lived three hours and twenty-five minutes.

Adam was issued a birth certificate and a death certificate - at the same time. Eyebrows were not raised at what would seem unseemly, however, because such occurrences are not unusual under America’s “new” constitution. Adam’s case was unusual only because it was reported by the local daily. (Of course, it was ignored by the news media in general.)

How can it be that - in America - Adam could suffer such a fate, to be simply set aside in a dark room to die? Was our nation not founded on the “self-evident truths,” spelled out in The Declaration of Independence, that the protection of “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” (italics added) is the foundation of legitimate government?

Thomas Jefferson, chief author of The Declaration of Independence, warned the nation that “Our peculiar security is in possession of a written Constitution. Let us not make it a blank paper by construction.” Alas, the Constitution lasted as a constitution little more than a century before it began to be dismantled “by construction.” Slowly throughout the decades of the 20th century, America’s constitutional foundation has crumbled as our leaders have compromised the legitimacy of our government by deliberately ignoring the Constitution, as we shall see.

Ethics and Medics recently carried an interesting observation: “In 1924 a German revolutionary wrote in his book that in order to develop a eugenics program to remedy the nation’s social ills, Germany should be guided by the programs in the United States. That revolutionary leader was Adolf Hitler and the book was Mein Kampf.”

The roots of America’s current abortion holocaust go back a hundred years to the eugenicists and birth controllers who originally furnished the sustenance for Hitler’s fevered mind. From the beginning of Hitler’s rise to power, the American Birth Control League (later renamed Planned Parenthood) had close ties to the Nazis. In fact, the eugenic laws adopted by Hitler came from American eugenicist Harry Laughlin’s model “Eugenical Sterilization Law,” for which Laughlin received an honorary degree from the University of Heidelberg, a center for studying “racial problems.”

Throughout the 1930s such luminaries as Dr. Ernst Rudin, curator of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Anthropology, Human Genetics, and Eugenics during Hitler’s Third Reich, were regular contributors to Margaret Sanger’s Birth Control Review. In turn, American racist Dr. Lothrop Stoddard, a director of the American Birth Control League, sat in on Germany’s Eugenic Supreme Court and wrote in the Birth Control Review that “The sterilization law is weeding out the worst strains in the Germanic stock in a scientific and truly humanitarian way.”

Following World War II, in revulsion against Nazism, the World Medical Association (of which the U.S. was a founding member), after consideration of war crimes presented by the U.N. War Crimes Commission, adopted the Declaration of Geneva. This document stated that “I will maintain the utmost respect for human life, from the time of conception; even under threat, I will not use my medical knowledge contrary to the laws of humanity.” A year later the International Code of Medical Ethics incorporated the Declaration’s principle: “A doctor must always bear in mind the importance of preserving human life from the time of conception until death.”

In 1959 the General Assembly of the U.N. unanimously adopted the Declaration of the Rights of the Child. The Preamble states that the child, because of its dependence, needs “special safeguards and care, including appropriate legal protection, before as well as after birth” (italics added).

In Mein Kampf Hitler boasted that people would sooner believe a big lie than a small lie. In a 1970 editorial in California Medicine, the official publication of the California Medical Association, Hitler’s observation was shamelessly illustrated. The editor, a physician, urged that abortion be legalized throughout the U.S. and suggested how it could be done:

Since the old ethic has not yet been fully displaced it has been necessary to separate the idea of abortion from the idea of killing, which continues to be socially abhorrent. The result has been a curious avoidance of the scientific fact, which everyone really knows, that human life begins at conception and is continuous whether intra- or extra-uterine until death.

The very considerable semantic gymnastics which are required to rationalize abortion as anything but taking a human life would be ludicrous if they were not often put forth under socially impeccable auspices. It is suggested that this schizophrenic sort of subterfuge is necessary because while a new ethic is being accepted the old one has not yet been rejected.

Soon after California Medicine called for “semantic gymnastics,” two troubled young women began their journey into history by becoming victims of the “schizophrenic sort of subterfuge” of two feminist attorneys.

Norma McCorvey was a homeless and hungry “hippie,” disheartened by her squalid, lonely life and an unwanted pregnancy. When she found out she was pregnant, she’d first wanted to have an abortion, but then changed her mind and resolved to give her baby up for adoption. When she asked for help, she was referred to attorney Sarah Weddington.

Ms. Weddington had recently graduated from law school and was just back from Mexico where she’d had an abortion. And as an ardent feminist, she was looking for a way to challenge the anti-abortion laws of Texas.

In lonely, hungry Norma, she saw her opportunity. She plied Norma with pizza, offered friendship, and enticed her into helping to challenge the Texas anti-abortion laws. Norma agreed, and in short order a gang-rape story was fabricated, a lawsuit was filed, and Norma McCorvey (“just some anonymous person who suddenly emerges,” according to a NOW activist) became the “Jane Roe” of Roe v. Wade.

In Georgia another young woman, Sandra Cano, didn’t want an abortion either. In fact, she wasn’t even pregnant. She asked ACLU Attorney Margie Hames of Atlanta for legal help to divorce her husband. Like Ms. Weddington, Ms. Hames was also looking for an opportunity to challenge abortion restrictions. In Georgia, which had legalized abortion but didn’t want to become an abortion “Mecca,” abortionists were not allowed to abort citizens from out of state.

Ms. Hames ignored the fact that Ms. Cano wasn’t pregnant. She also ignored the fact that, as a Georgia resident, Ms. Cano had no standing to challenge the nonresidency requirement. She gave Ms. Cano papers to sign, and without bothering to read the papers Ms. Cano affirmed that she was pregnant, mentally unstable, incapable of caring for a child and therefore in need of an abortion. She became the “Mary Doe” of Doe v. Bolton.

At the time these women approached their lawyers, abortion was just emerging as a feminist issue. Early feminists had been fiercely anti-abortion. Elizabeth Cady Stanton, organizer of the first women’s rights convention in 1848, called abortion “a disgusting and degrading crime.” Dr. Alice Stockham, an early feminist physician, called it the “fearful crime of feticide.” And Susan B. Anthony, early crusader for the women’s vote, wrote that “No matter what the motive...the woman is awfully guilty who commits the deed. It will burden her conscience in life; it will burden her soul in death.” It was in fact the 19th-century feminists who campaigned to pass the laws that criminalized abortion.

Until the present generation it was a basic tenet of Christian faith, questioned by no religious group, that life is the first and most fundamental human right, and American reverence for life was especially firm when confronted with abortion. Even when humanist education triumphed in the 1960s and the influence of Christian moral teachings in American culture began to collapse, few Americans supported abortion.

When several states, pressured by feminists, legalized abortion, other states rushed to reaffirm their laws defending life. In 1971 the Connecticut Legislature voted 132 to 28 against legalizing abortion and every Christian body supported their action. In referenda the following year, citizens in other states voted overwhelmingly against legalization of abortion.

But within months of these votes, the Supreme Court in effect deleted “life” from the “self-evident truths” of America’s Declaration of Independence and with that contemptuous fiat initiated moral and legal chaos throughout the nation. In one single moment Roe v. Wade began the transmutation of abortion from a loathsome abomination into the paramount sacrament of our secular society. Like the education and media establishments before them, the American judiciary declared war on all Americans who defend human life.

When Susan B. Anthony denounced women who had abortions, she had added a further condemnation: “Thrice guilty is he…who drove her to the desperation which impelled her to the crime.” Throughout history, unwilling to face responsibility for the pregnancies they cause, men have been stronger advocates of abortion than women. So it’s fitting that two men bear special responsibility for legalizing abortion.

In the 1960s the modern feminist movement was initiated by Betty Friedan’s The Feminist Mystique. Surprisingly, when she wrote her book, Ms. Friedan didn’t consider abortion a feminist issue, and early editions contained no mention of abortion. But shortly after the book’s publication, Lawrence Lader, a zealous pro-abortion activist, and Dr. Bernard Nathanson, operator of the nation’s largest abortion mill, Acme Reproductive Services, met with and converted Ms. Friedan to what had become their obsession - the legalization of abortion on demand.

As a result of the meeting, Ms. Friedan incorporated her newfound crusade into subsequent editions of The Feminist Mystique, and the Furies were let loose. Together Dr. Nathanson, Larry Lader, and Ms. Friedan founded the National Abortion Rights Action League and set about infecting the entire nation.

Years later Dr. Nathanson, now prolife, recounted how they went about the country “doctoring polls, manipulating the press, lying with statistics, falsely claiming that abortion was only a ‘Catholic’ issue, and so on.” When lecturing or testifying before congressional committees, as he was increasingly asked to do, Dr. Nathanson spoke of the “dangers of illegal abortion,” of the “fact” that pregnancy threatened thousands of women’s lives, and the “fact” that every year 10,000 American women were dying from “back-alley abortions.”

His words carried weight. He was a renowned physician, Director of Gynecology at the Hospital for Joint Diseases, Chief of Obstetrical Service at St. Luke’s Hospital Center, and Clinical Professor at the Medical College of Cornell University. (It was his testimony that persuaded the Supreme Court, and he is universally acknowledged as the “father of legalized abortion.”)

Dr. Nathanson’s “facts,” of course, were blatant lies. He later wrote in Aborting America: “I confess that I knew the figures were totally false…,” but they were “useful” and so he used them “shamelessly.”

The truth was that, as the 20th century progressed, fewer and fewer mothers died from abortion as medical practice improved and antibiotics were introduced. In fact, records show that since Roe v. Wade in 1973, abortions have been far more deadly to mothers than they had been previously.

In the decades preceding legalization, most abortions were called “therapeutic” and were done in hospitals. Dr. Mary Calderone wrote in 1960 in the American Journal of Health that “90% of all illegal abortions are presently done by physicians.” Understandably, if the abortions were illegal, doctors were very careful not to risk a mother’s death and invite subsequent investigation.

Was abortion necessary to save “thousands of women’s lives”? No. Dr. Arthur O’Leary wrote in Catholic New York: “In past years I was privileged to have [delivered] countless babies. My father did as many before me. Neither of us ever encountered a ‘medical indication’ for abortion. In fact, before 1973 it was medically legal to abort a mother as a life-saving procedure. Records indicate that the total number of abortions done at St. Luke and Cornwall hospitals [both nonsectarian] prior to 1973 was one.”

Today the situation is tragically different. Over 90 percent of abortions are done in freestanding abortion clinics. Many of these clinics are unregulated and filthy, and many use untrained personnel. One has only to talk with a doctor or nurse in the emergency room of a metropolitan hospital to know the carnage visited on women by “legal” abortions.

Eventually Roe v. Wade and Doe v. Bolton reached the Supreme Court where lies were brazenly repeated. Here the “10,000 deaths” were reaffirmed, though it’s inconceivable that the Court was unaware that the plaintiffs’ statements were false. According to government statistics, which were honestly kept at that time and certainly available to the Court, 39 women, not 10,000, had died the previous year from both legal and illegal abortions.

The Court also accepted the claim that a million women a year were seeking illegal abortions - an absurd claim since abortion had already been legalized in some states, New York among them. Obviously, few women would be still seeking “illegal” abortions when “legal” abortions were available. But at this time in the U.S. Supreme Court, the truth didn’t matter.

Of course, from the beginning these cases should never have been accepted by the Supreme Court. Nowhere does the Constitution grant to the Supreme Court a power of judicial review. Article III restricts the Court’s jurisdiction solely to suits under federal laws involving ambassadors, treaties, crimes on the high seas, controversies between the U.S. and other nations, between states, and between a state and citizens of another state, “with such exceptions and under such regulations as the Congress shall make” (italics added).

The founding fathers who designed the Constitution intended that the Supreme Court be the weakest of the three branches of government. The greatest power, including the power to regulate the Court, they gave to Congress.

A limited power of jurisdictional review was first claimed by Chief Justice John Marshall in 1803. This limited power was not exercised again until 54 years later when Justice Roger Taney claimed jurisdiction in the Dred Scott decision. And presidents ignored the Court, which had no enforcement power. But in his First Inaugural Address, Abraham Lincoln, referring to the Dred Scott decision, prophetically warned the nation that: “If the policy of the government upon vital questions affecting the whole people is to be irrevocably fixed by decisions of the Supreme Court…the people will have ceased to be their own rulers….”

In the 1930s the Court expanded its claim to a power of review. Though it did not yet claim legislative power for itself, it expanded the powers of the federal and state governments to exercise influence in economic and social affairs. Later the courts assumed broad legislative powers in the social upheavals of the 1950s, and this intrusion of substantive judicial review rapidly evolved into the deadly weapon of judicial pseudo-legislative powers that we confront today.

By 1973 the Court’s self-endowed legislative power had expanded beyond simple judicial review and had come to exemplify the worst fears expressed by the Constitution’s framers. Neither the Roe v. Wade decision nor the power of the Court to make that decision could be related to anything written in the Constitution (a reality recently voiced by law professor Kate Stith, who told a group of 300 Yale law students that “I worry that we teach you the Constitution means whatever you can make it mean”).

The Roe v. Wade decision was based on a tangled web of lies and subterfuge. Attorney Sarah Weddington lied to Norma McCorvey to lure her into becoming “Jane Roe.” Attorney Margie Hames lied to Sandra Cano to lure her into becoming “Mary Doe.” Both cases were brought to the Supreme Court with a carefully orchestrated media campaign of flagrant lies about “millions of women” seeking “back-alley abortions” and “tens of thousands dying” as a result.

It’s inconceivable that the justices were not aware that the principals were lying. But more shameless than the lying lawyers’ patently false testimony were the private deliberations of the justices themselves.

In 1988 the chronicle of the Court’s premeditated deception and outright lies came to light when the Library of Congress made available to the public the confidential Court papers of Justice William O. Douglas. Without these memos (researched by Robert Marshall of the Virginia House of Delegates for an article in Celebrate Life) the Court’s flagrant betrayal of American judicial processes would have remained unknown.

The Court’s intentional deception actually began in 1965 when Justice William Brennan Jr. (an “adroit judicial ventriloquist” in the words of Marshall) guided Justice Douglas in writing the majority opinion in Griswold v. Connecticut, a case involving the sale of contraceptives. A nominal Catholic, Justice Brennan was the Supreme Court’s chief ideologue. He saw in Griswold (and later in Roe) the triumph of the social libertarian philosophy that he so avidly promoted.

The justices had searched in vain for a constitutional basis for Griswold. Of course there was none. But in a note to Justice Douglas (“with reasoning that ricocheted around the Bill of Rights like a pinball” - Marshall), Justice Brennan proposed the solution: “We need not say how far [the right of privacy] would extend, nor intimate even remotely whether it would encompass ‘privacy’ in the common law sense.” Whatever the “contours of a Constitutional right to privacy,” Griswold could be based on the “First Amendment right of association [and]...the Ninth Amendment admonition that the enumeration of rights is not exhaustive.” The decision could then be “created out of the Fourth Amendment and the self-incrimination clause of the Fifth, together with the Third….”

“In human laws, where mystery begins,” Edmund Burke said, “justice ends.” From Brennan’s confused gibberish Douglas wrote in Griswold that “Specific guarantees in the Bill of Rights have penumbras [or shadows] formed by emanations from those guarantees that help give them life and substance…. Various guarantees create zones of privacy.” (Writing in dissent, Justice Potter Stewart observed that “I can find no such general right of privacy in the Bill of Rights, in any other part of the Constitution or in any case ever before decided by this Court.”)

By the time the Roe and Doe appeals arrived from the lower courts, the Supreme Court had become a veritable Theater of the Absurd. Again Justice Brennan was the ventriloquist, but this time the dummy was Justice Harry Blackmun, who was assigned to write the Court’s majority opinion.

Calling for help in “his legal shopping spree in search of some Constitutional peg for the abortion ‘right’” (Marshall), Blackmun wrote in a note to Brennan that “I come out on the theory that the Texas statute is unconstitutionally vague. This may or may not appeal to you. In any event, I am still flexible as to results.” (“Vagueness” had been introduced by attorney Weddington and seized on by Brennan and Blackmun in the pleadings.)

Brennan was unsatisfied with simple “vagueness.” He replied that “a majority of us felt that the Constitution required the invalidation of [anti-] abortion statutes.” Blackmun’s job was to find excuses for the majority’s ideological feelings.

Brennan instructed Blackmun that some issues “must be expressly addressed,” but others “should be simply finessed.” Finessed was a favorite word of Brennan’s. In both Roe and Doe he found a number of questions that needed to be “finessed.” (Webster defines finesse as “subtlety of contrivance; cunning; stratagem, artifice.”) He further suggested that questions that couldn’t be “finessed” should be simply resolved by “dicta” - declarative statements not supported by facts.

In his notes to Blackmun, Brennan expressed doubts that “Mary Doe” actually existed and observed that because she was “apparently a resident of Georgia, she seems to lack standing to raise the rights of non-residents.” But he brushed aside these legalisms, writing that “It may be best to finesse that question.” Since “Jane Roe” had already given birth and the baby had been adopted before the case reached the Court, she also no longer had “standing” and her case was moot. That problem also needed to be “finessed.”

Blackmun brazenly began his majority opinion for Roe v. Wade by declaring that “our task, of course, is to resolve the issue by constitutional measurement….” Admitting that “the Constitution does not explicitly mention any right of privacy,” he allowed that a long list of factors could “influence” and “color one’s thinking.” These factors were “one’s philosophy, one’s experiences, one’s exposure to the raw edges of human existence” along with “population growth, pollution, poverty, and racial overtones [that] tend to complicate…the problem.”

Blackmun didn’t explain how this laundry list of extraneous factors was the “constitutional measurement” that guided the Court’s decision legalizing abortion. Perhaps no explanation was needed, since American constitutional law was now being based on the prejudicial “feelings” of the Justices.

Blackmun noted Weddington’s claim that “the Texas statutes were unconstitutionally vague and that they abridged her [“Jane Doe’s”] right of personal privacy, protected by the First, Fourth, Fifth, Ninth, and Fourteenth Amendments.” Thus the Court felt the right to abortion was somewhere in the Constitution because: “This right of privacy, whether it be founded in the Fourteenth Amendment’s concept of personal liberty and restrictions upon state action, as we feel it is, or, as the District Court determined, in the Ninth Amendment’s reservation of rights to the people, is broad enough to encompass a woman’s decision whether or not to terminate her pregnancy” (italics added).

Blackmun followed his introduction with a protracted but highly selective history of abortion law and popular beliefs. He wrote at length of attitudes toward abortion in pagan Greece and Rome, citing Plato, Aristotle, Galen, and the Pythagoreans. He briefly mentioned the Hippocratic Oath (which doctors have sworn for 2,000 years) but dismissed it because “The late Dr. Edelstein…concludes that the Oath originated in a group representing only a small segment of Greek opinion.”

Blackmun did not mention ancient Jewish beliefs, illustrated, for example, by Flavius Josephus, a first-century Jewish historian who wrote: “The law has commanded us to raise all children and prohibited women from aborting or destroying seed; a woman who does so shall be judged a murderess of children….”

“Blackmun made it abundantly clear,” observed Dr. C. Everett Koop, editor of The Journal of Pediatric Surgery, “that if any religion was to be a guide to him it would be paganism. He alluded to the practice of the Persians, the Greeks, and the Romans, but he ignored Christianity.”

Indeed he did. Blackmun failed to mention that early Christians were horrified at Rome’s “culture of death” and repeatedly inveighed against “aborting or destroying seed.” Nowhere did he indicate that the Didache (written c. A.D. 70 for instructing catechumens) emphatically condemned abortion, commanding that “You shall not murder a child by abortion nor kill that which is begotten.”

In his defense written to the emperor, St. Justin used Christian condemnation of abortion and infanticide to illustrate how Christians differed from pagans. (Unfortunately, as would be true today, that didn’t win the emperor’s sympathy or save St. Justin from martyrdom.) In A.D. 375 St. Basil wrote that “A woman who deliberately destroys a fetus is answerable for murder. And any fine distinction as to its being formed or unformed is not admissible among us”(italics added).

“To prevent birth is anticipated murder,” wrote the famous Christian apologist Tertullian. Athenagoras, Hippolytus, Clement, Origen, the Councils of Elvira, Ancyra, Lerida, Braga - the list of Church Fathers and Church Councils which condemned abortion in the Roman world could go on and on. None of these was mentioned. Perhaps “the late Dr. Edelstein” wasn’t aware of them.

Following his disregard of Christianity, Blackmun launched into a long dissertation (with carefully selected quotes) on the absence of abortion from English and American common law. All of this is irrelevant, of course, because until the latter part of the 19th century, childbirth and related issues (such as contraception and abortion) were not considered part of “medicine” and were not associated with doctors. Accordingly, they were not addressed by the common law. Childbirth and other “women’s problems” were dealt with by midwives and, when addressed at all, were dealt with by local regulation. Abortion was considered witchcraft, and midwives caught aborting were dealt with accordingly.

Blackmun dismissed state laws against abortion as simply measures to protect women, not their babies. “Thus, it has been argued [referring to Weddington during the pleadings] that a State’s real concern in enacting a criminal abortion law was to protect the pregnant woman, that is, to restrain her from submitting to a procedure that placed her life in serious jeopardy.” He offered no basis for this absurd statement, which would have angered early feminist leaders who strongly condemned abortion and had fought for anti-abortion laws.

It is especially important to note that throughout his meandering discussion, Blackmun was fixated on the concept of “quickening,” the moment when a mother first feels her baby move. In fact, in his leisurely stroll through history, he mentioned “quick” or “quickening” over 20 times.

In Footnote 22 of the Roe v. Wade decision we discover the bizarre explanation for Blackmun’s fixation and, with it, the basis for current American constitutional law: “Aristotle’s thinking derived from his three-stage theory of life: vegetable, animal, rational. The vegetable state was reached at conception, the animal at ‘animation’ [quickening], and the rational soon after live birth.” He then emphasized that St. Augustine (who condemned all abortions) “made a distinction between embryo inanimatus, not yet endowed with a soul, and embryo animatus [quickened].”

The Supreme Court’s decision in Roe v. Wade was in fact based on primitive pre-scientific concepts of biology, propounded by Aristotle and innocently accepted by Augustine and Aquinas, that the “seed” is merely an “inanimate object” until God at some point “infuses” into it a living soul.

In Roe v. Wade the Supreme Court, always so careful to protect the nation from “an establishment of religion,” established ancient paganism (supported by the medieval philosophers’ ignorance of embryology) as the legally recognized foundation for American law!

Blackmun summarized his feelings: “The heart of the matter is that somewhere, either forthwith at conception, or at ‘quickening,’ or at birth, or at some other point in between, another being becomes involved…. It is not for us of the judiciary, especially at this point in the development of man’s knowledge, to speculate or to specify when life begins.”

Seven of the nine justices were apparently unaware that Zacharias Janssen discovered the microscope in 1656, anatomist William Harvey propounded his theory of epigenesis in 1651, and anatomist Kaspar Wolff in 1759 demonstrated that all organs arise from live undifferentiated embryonic cells. And could the Court really have been unaware of the many remarkable discoveries in embryology in the 20th century?

Since the decision implies that the “development of man’s knowledge” has not progressed in 22 centuries, it might have been proper for those “of the judiciary…at this point in the development of man’s knowledge” to have read in Biological Principles and Modern Practice of Obstetrics that “The term conception refers to the union of the male and female pronuclear elements of procreation from which a new living being develops…. The zygote thus formed represents the beginning of a new life.”

They might have read in The Developing Human: Clinically Oriented Embryology that a zygote “results from fertilization of an oocyte by a sperm and is the beginning of a human being…. Each of us started life as a cell called a zygote.” Or in Foundations of Embryology that “Every one of the higher animals starts life as a single cell - the fertilized ovum. The union of two such sex cells to form a zygote constitutes the process of fertilization and initiates the life of a new individual.”

They might have read in Having a Baby, written by Planned Parenthood’s Dr. Alan Guttmacher in 1950, that a new baby is created at fertilization - “the exact moment when a new life is initiated.”

Or “those of the judiciary” might have looked at a middle school textbook. But they didn’t. One of the great ironies of history is that the Supreme Court announced its adherence to a prescientific concept of fetal life.

After discussing their strange views of embryology, the Court progressed further into an ethereal realm far beyond Aristotle’s metaphysics. Collectively they proposed the indecipherable metaphysical hypothesis that the unborn baby “represents only the potentiality of life.” As “potential life,” of course, either unborn babies don’t actually exist before birth or they exist but are not alive. So far no one has explained, theologically, philosophically, or scientifically, what “the potentiality of human life” could possibly mean.

The justices further collectively admitted their inability to determine that “potentially living” unborn babies, if they actually do exist, are “persons.” (Any dictionary would have helped them.) Since babies not yet born are only “potentially” alive and have only “the suggestion of personhood” (whatever that may mean), they are not protected by the Constitution. An earlier Court had similar problems determining “personhood” in the Dred Scott decision, but they at least recognized that African-Americans were alive.

On January 22, 1973, a clerk called the Court to order with the now-cynical prayer: “God save this honorable Court.” The justices filed into the chamber and handed down their decision in Roe v. Wade.

Explaining the decision, Chief Justice Warren Burger emphatically denied that Roe v. Wade authorized abortion on demand. “Plainly,” he stated, “the court today rejects any claim that the Constitution required abortion on demand.” The decision allowed unlimited abortion only in the first trimester.

From the third month to “viability,” states could impose some regulations to safeguard the health of the mother. After “viability” the state could forbid abortions, “except to preserve the life or health of the mother.” (Six years later the Court determined, with Blackmun again writing the majority opinion, that - contrary to his opinion in Roe v. Wade - the word viability is “vague” and laws based on viability are “unconstitutional” - Colautti v. Franklin.)

But the Court’s “schizophrenic subterfuge” didn’t end with Roe v. Wade. After explaining the restrictions in Roe, Chief Justice Burger handed down the Court’s decision in Doe v. Bolton, which allowed abortion up to the moment of birth for reasons of “health.” The Doe decision defined health as “all factors - physical, emotional, psychological, familial, and the woman’s age - relevant to the well-being of the patient.” What Roe gave, Doe took away, a fact that Chief Justice Burger finally noticed in 1986 when in Thornburgh v. American Coll. of Obs. & Gyns, he expressed chagrin at what had been done by means of Roe v. Wade.

Under post-Roe American law, unborn babies, having only “the suggestion of personhood,” can be destroyed up to the moment of birth.

But Justice William “Moonbeam” Douglas had written the Court’s Sierra opinion which specified who, in American law, can be considered a person:

The ordinary corporation is a “person” for purposes of the adjudicatory process…. So it should be as respects valleys, alpine meadows, rivers, lakes, estuaries, beaches, ridges, groves of trees, swampland or even air that feels the destructive pressures of modern life…. The problem is to make certain that the inanimate objects…have spokesmen before they are destroyed…. All forms of life will stand before the court - the pileated woodpecker as well as the coyote and bear, the lemmings as well as the trout in the streams.

Under current American constitutional law, pileated woodpeckers are “persons”; human babies are not.

So “the blood-dimmed tide is loosed” (Yeats). In The Origins of Nazi Genocide, Henry Friedlanders pointed to the importance of the German euthanasia program that the Nazis found in operation when they came to power. The program “convinced the Nazi leadership that mass murder was technically feasible, ordinary men and women were willing to kill large numbers of innocent human beings, and the bureaucracy would cooperate in such an unprecedented enterprise.” America has by now learned that lesson well.

The Roe and Doe decisions have corrupted our children, corrupted our schools, corrupted the entertainment and news media, and corrupted our government.

The decision has especially corrupted the medical profession. Year after year the ocean of blood continues to deepen. Consider an advertisement in the National Institutes of Health Guide offering for sale the following items: “Human embryonic and fetal tissues available from the Central Laboratory for Human Embryology at the University of Washington.” The director claims that they “are the premier laboratory when it comes to actually separating the fetus into its various parts.” Today the buying and selling of human fetal parts is a multi-billion dollar business.

Several years ago Washington State Supreme Court Justice Richard Sanders told a group of supporters that “Nothing is, nor should be, more fundamental in our legal system than the preservation and protection of innocent human life.” In saying this he reflected 2,000 years of Christian teaching and reaffirmed 200 years of American belief in the three fundamental requirements of a civilized society, “Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness,” that are found in The Declaration of Independence.

When Judge Sanders spoke of “the protection of innocent human life,” a call was raised for his impeachment. The news media accused Sanders of breaching the “tension” between judicial impartiality and free speech, and the state’s Commission on Judicial Conduct held two days of hearings to consider his removal from the bench. He was formally reprimanded and ordered to attend a course in “judicial ethics,” though on appeal to a state court, the Commission’s reprimand was withdrawn.

“When will all this extermination cease?” Dr. Nyiszli asked Dr. Mengele in Auschwitz. And Dr. Mengele answered: “My friend! It will go on, and on, and on.”

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Would You Consider ABORTION In the Following Situations?

1. A preacher and his wife are very, very poor. They already have 14 children. Now she finds that she’s pregnant with number 15. They’re living in tremendous poverty. Would you consider recommending an abortion?

If you answered “yes,” you would have recommended the death of John Wesley.

2. The father is ill with syphilis (FPB adds: as well as a regular drunkard); the mother has tuberculosis. They have had four children. One child has died, one is blind, one deaf, and one has tuberculosis. The mother is pregnant. Would you recommend an abortion?

If you answered “yes,” you would have recommended the death of Ludwig van Beethoven.

3. A baby is born crippled and a dwarf. If that outcome had been predicted in advance, would you have recommended an abortion?

If you answered “yes,” you would have recommended the death of Alexander Pope.

4. A white man raped a 13-year-old black girl and impregnated her. Would you recommend an abortion?

If you answered “yes,” you would have recommended the death of the gospel singer Ethel Waters.

5. A poor teenage girl is pregnant and unmarried. Her soldier father disowns her and the child. She would name the child after the father and raise the child, while bearing the disgrace of illegitimacy. Would you recommend an abortion?

If you answered “yes,” you would have recommended the death of Father Joseph Mohr, lyricist and co-composer of “Silent Night.”

6. A teenage girl is pregnant. She’s not married. Her fiancé is not the father of the baby. Would you recommend an abortion?

If you answered “yes,” you would have recommended the death of the Lord Jesus Christ. (FPB adds: Which is only too right, since what did in fact kill Jesus Christ on the Cross was the weight of our sins, of which abortion is hardly the least.)

Permission for our readers to reprint this is granted by American Life League, Inc., P.O. Box 1350, Stafford VA 22555.

Joseph Collison is Director of the Office of Pro-Life Activities for the Diocese of Norwich, Connecticut. He also writes for the Four County Catholic, the diocesan newspaper of Norwich.