Roe v. Wade--31 Years of Life Denied
"America needs no words from me to see how your decision in Roe v. Wade has deformed a great nation. The so-called right to abortion has pitted mothers against their children and women against men. It has sown violence and discord at the heart of the most intimate human relationships. It has aggravated the derogation of the father's role in an increasingly fatherless society. It has portrayed the greatest of gifts--a child--as a competitor, an intrusion, and an inconvenience." --Mother Teresa
January 22, 2004 marks the 31st anniversary of the Roe v. Wade Supreme Court decision that legalized abortion on demand in the United States. Since then over 44 million unborn children have lost their lives to abortion and countless thousands of women have suffered the destructive physical and emotional pain of abortion. According to the Alan Guttmacher Institute (Planned Parenthood’s right arm), it is estimated that 43% of US women will have at least one abortion by the time they are 45 years old.
*The following article is by Dr. Frank Beckwith, Associate Professor of Philosophy, Culture, and Law, and W. Howard Hoffman Scholar at Trinity Graduate School, Trinity International University, California Campus. He holds a Ph.D. from Fordham University.
It is important to understand the current legal status of abortion in America. There seems to be a widespread perception that the Supreme Court decision Roe v. Wade(1973) only permits abortions up to 24 weeks, and after that time only to save the life of the mother. This false perception, fueled in large part by groups supporting abortion rights, is uncritically accepted by the media. The fact is that the current law does not restrict a woman from getting an abortion for practically any reason she deems fit during the entire nine months of pregnancy. In order to understand why this is the case, a brief history lesson is in order.
In Roe, Justice Harry Blackmun divided pregnancy into three trimesters. He ruled that aside from normal procedural guidelines (e.g., an abortion must be safely performed by a licensed physician), a state has no right to restrict abortion in the first six months of pregnancy. Thus, a woman could have an abortion during the first two trimesters for any reason she deemed fit, whether it be an unplanned pregnancy, gender selection, convenience, or rape. In the last trimester, the state has a right, although not an obligation, to restrict abortions to only those cases in which the mother's health is jeopardized. In sum, Roe v. Wade does not prevent a state from allowing unrestricted abortion for the entire nine months of pregnancy if it so chooses.
Like many other states, my state of Nevada has chosen to restrict abortion in the last trimester by only permitting abortions if "there is a substantial risk that the continuance of the pregnancy would endanger the life of the patient or would gravely impair the physical or mental health of the patient." But this restriction is a restriction in name only. For the Supreme Court so broadly defined "health" in Roe's companion decision, Doe v. Bolton(1973), that for all intents and purposes the current law in every state except Missouri and Pennsylvania (where the restrictions have been enacted into law) allows for abortion on demand.
In Bolton the court ruled that "health" must be taken in its broadest possible medical context, and must be defined "in light of all factors -- physical, emotional, psychological, familial, and the woman's age -- relevant to the well being of the patient. All these factors relate to health." Since all pregnancies have consequences for a woman's emotional and family situation, the court's health provision has the practical effect of legalizing abortion up until the time of birth, if a woman can convince her physician that she needs the abortion to preserve her "emotional health." This is why the Senate Judiciary Committee, after much critical evaluation of the current law in light of the court's opinions, concluded that "no significant legal barriers of any kind whatsoever exist today in the United States for a woman to obtain an abortion for any reason during any stage of her pregnancy." A number of legal scholars have come to the same conclusion, offering comments and observations such as the following:
1. In actual effect, Roe v. Wade judicially created abortion on demand in the United States.
2. The concept of "health," as defined by the Supreme Court in Doe v. Bolton, includes all medical, psychological, social, familial, and economic factors which might potentially inspire a decision to procure an abortion. As such, "health" abortion is indistinguishable from elective abortion. Thus, until a more narrow definition of "health" is obtained, it may not be possible to limit effectively the number of abortions performed.
3. After viability, the mother's life or health (which presumably is to be defined very broadly indeed, so as to include what many might regard as the mother's convenience...) must, as a matter of constitutional law, take precedence over...the fetus's life...
4. It is safe to say, therefore, that in the first six months of pregnancy a woman can have an abortion for no reason, but in the last three months she can have it for any reason. This is abortion on demand.
Those who defend abortion rights do not deny this disturbing fact but often dismiss it by claiming that only one percent of all abortions are done in the last trimester. There are several problems with this statistical dismissal. First, the fact that third-trimester abortions are permitted for nearly any reason and that unborn children are left unprotected is significant in itself regardless of whether a small percentage of total abortions has taken place during this time. Second, since there are about 1.5 million abortions per year in the United States, it follows that 15,000 (or one percent) of them are done in the third trimester. This means that 1,250 of them are performed every month (about 40 a day). This is no insignificant number. (end of article)
The Supreme Court held that a woman's right to an abortion fell within the right to privacy protected by the Fourteenth Amendment. The Pro-life Action League conducted an interview with Norma McCorvey, the "Roe" of Roe v. Wade and Sandra Cano, the "Doe" of Doe v. Bolton. We find that they were used to make abortion legal in America. Before the Supreme Court's decisions actually came down on legalized abortion, the pro-abortion lobby had been working for a number of years to bring that about and break down America's attitudes toward abortion. Anybody who's read Bernard Nathanson's (a former abortionist) book or heard him speak has heard about the lies and the deceit and their specific intention to blame the churches, specifically the Catholic Church, claiming that 10,000 women were dying from illegal abortions. No records actually show any figures even remotely close to that. So we know that they were pushing really hard to break down America's values for life. And in the process, they needed to find some pregnant women that they could use to bring a case against various state laws and strike down those laws against abortion. As a matter of fact, both Norma McCorvey and Sandra Cano are pro-life. What is not well known is that Sandra never had, wanted or believed in abortion. Her story can be found at Priests for Life.
In 1995, Norma became a pro-life Christian, and in 1998 was initiated into the Catholic Church. She now has her own pro-life ministry and website at www.roenomore.org.
If you would like more information about these Supreme Court cases, log onto www.roevwade.org.
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Silent No More
Roe v. Wade: 30 Years Of Lies
by Tom Neven, editor of Focus on the Family magazine
Hoist by your own petard -- an old literary expression that means blown up by your own bomb. In 1973 the ACLU and feminist lawyers dropped a bomb on
American culture by asking the Supreme Court to legalize abortion on demand. But the two women they used as pawns are now doing something explosive -- trying to take their cases back to the Court to have them overturned. And according to Rule 60 of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure, there's nothing the pro-abortionists can do about it. Rule 60 states that "Upon such terms as are just, a motion can be made by a party and the judgment will be set aside." Basically, the plaintiffs say they know things now that they didn't know before, such as the fact that Roe v. Wade and its companion case, Doe v. Bolton, were based upon lies, the fact of post-abortion trauma suffered by millions of women and the well-documented link between abortion and breast cancer.
Taken advantage of Norma McCorvey, the Jane Roe of Roe v. Wade, and Sandra Cano, the Mary Doe
of Doe v. Bolton, are now pro-life Christians. While McCorvey's case was about abortion, even though she lied to her lawyers, Cano's was not remotely associated with the gruesome procedure. In 1970 Cano was a homeless mother of three children who had been taken away. Cano approached the local legal-aid office seeking custody of her children and a divorce from her husband. What she received was something
she never requested: the legal right to abort her child. Cano admits she was young, uneducated and naïve. "I never wanted an abortion. I just wanted my children back," she says. Her legal-aid attorney, Margie Pitts Hames, however, filed the case under
false pretenses. Cano says that either Hames forged her signature on the affidavit, or she slipped it in among other papers Cano was told to sign for her divorce. Cano never saw the affidavit that was filed with the Supreme Court, but she says unequivocally, "The facts stated in the affidavit in Doe v. Bolton are not true."
"Before my court date, I was instructed not to say anything and just be there," Cano says. "This is the only time I ever made an appearance in court before the Doe decision -- and I never spoke a word." The deception went further. Cano says that a TV interview was basically faked. "They set up the cameras facing my back, and then Margie did all the talking like she was me. It wasn't even my voice." Years later, when Cano tried to have her court records unsealed, she was
fought by, of all people, her former attorney, Hames. "At first I couldn't understand why; she knew it was me. But now I understand." The affidavit said that she had applied for an abortion, had been turned
down and had therefore sued the state of Georgia. "According to the records, I had applied for an abortion through a panel of nine doctors and
nurses at [state-funded] Grady Memorial Hospital," she says. "This is a lie. I contacted the hospital and tried to get my records. At first they said they were there, but when my attorney sent for them, the records disappeared, if they ever really existed." In fact, Cano was against abortion. When told she had "won" her court case, Cano says, "It was like a whole bunch of bricks were put on my shoulders, and it has been that way ever since. I never wanted an abortion. Regardless of the worst state of misery or depression, it would never cross my mind to take the life of a child."
Another pawn
In 1969 Norma McCorvey was a self-described hippie and often unhappy. "I'd been on the streets since I was 9 or 10," she says. "I often told my mother, 'I wish I could find the person who invented life. I'd slap 'em.'" She was pregnant for the third time -- the second time out of wedlock -- and looked into getting an abortion. The illegal abortion clinic she was referred to was, in the mildest of terms, disgusting. "There was dried blood all over the floor and on the side of this makeshift table," McCorvey says. "There was a grip hanging from the ceiling. I guess that's what the girls would hold on to. This was before they could give them anesthesia. I saw the conditions of the place and went outside to get ill."
Eventually, McCorvey was recommended to two young women fresh out of law school, Sarah Weddington and Linda Coffee. She lied to them, saying she had been gang-raped. "They said, 'Well, you know, women have the right to vote,' " McCorvey says. "I'm sitting there and thinking, Well, I may live part time in the
streets and part time at my dad's, but I'm not stupid, okay? They were treating me like I was stupid, and I resented that. "Then they said, 'Well, Norma, don't you think women should have rights to
their own reproductive organs?' And I'm going, like, yeah. I wasn't real sure what they were talking about, but then you have to understand that I stayed stoned a lot." They told McCorvey that the case was only about Texas' abortion laws. (Ironically, because the case dragged out in the courts, McCorvey never got
an abortion. She gave up the baby for adoption.) When she found out that the case had gone all the way to the Supreme Court and resulted in legalizing abortion in all 50 states, she was stunned. "I sat in the dining room that night and just kept rereading the newspaper story and drinking -- drinking and thinking," she says. "It made me sad to know that my name, even though it was a pseudonym, would always be connected to the death of children." McCorvey got a straight razor and started cutting her wrists a little at a time. "That didn't work, so I went out and I got as many pills as I could. I took all of them and chased it with a quart of Johnny Walker, thinking I would die, and I wouldn't ever have to talk to Sarah Weddington or Linda Coffee again. But that was not God's plan for me."
Silent no more
Both women now are in a position to take away some of that shame, particularly since McCorvey became a Christian in the mid-1990s and Cano two years ago. With the help of the Texas Justice Foundation, they are asking the Supreme Court to rehear their cases. (The Foundation is also representing Donna Santa Marie, a 16-year-old girl whose parents forced her
to get an abortion -- after her father allegedly punched her in the stomach to try to induce a miscarriage.) Allan Parker, president of the Foundation, says, "They were willing to listen to Norma the first time; they ought to be willing to listen to her again." He is launching a three-phased strategy called Operation Outcry: Silent No More.
"We have filed a Friend of the Court brief on behalf of Norma and Sandra, and thousands of women who have signed our Friend of the Court form, saying they don't agree with Roe v. Wade." In Parker's second phase of litigation, he has sued the Texas Department of Health for not adequately protecting women's health as it relates to abortion. "While this suit can't overturn Roe v. Wade, we want women to be
told, 'This is a human life that you're taking. You still have the choice under Roe, but you may suffer severe psychological consequences.'" The third phase of Operation Outcry will be filing the motion to reopen Roe v. Wade and Doe v. Bolton, based on the fact that false testimonies were used in both. "I believe that the Supreme Court will take and hear the
case," Parker says. "It's a unique, historic opportunity in America where two people who won landmark Supreme Court decisions want to go back."
Silent No More is a campaign to raise awareness about the negative after-affects of abortion and we need your help! SNM invites women who regret their abortion to participate in events being planned at state capitols and in Washington DC. during
the week of January 18th - 25th. Carry a sign, share your testimony, meet one another and help us tell the nation the truth about abortion. SNM needs your voice to be heard to help other hurting women.
Register on-line at www.silentnomoreawareness.org or call 800-707-6635.
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