Norma McCorvey never wanted an abortion — she was seeking a divorce from her husband — but young, pro-abortion feminist attorney Sarah Weddington used McCorvey’s case as a means of attempting to overturn Texas’ law, making most abortions illegal. Weddington took the case all the way to the Supreme Court, which invalidated every pro-life state law in the nation protecting unborn children. But most Americans don’t know that McCorvey, who was “pro-choice” on abortion at the time, is now a pro-life advocate. She is dedicated to reversing the Supreme Court case that bears her fictitious name, Jane Roe. (Lifenews.com)
Some people refer to the "legalization" of abortion in 1973 in the Supreme Court decision of Roe v. Wade. The statement is misleading. Roe v. Wade DIDN'T legalize abortion procedures in the United States. Women were already obtaining legal abortions in the early stages of pregnancy in some states, citing rape, incest, danger to their health or damage to the fetus. A few other states had similar exceptions. By 1970, New York, Alaska, Washington, and Hawaii were offering unrestricted abortions.
What DID occur because of the 1973 court decision was a federal mandate forbidding the rest of the states from outlawing abortions during the first twenty-four weeks of pregnancy.
It also forced them to allow mental and physical exceptions for abortion during the last twelve weeks of pregnancy, including questionable definitions for mental illness during an unwanted pregnancy (such as depression). Subsequent decisions by the court however, have said that states could not prohibit abortion at any time for any reason.
Although many conservatives want stricter federal abortion laws in the United States, such a measure would be just as unconstitutional as the previous Roe v Wade decision. What the Supreme Court rendered in 1973 was flagrantly unconstitutional! I believe this stems from many Americans sadly believing the government grants their rights.The main part of the Constitution simply establishes the framework for the federal government and its three parts, defines their respective duties, and establishes what the federal government can do and what the states can do.
None of that has anything at all to do with individual rights or with social issues.
“The Bill of Rights, which is a set of amendments added after ratification to reassure opponents of the Constitution that the new government would not usurp their rights, simply forbids the new federal government from abusing or abridging already-existing rights.
“The right to free speech and all others existed prior to the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. The language of the First Amendment tells what the intent was: "Congress shall pass no law."
“The Second Amendment did not grant people the right to keep and bear arms. They already had and continue to have that right. It simply says the already-existing right cannot be abridged. You can't abridge something that doesn't exist.” (Charley Reese, We are Revolutionaries)
If you believe that your rights come from your government, then you must also concede that the government can take them away.
“The government, by granting a "right" to abortion to a woman for almost any reason, could do it only by guaranteeing the destruction of preborn human beings. In other words, government did not expand rights; it deprived one group of humans a right to continue living in the process of permitting another group of humans the choice of not carrying their pregnancies to term. “(William L. Anderson, On the Anniversary of Roe V. Wade)
The US Supreme Court claims that the Constitution contains a "penumbra" of rights. The word penumbra means "something that covers, surrounds, or obscures". Supposedly, a hidden "right" to abortion was emanating out of this constitutional cauldron that only the Supreme Court had special powers to find. In 1973, the Court brought it forth and gave substance to shadow.
They awkwardly hinged their decision on the Fourteenth Amendment's Due Process Clause, cleverly spinning a misleading notion of a constitutional "Right to Privacy":
No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.
First, there is no mention of the word "privacy". But it does clearly state that the States shall not deprive ANY person of life, liberty or property without due process.
In the case of Roe v. Wade, the Court favored the stronger over the weaker, the bigger bully over the defenseless...even to the point of refusing to address the personhood of the younger and his rights. And all in the name of the aggressor's right to privacy? Is this justice?
Then, if we use the Court's own "stretched" interpretation, doesn't a fetus deserve to be left alone in privacy to grow and develop, considering he did not ask to be born, but came into being as a result of the FREE choices (albeit, reckless and perhaps uninformed) of his mother and father?
As a libertarian, I value my privacy and do not want the government prying or interfering into how I choose to live my life. But if, in the enjoyment of my privacy, I harm other individuals, use them against their consent to further my pleasure, or coerce others into my pleasures who do not have fully informed consciences, such as children or the mentally impaired, then I am an aggressor!
If you like porn, that's your business. However, you lose your "right" to privacy when you force my child against his will to participate in it or look at pornography. Your freedom ends when your actions harm another person.
When plantation owners invoked their legal "right" to do as they privately pleased with their black property, was it proper for citizens to side with them?
Although legal at the time, owning and abusing imported black Africans was immoral. Abolitionists worked tirelessly to raise awareness and the conscience of the American people that led to a significant overruling by the Supreme Court of the infamous Dred Scott Decision, and then to the eventual end of slavery in this country.
I used to teach high school courses at a private, Christian school. The students were consistently horrified to learn that people of African descent imported to this country for slavery were once legally deemed "chattel" (property), and therefore were not citizens (legal persons) with any Constitutional protections. Slaves could not sue in court, nor could they be taken away from their owners without due process.
I often wonder if one day, future generations in America will also find it hard to believe that we gave protective rights to a host of animals from eagles to whales, but none to developing human beings!
“Abortion involves the deliberate, terminal removal of a defenseless human being from its property (the fetal membranes are part of the zygote's cells; it takes no tissue or blood from the host), and the destructive dislodging of the fetus and his property from the womb--a place he "entered" not by request, but by the free will actions of the host.
“Thus, is the fetus really the property of the host or a temporary guest who comes for room and board? Does a landlord own a renter? Should a renter ever be denied due process?
“That's why pro-choicers fight so hard against acknowledging the personhood of the fetus, despite the embryological evidence. If we granted these little human beings the status of legal personhood, then everything would change. It did for slavery!
“Second, the United States Supreme Court is supposed to be restricted by the Constitution to interpret existing laws, not "discover" new ones.
“It (Roe v. Wade) was a flawed decision, not because it legalized abortion, but because it usurped the authority of 50 state legislatures. Far too many judges, both federal and state, have taken it upon themselves to legislate rather than rule on existing law.
“It's important to understand the difference between legislatures and courts. All of the moral and philosophical decisions are the province of legislatures. It is in the legislature that the will of the people expresses itself.
“Courts properly have no legislative function. Their function is to look at a written law and see if it applies to a particular case. In the case of the Supreme Court, it is supposed to decide if any law conforms to the U.S. Constitution.
“The Constitution is dead silent on abortion and on practically every other moral and philosophical issue.
“It was a charter authorized by the sovereign states for a federal government with limited powers. All you have to do is read the document, and you can plainly see it is simply about the structure of government and the powers assigned to the various components.
“Prior to Roe v. Wade, the question of abortion had been left properly to the 50 states. It was legal is some states, not in others. What the Supreme Court did, without a shred of basis in the Constitution, was to declare its exclusive right to decide the issue for all 50 states!
“The excuse was that prohibiting abortion was an invasion of privacy and that the right of privacy is in the "penumbra" of the Constitution. That's 200 percent baloney. The Constitution makes no mention of privacy! The closest it comes is saying that homes may be searched and private papers seized if due process of law is followed. That certainly is not a broad grant of privacy.
“And if prohibiting the murder of an infant in the womb is a violation of a woman's right to privacy, why is it not a violation of her right to privacy to prohibit her murder of other children? Indeed, following the illogic of that court, the whole criminal code is a violation of people's right to privacy.” (Charley Reese, Judges and Solons)
In the '60s, an 1879 law still on the books in Connecticut forbid any use of contraception or the assisting of anyone seeking contraception. It had not been enforced for years, and women were easily getting contraceptives over the counter in the state as "feminine hygiene" products.
The law was challenged and first came before the Supreme Court in the 1961 case, Poe v. Ullman, where a doctor and his patients claimed they were denied their Due Process rights under the Fourteenth Amendment. Citing that the law had not been enforced in many years, the Court dismissed the case on the ground that the plaintiffs lacked sufficient standing to sue.
Next, Estelle Griswold, the Director of the Planned Parenthood League of Connecticut, opened a birth control clinic in New Haven to dispense contraceptives. This "hanging out a sign" was designed to challenge the law.
Griswold and C. Lee Buxton, a physician who served as the Medical Director of the League, were arrested and charged with providing contraceptive information, devices, and drugs to a married Connecticut couple.
They appealed their conviction to the Supreme Court, citing the law violated the Fourteenth Amendment. This time, the Supreme Court agreed. Remember the "penumbra of rights and emanations" hocus-pocus?
In a gigantic leap of circus-like judicial activism, the judges in Griswold vs. Connecticut "discovered" guarantees in the First Amendment, the Third Amendment, the Fourth Amendment, the Fifth Amendment, and the Ninth Amendment that emanated a “zone of privacy" that begged to come out into the light of law. This zone, they insisted, protects the right to privacy in the marriage relationship.
A later case established the right of unmarried people to contraception and opened the door to expanding the definition--on a federal level--of what is included in a person's privacy. It thereby set the judicial stage for Roe V. Wade. (source: Griswold vs. Connecticut)
Even one of the dissenting judges in the Griswold case, Potter Stewart, agreed that the Connecticut law was "silly", but not a matter for the US Supreme Court to take up because it was NOT a constitutional issue:
“Since 1879, Connecticut has had on its books a law which forbids the use of contraceptives by anyone. I think this is an uncommonly silly law. As a practical matter, the law is obviously unenforceable, except in the oblique context of the present case. As a philosophical matter, I believe the use of contraceptives in the relationship of marriage should be left to personal and private choice, based upon each individual's moral, ethical, and religious beliefs.
“As a matter of social policy, I think professional counsel about methods of birth control should be available to all, so that each individual's choice can be meaningfully made. But we are not asked in this case to say whether we think this law is unwise, or even asinine. We are asked to hold that it violates the United States Constitution. And that I cannot do.” (Griswold vs. Connecticut)
From a 1965 Time Magazine article: "All these emanations failed to impress dissenting Justice Potter Stewart, who could find no constitutional infringements whatever in the law. In what conceivable way, asked he, did Connecticut's birth-control law violate the Third Amendment ban against quartering soldiers in private homes? How could a federal court use the Ninth Amendment to take away rights assigned to the people's elected state representatives?
Stewart's solution? Let Connecticut citizens persuade their legislature to repeal the law!
Indeed, by the time of Griswold vs. Connecticut, the birth control pill was already available in some states to physicians. After the Griswold case, contraceptives became available to married women in 1965 and to unmarried women in 1972
The point is this: the birth control pill was bringing about the revolution in contraceptive use and we DID NOT need the federal government's interference!
THE PEOPLE--the citizens in each state--would have pressured for reform in community standards that would have eventually changed their laws...changes made by the state legislatures, not the federal government!
I don't fault Estelle Griswold for opening a clinic and challenging the law. However, I regret she did not keep her fight inside Connecticut. That makes me suspicious as to the entire political agenda of Planned Parenthood from the beginning. Federal mandates translate into federal funding with our tax dollars (which they now receive in the millions) to not only offer contraceptives and counseling, but also abortion services nationwide.
What will the national landscape look like if Roe v. Wade is ever overturned? Each state will regain power to constitutionally regulate the abortion industry within its borders. A few states would probably ban abortions, but most would retain the freedoms worded within the Roe decision for first trimester abortions and, more than likely, put tougher restrictions on second and third trimester abortions, which would vary from state to state. Still, others would have very liberal laws.
Therefore, a woman with an unwanted pregnancy can travel to a nearby city or state that offers the abortion services she wants during any stage of pregnancy. The couple in Griswold could have done the same thing, but they were being "guided" (used is a better word) by Planned Parenthood's legal team. Women would NOT be forced to revert to "back alley "abortions, nor would they be arrested as criminals.
Mary Calderone, (former Medical Director of Planned Parenthood) and Nancy Howell Lee (a pro-choice researcher) both investigated the practice of criminal abortion in the pre-legalization era.
Calderone estimated that 90% of all illegal abortions in the early 1960s were being done by physicians.
Calderone further estimated that 8% were self-induced, and 2% were induced by someone other than the woman or a doctor. Lee estimated that 89% of pre-legalization abortions were done by physicians, an additional 5% by nurses or others with some medical training, and 6% were done by non-medical persons or the woman herself.
Calderone's numbers came from "43 men and women from the various disciplines of obstetrics, psychiatry, public health, sociology, forensic medicine, and law and demography." Lee interviewed women who had undergone pre-legalization abortions. The discrepancy between Lee's and Calderone's breakdowns of non-physician abortions is probably due to sampling errors.
Lee spoke only with women who survived abortions. Therefore, she would not be exposed to the proportionate number of women who chose the most dangerous alternative. Lee's sample also included only willing survey participants who would be more forthright and complete in divulging information.
Calderone, on the other hand, spoke with those likely to see the botched and fatal abortions, and therefore they would be exposed to a higher percentage of the most dangerous, self-induced abortions. In addition, Calderone's informants would have been investigating botched abortions that could be subject to a criminal investigation.
As a result, women speaking to them would be likely to withhold the true identity of their abortionists to protect them. Also, should the woman die, her family and friends might identify the woman herself as the abortionist, rather than admit their own roles in arranging or performing abortions.
Anecdotal data tends to support Lee's research. Stories of abortions by midwives, orderlies, and chiropractors and assorted lay practitioners like Harvey Karman and the Jane Syndicate (underground abortion service) are far too common to represent only 2% of criminal abortions.
Let’s rely primarily on Lee's numbers and adjusted them slightly to reflect the slight under-reporting of amateur abortions. Thus, a fair estimate of the breakdown of criminal abortions would probably look like this:
90% performed by physicians, 5% performed by trained non-physicians (medical and lay), 3% performed by an untrained accomplice, and 2% performed by the woman herself.
What did pre-legalization abortions look like in practice?
There were physicians who ran abortion mills, physicians who did selected abortions on their own patients, and physicians who worked patients through loopholes in the law. In addition to physician abortionists, there were the professional non-physicians, often operating with training, equipment, medications, and back-up provided by physicians.
Where, then, does the image of the coat hanger come in?
Lee found a different picture with women who had self-aborted from the women who had sought professional (however illegal) abortions. These self-aborting women tended to be less rational and more self-destructive than the women seeking competent abortionists. Lee also found that the women attempting self-abortion were likely to have had a death wish at the time of the abortion.
This finding is in keeping with psychiatric literature of the time, which treats self-induced abortion as a peculiar manifestation of the self-mutilating behavior common in patients with certain psychiatric disorders. Self-mutilation in patients with these disorders can range from superficial cuts and cigarette burns to self-trepanning (drilling holes in the skull), enoculation (gouging the eyes out), and amputation of limbs.
Mutilation of the genitals is not rare in these patients, and self-induced abortion was often regarded as an extreme form of genital mutilation aimed at attacking the patient's own femininity. It was in the political context, not the psychiatric or psychological context, that self-induced abortions were considered to be the expected behavior of normal women. This politicized view of self-aborting women eclipsed the reality.
This is not to say that all women who self-induce abortions are mentally ill. Investigators of post-Roe self-induced abortion injuries and deaths found other factors, such as distrust of the medical profession, a perception of home herbal abortion as more "natural," cultural preferences, and "idiosyncratic" factors nobody could readily explain.
What of the women turning up in emergency rooms and morgues?
The things they put into their bodies illustrate that there is something more going on than just an attempt to dislodge an unwanted fetus: pine oil, drain cleaner, curtain rods, ice picks, coat hangers, bicycle pumps, turpentine... Every year or so a self-induced or rank-amateur abortion death will be reported to the Centers for Disease Control, showing that the problem has not just gone away with legalization. But the problem is now swept under the rug because admitting that it exists poses a threat to the abortion agenda.
The self-induced and amateur abortions that showed up in the emergency room and the morgue gave some people a distorted view of criminal abortion. Abortion proponents capitalized on and magnified that distorted view. But the truth is that most women who were making a self-interested decision to abort found a competent person to do the abortion.
All that's changed with legalization is that abortionists have been given a new clientele -- women who would never have sought abortions had they been illegal. While that's a boon to abortionists, it's hard to argue that more abortions for ambivalent women are a real gain to society, or to the women themselves. (The Bad Old Days of Abortion)
Therefore, regardless of any federal or state laws, some women will not turn to readily available medical clinics or competent physicians to end their pregnancies--even if the services are free!
There will always be charlatans who offer assistance at a cut-rate price or for other insidious favors. They will continue to prey upon women frightened of doctors and medical procedures. Modern, more sophisticated Snake Oil "Doctors" still peddle their cures and remedies for everything from gout to abortifacients. Troubled women, seeking to symbolize their internal pain with the way they abort, will always make up a small percentage of the abortive population.
If Roe v. Wade is overturned, will these desperate women be arrested?
“...abortion advocates have claimed—without any evidence and contrary to the well-documented practice of ALL 50 states—that women were jailed before Roe and would be jailed if Roe falls (or if state abortion prohibitions are reinstated).
“This claim rests on not one but two falsehoods:
“First, the almost uniform state policy before Roe was that abortion laws targeted abortionists, not women. Abortion laws targeted those who performed abortion, not women. In fact, the states expressly treated women as the second “victim” of abortion; state courts expressly called the woman a second “victim.” Abortionists were the exclusive target of the law.
“Second, the myth that women will be jailed relies, however, on the myth that “overturning” Roe will result in the immediate re-criminalization of abortion. If Roe were overturned today, abortion would be legal in at least 42-43 states tomorrow, and likely all 50 states, for the simple reason that nearly all of the state abortion prohibitions have been either repealed or are blocked by state versions of Roe adopted by state courts. The issue is entirely academic.
“The legislatures of the states would have to enact new abortion laws—and these would almost certainly continue the uniform state policy before Roe that abortion laws targeted abortionists and treated women as the second victim of abortion. There will be no prosecutions of abortionists unless the states pass new laws after Roe is overturned.
“This political claim is not an abstract question that is left to speculation—there is a long record of states treating women as the second victim of abortion in the law that can be found and read. To state the policy in legal terms, the states prosecuted the principal (the abortionist). And that will most certainly be the state policy if the abortion issue is returned to the states.
“Why did the states target abortionists and treat women as a victim of the abortionist?
“It was based on three policy judgments:
The point of abortion law is effective enforcement against abortionists
The woman is the second victim of the abortionist
Prosecuting women is counterproductive to the goal of effective enforcement of the law against abortionists.
“The irony is that, instead of states prosecuting women, the exact opposite is true. To protect their own hide, it was abortionists (like the cult hero and abortionist Ruth Barnett when Oregon last prosecuted her in 1968), who, when they were prosecuted, sought to haul the women they aborted into court. As a matter of criminal evidentiary law, if the court treated the woman as an accomplice, she could not testify against the abortionist and the case against the abortionist would be thrown out.
“There are “only two cases in which a woman was charged (not prosecuted) in any State with participating in her own abortion”: from Pennsylvania in 1911 and from Texas in 1922. There is no documented case since 1922 in which a woman has been charged in an abortion in the United States.
“Based on this record—spanning 50 states over the century before Roe v. Wade—it is even more certain that the political claim that any woman might be questioned or prosecuted has no record in history and will certainly not be the policy of any state in the future.
Even pro-abortion historians admit this record.
The pro-abortion historian Leslie Reagan, in her 1997 book When Abortion Was A Crime, admits that states did not prosecute women for their abortions and that women did not face criminal liability as principals, accomplices, conspirators, solicitors, or murderers, and concedes that the purpose behind that law was not to degrade women but to protect them.
“Prolife legislators and pro-life leaders do not support the prosecution of women and will not push for such a policy when Roe is overturned. This is demonstrated by abortion regulations enacted in the past 20 years—like the federal partial birth abortion ban—in which women are expressly excluded from any possible prosecution. Instead, pro-life legislators are advocating laws that defend the unborn and protect women from the negative impact of abortion.” (States Didn’t Put Women in Jail for Abortions Before Roe)
This thorough research bears out that abortion providers--trained or otherwise--will be the focus of any future state laws restricting abortion procedures.
Pro-choicers often cry about "keeping the government out of our personal lives", but supporting Griswold v. Connecticut and subsequently Roe v. Wade opened the door for just that very thing--allowing our central government to address issues for which they have no constitutional authority!
As a result, we now have the fat and soda police scouring our nation's schools and fast food restaurants. Regulations abound, including what kind of light bulbs we can use. Our daily electricity consumption (under the threat of a temporary shut down if deemed excessive) and the water level in our showers will be monitored soon for 'acceptable' levels.
Our eligibility for healthcare will be determined by our liability to society--not our ability to pay. The federal government has become both Big Brother and Nanny--surveilling, assessing, and deciding what's best for its citizens.
The notion that an all-powerful, centralized state should provide monolithic solutions to the ethical dilemmas of our times is not only misguided, but also contrary to our Constitution.
Remember, federalism was established to allow decentralized, local decision-making by states. Today, however, we seek a federal solution for every perceived societal ill, ignoring constitutional limits on federal power. The result is a federal state that increasingly makes all-or-nothing decisions that alienate large segments of the population
Why are we so afraid to follow the Constitution and let state legislatures decide social policy?
“Surely, people on both sides of the abortion debate realize that it's far easier to influence government at the state and local level. The federalization of social issues, originally championed by the left but now embraced by conservatives, simply has prevented the 50 states from enacting laws that more closely reflect the views of their citizens. Once we accepted the federalization of abortion law under Roe, we lost the ability to apply local community standards to ethical issues.” (Statesman Ron Paul)
Does the host have a right to evict? Is continuing an unwanted pregnancy tantamount to slavery? Is the "It's my body" claim valid under such circumstances?
