The Abortion Debate

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From http://www.eugenics-watch.com/roots/chap13.html


Chapter 13:

The Abortion Debate

In 1973, the U.S. Supreme Court announced decisions in two abortion cases, Roe v. Wade and Doe v. Bolton. The decisions swept aside the laws restricting abortion in all 50 states and the District of Columbia. There was an immediate outcry against the decisions, from the growing "right to life" or "pro-life" movement.

When people speak about the decisions, they often refer only to Roe v. Wade, because it was the first of two decided. But Doe v. Bolton was also important. Roe v. Wade ended almost all legal protection for unborn children or fetuses. It divided pregnancy into three "trimesters," and said that abortion in the first trimester was a matter to be decided by the woman and her physician. In the second trimester, the states could pass laws to protect the woman during an abortion (e.g., requiring that abortions be performed in hospitals). Under Roe, the states could restrict or even ban abortion in the third trimester unless the abortion was necessary to protect the life or health of the woman. Under Doe v. Bolton, however, health is defined, and the definition is so broad ("medical judgment may be exercised in the light of all factors — physical, emotional, psychological, familial, and the woman's age") that abortion is effectively legal until birth. If emotional and psychological factors are weighed, then every unwanted pregnancy is a threat to health, because an unwanted pregnancy is a huge emotional and psychological burden. When health is defined this way, then the state can ban abortion in the third trimester — unless the mother wants an abortion. Justice William Rehnquist (later the Chief Justice) and Justice Byron White dissented. Justice White called the rulings "an exercise of raw judicial power."

Decisions Based on Deceit

Both abortion cases were based on lies, like the 1927 Buck v. Bell sterilization case. What happened to the women who were used in these cases — Roe and Doe — was quite distant from what their attorneys told the court. The attorneys were not paying attention to the dignity of their individual clients, but to their own ideas about how to improve society.
Norma McCorvey (born 1947) is currently a Roman Catholic pro-lifer and the mother of three girls, but in 1970 she was a troubled, poor Texan woman in search of an abortion. In 1970 she was introduced to Sarah Weddington and Linda Coffee, two young lawyers looking for an unwed woman who wanted an abortion so that they could challenge Texas law banning abortion. McCorvey agreed to become "Jane Roe," the plaintiff in the lawsuit Roe vs. Wade, and was told she could get an abortion when the lawsuit was over.

McCorvey never got an abortion and had little communication with either Weddington or Coffee until her baby was over a year old. Meanwhile, the two lawyers had challenged the Texas law banning abortion and had won the case. The appeal went all the way to the Supreme Court, and McCorvey found out that abortion had been decriminalized thanks to "her" case, Roe vs. Wade, on January 22, 1973, when she saw it on the news.

McCorvey became highly involved in the abortion industry during the 1980s. She was an active member of several pro-abortion organizations and worked in an abortion clinic in Dallas, Texas. There, she became acquainted with Pastor Flip Benham, the head of Operation Rescue, who spent time regularly outside the abortion facility where Norma worked, praying and offering help to the women who approached the place.

In August 1995, Pastor Benham baptized Norma into the Christian faith. Soon after, she became a Roman Catholic and is now a pro-life speaker, the founder of "Roe No More," and a great witness for life.

Sandra Cano was poor and alone in Atlanta, Georgia in 1970. Her husband was in jail, two of her children had been taken away from her by welfare workers, and she was pregnant.
She went for help to a legal aid clinic where she met ACLU lawyer Margie Pitts Hames, who promised to help her get a divorce and get her two children out of foster care. Hames asked Cano what she thought of abortion, and Cano replied that she was against it. In any case, she agreed to have her name put on an affidavit, and — although she did not actually know exactly what she was doing — became "Mary Doe," in Doe vs. Bolton, the landmark Supreme Court case which opened the floodgates of abortion through all nine months of pregnancy for any reason.
Hames and others collected money to help Cano get an abortion, which Cano didn't even want. The day before she was scheduled to abort her baby, she ran away. She later gave birth to a daughter. Meanwhile, Hames lied about her in court and claimed that Cano could not get the abortion due to lack of funds.

For many years, Sandra Cano felt guilty about her role in American abortion, even though she was a victim of manipulation. In 1989, she came forward and exposed the fact that Doe vs. Bolton was based on lies.

Both women now speak out against abortion.
Eugenics in Roe v. Wade

The 1973 Supreme Court decisions that ended all legal protection of unborn children were based on eugenics. Despite that, comments about the decisions usually focus on privacy and women's rights, not on eugenics. So we should look carefully at the ways in which eugenics shows up in the decisions.

(1) The appearance of eugenics in the abortion decisions that is easiest to see is the reference in a footnote to Buck v. Bell, the 1927 case that opened the floodgates for sterilizing people who were considered to be unfit. In Roe v. Wade, the Supreme Court said that the Constitution protects a "right to privacy" and that the decision to have an abortion is an exercise of this right. But, the Court stated, the right to privacy is not absolute; it can be limited in some cases, such as vaccination and sterilization. So the abortion decision was not about women's rights; it cited a case permitting forced sterilization.

(2) The abortion decisions were written by Justice Harry Blackmun. Blackmun's approach to abortion follows the lead of Glanville Williams. Glanville Williams, who taught law at Cambridge University, was a member of the Eugenics Society. In 1954, the Eugenics Society voted to support the Abortion Law Reform Association, which set out to remove legal restrictions against abortion. Williams became president of the ALRA from 1962, and was successful within a few years; the British law was changed in 1967.

The longest part of the decision written by Justice Harry Blackmun was his history of abortion laws. This is not a bizarre approach, but it is not the obvious approach either. If it was his intention to discuss abortion at length before examining the case that had come to the Supreme Court, he could have written about the development of the child, or about the methods of abortion, or about various birth control methods. He decided to dwell at length on the history of abortion laws. This is noteworthy, because this is the approach taken by Glanville Williams, in his book The Sanctity of Life and the Criminal Law, which Blackmun cited.

Williams's history of abortion:

Blackmun's history of abortion:

Abortion in Greece and Rome, quoting Plato and Aristotle
1. Ancient attitudes, especially Greeks and Romans,referring to Plato and Aristotle
Abortion and early Christianity, especially Augustine
2. The Hippocratic Oath, and Christian use of it
Aquinas and speculation about life at 40-80 days after conception

English law, with reference to Bracton and Blackstone
3. Common law, quoting Bracton, Blackstone and Coke

4. English statutory law, and special attention toRex v. Bourne
American law
5. The American law.
Exception for therapeutic abortion; Bourne case


6-8. The positions taken by the American Medical Association, the American Public Health Association, and the American Bar Association
A startling aspect of Roe v. Wade is its insistence that laws against abortion are recent. But this view is taken from Glanville Williams. Williams wrote: "It is not generally realized that this rule is not older than the beginning of the last century." Blackmun wrote: "It perhaps is not generally appreciated that the restrictive criminal abortion laws in effect in a majority of states today are of relatively recent vintage."

The Hippocratic Oath is a stumbling block for historians who want to argue that only Christians oppose abortion. Williams and Blackmun deal with the Hippocratic Oath in different ways. Williams, incredibly, simply skips over it; he quotes Hippocrates on some other matter, but does not mention the Oath. Blackmun addresses it, but finds a way to set it aside. He explains that it represented a minority view among the Greeks, but was later taken up by Christians.
(3) Most importantly, the whole idea of humanity accumulating over time, from zero person at conception through various levels of value in each trimester up to 100% person at birth, is eugenics. The idea of evolution through stages from insignificance to humanity is pure eugenics, based on Darwin's theories.

The whole trimester scheme in Roe v. Wade, with different rules at three stages in pregnancy, is blatantly arbitrary, and that has always struck pro-lifers as a fatal flaw in the decision. But eugenicists are not bothered by arbitrary decisions, since their view is that rights are invented by society, by a social contract based on consensus, not given by God.
Eugenics devalues humans by rating people on a sliding scale. There are different sliding scales, but they all dehumanize vulnerable people and justify various crimes against humanity. The eugenics in Roe v. Wade is not a sliding scale based on racism; it does not assert that whites > yellows > reds & browns > blacks. And it is not a sliding scale based on IQ testing, placing the highly intelligent over the normal, the normal over morons, and morons over imbeciles. It is like the sliding scale in evolution, from protozoa to vegetable life to animal life to mammals to primates to savages to civilized mankind.

Roe v. Wade reflects a belief in the idea that each individual passes through developmental stages that imitate evolution: egg and sperm become a zygote, which becomes a blastocyst, then an embryo, then a fetus, then an infant, then a child, then an adult, then an old person, then a corpse. Of course each person goes through different stages in life; the critical question is whether the person's worth also rises and falls. The 1973 decisions on abortion reflect the idea that size and weight and complexity — and value and rights — all accumulate gradually.
Review of Chapter 13: The Abortion Debate1. Summarize Roe v. Wade and Doe v. Bolton.2. Identify Norma McCorvey and Sandra Cano.3. Roe v. Wade refers to the 1927 Supreme Court decision, Buck v. Bell. What does that show?4. Who was Glanville Williams, and what was his influence on Roe v. Wade?5. In Justice Blackmun's trimester scheme, does life have a clearly defined beginning?

Discuss: People who identify themselves as pro-life take a substantive position, making clear statements. What are these points? People who identify themselves as pro-choice focus on the procedure for handling a disagreement. But they rarely make clear substantive statements. So what is the disagreement?

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