Posted on 11/01/2009 6:18:54 AM PST by GonzoII
A pro-life movement seeking to guarantee basic human rights to unborn babies is exploding in 32 states – and leaders say it could be just the key to nullifying abortion provisions in President Obama's health-care "reform."
While abortion was not specifically mentioned in earlier bills under consideration, H.R.3962, unveiled by Nancy Pelosi this week, does in fact state abortion is to be covered. Concerns are mounting that whatever the final form of the legislation, the procedure will become more accessible, requiring health insurance companies to fund abortions.
Gualberto Garcia Jones is director of Personhood Colorado and a legal analyst for Personhood USA, a grassroots Christian organization that seeks to legally define every unborn baby as a "person" protected by God-given and constitutionally protected rights, including the right to life. His organization was set up to support personhood efforts across America through legislation and constitutional amendments.
"We're trying to end abortion right now," Garcia Jones told WND. "All of our laws that we're promoting are direct challenges to Roe v. Wade. If we can get a challenge up to the Supreme Court, then that's the ideal thing. That's what we're trying to do."
The personhood approach within the pro-life movement was sparked by a statement in the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision that opened the doors for legal abortion in the U.S.
Justice Harry Blackmun wrote in the majority opinion for Roe v. Wade, "The appellee and certain amici [pro-lifers] argue that the fetus is a 'person' within the language and meaning of the Fourteenth Amendment. In support of this, they outline at length and in detail the well-known facts of fetal development. If this suggestion of personhood is established, the appellant's case, of course, collapses, for the fetus' right to life would then be guaranteed specifically by the [14th] Amendment."
(Excerpt) Read more at wnd.com ...
--Horton
Thanks for this post.
A related story - was in our local news yesterday:
http://www.wral.com/news/local/story/6322876/
Victims Familes Push for Fetal Homicide Law (NC_
30 states have laws that make it a crime of murder if an unborn child is killed when the mother is killed - evidently.
But not in MC = such a law cannot even get out of legislative committee!!! Why? Pro choicers opposition and the Dem/Socialist/Marxist/Communist party RULES in NC.
(realize the people who are wanting this passed in NC are quoted as saying they do not want to end abortion rights....but it is related because such a law would FINALLY give legal recognition of an unborn baby as a person for whom its murder would become criminally accountable - FINALLY - in NC!
What a shame and disgrace that this has not already passed!
I dislike the term "unborn". It is negative. I prefer the term "pre-born". It is more positive. "Unborn" implies not born, while "pre-born" implies awaiting birth.
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Obama Says A Baby Is A Punishment
Obama: “If they make a mistake, I don’t want them punished with a baby.”
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/825290/posts
Roe vs Wade was decided upon medical science at the time. The Justices even alluded to advancement in medical science in the future to resolve this question of life. Medical science is light years beyond that place now and all those who still hold to the denial of personhood are not only anti-life, they are anti-science (something they are probably even more repulsed by).
He said citizens in 32 states are now acting to find sponsors for personhood statutes or constitutional amendments to include them on 2010 ballots."It's taken off so much that we're having trouble keeping up with it," he said. "Colorado, Montana, Missouri, Mississippi and California are all in the process of getting signatures."
The Los Angeles Times reported Sept. 28 that while personhood measures failed in Montana and North Dakota legislatures earlier this year, "the close votes alarmed supporters of legal abortion."
According to WND columnist Jill Stanek, pro-life legislators in Alaska, Arkansas, Hawaii, Indiana, Louisiana and Texas have also signaled their intent to introduce personhood statutes.
He only names 12 states.
Citizens working for personhood in 32 states have found willing legislators in 12 states.
Thanks for this post.
—
No problem.
Living things come with an in and out door. That's the way it is.
Allow me to re-phrase. They ‘hid behind’ the technology of the day to suggest it wasn’t known.
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With all due respect, that is wholly and completely FALSE.
Roe v Wade was decided upon political ideology and social engineering; while purposefully ignoring the mountain of irrefutable medical science presented at the time.
[[[[They ‘hid behind’ the technology of the day to suggest it wasn’t known.]]]
The “technology of the day” was quite impressive and the court was presented well in advance with all of it. They simply ignored it because it did not help them reach the conclusion they wanted to reach.
Cover of 1965 issue of LIFE Magazine. The issue, published eight years before the lies of Roe v Wade, covered in great detail the scientific facts of life in the womb with amazing imagery.
Let’s be completely candid about this.
The seven voting for Roe were not ignorant of any science related to the case. They were leftist ideologues with an agenda.
It is not inaccurate to say that science and objective truth were irrelevant to the majority opinion as written in Roe. Our Constitution was all but voided with the monstosity of Roe.
Reference materials to support the cause on the way…
Pro-Life PING
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It is impossible to rightly govern a nation without God and the Bible.
--George Washington
"It is the duty of every patriot to protect his country from its government"
--Thomas Paine
By Dr. John Ankerberg and John
Weldon
http://www.ankerberg.com/Articles/apologetics/AP0805W3.htm The complete article is available in print friendly PDF format at:
http://www.ankerberg.com/Articles/_PDFArchives/apologetics/AP3W0805.pdf
The scientific authorities on when life begins are biologists. But these are often the last people consulted in seeking an answer to the question. What modern science has concluded is crystal clear: Human life begins at conception. This is a matter of scientific fact, not philosophy, speculation, opinion, conjecture, or theory. Today, the evidence that human life begins at conception is a fact so well documented that no intellectually honest and informed scientist or physician can deny it.
In 1973, the Supreme Court concluded in its Roe v. Wade decision that it did not have to decide the “difficult question” of when life begins. Why? In essence, they said, “It is impossible to say when human life begins.” The Court misled the public then, and others continue to mislead the public today.
Anyone familiar with recent Supreme Court history knows that two years before Roe V. Wade, in October 1971, a group of 220 distinguished physicians, scientists, and professors submitted an amicus curiae brief (advice to a court on some legal matter) to the Supreme Court. They showed the Court how modern science had already established that human life is a continuum and that the unborn child from the moment of conception on is a person and must be considered a person, like its mother. The brief set as its task “to show how clearly and conclusively modern science—embryology, fetology, genetics, perinatology, all of biology—establishes the humanity of the unborn child.” For example,
In its seventh week, [the pre-born child] bears the familiar external features and all the internal organs of the adult.... The brain in configuration is already like the adult brain and sends out impulses that coordinate the function of other organs…. The heart beats sturdily. The stomach produces digestive juices. The liver manufactures blood cells and the kidneys begin to function by extracting uric acid from the child’s blood.... The muscles of the arms and body can already be set in motion. After the eighth week… everything is already present that will be found in the full term baby.
This brief proved beyond any doubt scientifically that human life begins at conception and that “the unborn is a person within the meaning of the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments.”
Thus, even though the Supreme Court had been properly informed as to the scientific evidence, they still chose to argue that the evidence was insufficient to show the pre-born child was fully human. In essence, their decision merely reflected social engineering and opinion, not scientific fact. Even during the growing abortion debate in 1970, the editors of the scientific journal California Medicine noted the “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.”
In 1981, the United States Congress conducted hearings to answer the question, “When does human life begin?” A group of internationally known scientists appeared before a Senate judiciary subcommittee.
The U.S. Congress was told by Harvard University Medical School’s Professor Micheline Matthews-Roth, “In biology and in medicine, it is an accepted fact that the life of any individual organism reproducing by sexual reproduction begins at conception....”
Dr. Watson A. Bowes, Jr., of the University of Colorado Medical School, testified that “the beginning of a single human life is from a biological point of view a simple and straightforward matter—the beginning is conception. This straightforward biological fact should not be distorted to serve sociological, political or economic goals.”
Dr. Alfred Bongiovanni of the University of Pennsylvania Medical School noted: “The standard medical texts have long taught that human life begins at conception.”
He added: “I am no more prepared to say that these early stages represent an incomplete human being than I would be to say that the child prior to the dramatic effects of puberty... is not a human being. This is human life at every stage albeit incomplete until late adolescence.”
Dr. McCarthy De Mere, who is a practicing physician as well as a law professor at the University of Tennessee, testified: “The exact moment of the beginning [of] personhood and of the human body is at the moment of conception.”
World-famous geneticist Dr. Jerome Lejeune, professor of fundamental genetics at the University of Descarte, Paris, France, declared, “each individual has a very unique beginning, the moment of its conception.”
Dr. Lejeune also emphasized: “The human nature of the human being from conception to old age is not a metaphysical contention, it is plain experimental evidence.”
The chairman of the Department of Medical Genetics at the Mayo Clinic, Professor Hymie Gordon, testified, “By all the criteria of modern molecular biology, life is present from the moment of conception.”
He further emphasized: “now we can say, unequivocally, that the question of when life begins… is an established scientific fact…. It is an established fact that all life, including human life, begins at the moment of conception.”
This Senate report concluded:
Physicians, biologists, and other scientists agree that conception marks the beginning of the life of a human being—a being that is alive and is a member of the human species. There is overwhelming agreement on this point in countless medical, biological, and scientific writings.
In 1981, only a single scientist disagreed with the majority’s conclusion, and he did so on philosophical rather than scientific grounds. In fact, abortion advocates, although invited to do so, failed to produce even one expert witness who would specifically testify that life begins at any other point than conception.
Again, let us stress that this is not a matter of religion, it is solely a matter of science. Scientists of every religious view and no religious view—agnostic, Jewish, Buddhist, atheist, Christian, Hindu, etc.—all agree that life begins at conception. This explains why, for example, the International Code of Medical Ethics asserts: “A doctor must always bear in mind the importance of preserving human life from the time of conception until death.”
This is also why the Declaration of Geneva holds physicians to the following: “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.” These statements can be found in the World Medical Association Bulletin for April 1949 (vol.1, p. 22) and January 1950 (vol. 2, p. 5). In 1970, the World Medical Association again reaffirmed the Declaration of Geneva.
What difference does it make that human life begins at conception? The difference is this: If human life begins at conception, then abortion is the killing of a human life.
To deny this fact is scientifically impossible.
Good post.
A growing Personhood archive HERE.
You’re welcome.
Criticisms of Roe v Wade by Pro-abortion legal scholars
Many in the legal field, including several who support abortion on demand, have harshly criticized the Roe v Wade opinion written by Justice Harry Blackmun.
From http://www.timothypcarney.com/?page_id=176
Edward Lazarus — Former clerk to Supreme Court Justice Harry Blackmun, the author of the
Roe v Wade decision:
“As a matter of constitutional interpretation and judicial method, Roe borders on the indefensible. I say this as someone utterly committed to the right to choose, as someone who believes such a right has grounding elsewhere in the Constitution instead of where Roe placed it, and as someone who loved Roe’s author like a grandfather.”
…. “What, exactly, is the problem with Roe? The problem, I believe, is that it has little connection to the Constitutional right it purportedly interpreted. A constitutional right to privacy broad enough to include abortion has no meaningful foundation in constitutional text, history, or precedent - at least, it does not if those sources are fairly described and reasonably faithfully followed.”
“[A]s a matter of constitutional interpretation, even most liberal jurisprudes — if you administer truth serum — will tell you it is basically indefensible.”
John Hart Ely — Yale Law School, Harvard Law School, Stanford Law School
Roe “is not constitutional law and gives almost no sense of an obligation to try to be.”
…. “What is frightening about Roe is that this super-protected right is not inferable from the language of the Constitution, the framers’ thinking respecting the specific problem in issue, any general value derivable from the provisions they included, or the nation’s governmental structure. Nor is it explainable in terms of the unusual political impotence of the group judicially protected vis-à-vis the interest that legislatively prevailed over it.… At times the inferences the Court has drawn from the values the Constitution marks for special protection have been controversial, even shaky, but never before has its sense of an obligation to draw one been so obviously lacking.”
31 N.Y.2d 194
335 N.Y.S.2d 390
286 N.E.2d 887
Robert M. BYRN,
as Guardian ad Litem for an Infant “Roe”, an Unborn Child,
and All Similarly Unborn Infants, Appellant,
v.
NEW YORK CITY HEALTH & HOSPITALS CORPORATION et al., Respondents,
Court of Appeals of New York
Argued May 30, 1972
Decided July 7, 1972
BURKE, Judge (dissenting).
As I stated in Robin v. Incorporated Vil. of Hempstead (30 N Y 2d 347, 352) chapter 127 of the Laws of 1970 is not a valid exercise of legislative power. The majority opinion states the issue as: “whether the law should accord legal [p892] personality is a policy question* which in most instances devolves on the Legislature, subject again of course to the Constitution as it has been ‘legally’ rendered”.
This argument was not only made by Nazi lawyers and Judges at Nuremberg, but also is advanced today by the Soviets in Eastern Europe. It was and is rejected by most western world lawyers and Judges because it conflicts with natural justice and is, in essence, irrational. To equate the judicial deference to the wiseness of a Legislature in a local zoning case with the case of the destruction of a child in embryo which is conceded to be “human” and “is unquestionably alive” is an acceptance of the thesis that the “State is supreme”, and that “live human beings” have no inalienable rights in this country. The most basic of these rights is the right to live, especially in the case of the “unwanted” who are defenseless. The late Chief Judge Lehman once wrote of these rights: “The Constitution is misread by those who say that these rights are created by the Constitution. The men who wrote the Constitution did not doubt that these rights existed before the nation was created and are dedicated by God’s word. By the Constitution, these rights were placed beyond the power of Government to destroy.” In other words, what the Chief Judge was saying was that the American concept of a natural law binding upon government and citizens alike, to which all positive law must conform, leads back through John Marshall to Edmund Burke and Henry de Bracton and even beyond the Magna Carta to Judean Law. Human beings are not merely creatures of the State, and by reason of that fact, our laws should protect the unborn from those who would take his life for purposes of comfort, convenience, property or peace of mind rather than sanction his demise. Moreover, if there is a confiscation of property through a zoning law, it is “constitutionally” invalid. Recently, the United States Supreme Court held that the taking of a life of a murderer by a State was constitutionally invalid, and in the words of one Justice, was found to be “immoral and therefore unconstitutional” (Furman v. Georgia, 408 U.S. 238, 364-366 [Marshall, J., concuring]).
The Attorney-General argues that the legislative determination in choosing between the competing values involved herein is a value judgment committed to the legislative process of government, not to the discretion of the judiciary. Furthermore, it is argued that there is a legitimate State interest in a woman’s right of privacy and in the undesirable effect of unwanted children upon society. (See Lexogram, Vol. 4, No. 10.) Upon scrutiny, these arguments are not persuasive, and the legislation cannot stand for two reasons — it is irrational and unconstitutional.
The irrationality of the legislation in question has several aspects. In view of modern and reliable contraception devices, there is no reason for unwanted conceptions to take place that would cause an exceptional population growth. Secondly, the argument that these unborn children are unwanted is fallacious as there are many, many families presently interested in adoption, who would be more than happy to welcome such an infant into their home. Thirdly, as we reach zero population growth, there is no compelling State interest to support the abortion legislation. Additionally, two other frequently raised arguments by proponents of abortion cannot withstand scrutiny. Thus, the plaint regarding women dying from botched abortions under the old law is easily answered. Examples of due justice for foetuses are more merciful than the unbounded exercise of pity for those few unfortunate pregnant women who fall into the hands of the few inexpert doctors. Thousands of illegal [p893] abortions were performed in New York City hospitals under the old law without fatalities but with serious side effects. To overcome this self-created problem by destroying hundreds of thousands of foetuses by State law is uncivilized. At best, a few human beings are only possibly wholly preserved from a fate set in motion by themselves at the sacrifice of hundreds of thousands and soon millions of other human beings. Nor can the old abortion law be said to be an interference with a physician’s right to practice his profession. The old abortion law sanctioned therapeutic abortion when medically indicated, thus enabling the physician to save the life of the mother in extreme circumstances.
The more telling fact than the present legislation’s irrationality is its unconstitutionality. The unconstitutionality stems from its inherent conflict with the Declaration of Independence, the basic instrument which gave birth to our democracy. The Declaration has the force of law and the constitutions of the United States and of the various States must harmonize with its tenets. The Declaration when it proclaimed “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness” restated the natural law. It was intended to serve as a perpetual reminder that rulers, legislators and Judges were without power to deprive human beings of their rights.
Unless there had been a Thomas Jefferson who was educated by a philosophy professor to know the primacy of the natural law — there would be no United States of America. For, if the Declaration had been written by a pragmatist for expedient reasons we never could have enlisted the sympathies and agreement of such a large part of the then world, including members of the British Parliament in our righteous cause. They would know the pragmatic reasoning would be nothing more than pettifoggery, and had no basis in law.
We began our legal life as a Nation and a State with the guarantee that these were inalienable rights that come not from the State but from an external source of authority superior to the State which authority regulated our inalienable liberties and with which our laws and Constitutions must now conform. That authority alone establishes the norms which test the validity of State legislation. It also tests the Constitutions and the United Nations Convention against genocide which forbids any Nation or State to classify any group of living human beings as fit subjects for annihilation. In sum, there is the law which forbids such expediency. It is the inalienable right to life in the nature of the child embryo who is “a human” and is “a living being”.
Inalienable means that it is incapable of being surrendered (Webster’s Third New International Dictionary). Thus, the butchering of a foetus under the present law is inherently wrong, as it is an illegal interference with the life of a human being of nature.
The report of the Governor’s commission explanation that it was not dealing with “morality” but only law, overlooked the fact that it turned its back on the law — the natural law reiterated in the Declaration of Independence. The reasons given for the enactment of the present abortion law are irrational from a medical, scientific and factually objective analysis. There is no need for abortion except in very limited medical circumstances.
Chapter 127 of the Laws of 1970, authorizing abortion “on demand” is a resort to expediency which is recognized everywhere as the death of principle. The rationale of the majority opinion admits that customs do change and the Legislature could, if it should in the future be the attitude of the Legislature, do away with old folks and eliminate the great expense the aged are to the taxpayers. This, of course, would parallel the Hitler laws which decreed the death of all the inmates of mental hospitals and also decreed that for [p894] many purposes non-Aryans were nonpersons.
Chief Judge Lehman’s understanding of inalienable rights is the only understanding that makes any sense out of the Declaration of Independence, the Magna Carta, the Bill of Rights and the United Nations Convention against genocide.
According to the majority opinion, valid law is a merger of legislative and executive emotions, whims and hunches — announced today and perhaps changed tomorrow. One’s rights are never permanent as the existence of the natural law is denied. The majority suggests that all law is man made. Such a philosophy of law we know would not attract persons educated in philosophy. Others, however, are attracted by pragmatism. This is just as dangerous as expediency because certain individuals think: we are realistic and self-sufficient — this legislation will control population growth and assist the taxpayers.
This pragmatism, of course, is masked by a contrived theory exemplified in Abele v. Markle (342 F. Supp. 800) of giving the right of privacy of the woman an absolute paramountcy over the inalienable right of the foetus to life. On that false and unsupported premise (as I shall point out later) it then cites Griswold v. Connecticut (381 U.S. 479). That citation is inapposite. Here there are three people with different interests involved. The man, the woman and the foetus. The foetus has the superior “right to life” rather than the particular female’s or male’s concern to avoid responsibility. The proponents of abortion know that there are men who desire offspring for the joy as well as the responsibility they bring. The protection of the foetal life has been the concern of law givers even before the judicial Law of Moses, the great law giver (the Ten Commandments) down through the ages. Even in barbaric ages this was the law (see de Bracton, Sir Matthew Hale, Fleta, Sir Edward Coke, Sergeant Hawkins, Sir William Blackstone).
Under New York State law the foetus, if it is born, is entitled to posthumously share in a deceased husband’s intestate estate. This legislation gives the “right” to the wife to unilaterally, through abortion, appropriate the husband’s entire estate by preventing offspring and depriving the legally wedded husband of transmission of his blood line, name and properties to “flesh of his flesh”: another inalienable right.
The proponents of abortion take refuge in concocted distinctions as to what living human beings are persons and what living human beings are not persons -to justify the massacre of the innocents, over 400,000 in New York State this year. They belittle Chitty, Coke and twist the statements of Hale to try to persuade those who, as did the author of the Declaration of Independence, recognize that the natural law granted inalienable rights to human living beings. They demand that the natural law expressed in the Declaration of Independence on which the United States is founded, should be ignored for expedient reasons. The pragmatists have a remarkable capacity for bearing the suffering of others with equanimity so long as the suffering is not imposed on them. They are just as callous toward their fellow human beings (they all started as foetuses) as the parents who slaughtered their children in the earlier centuries. In that age parents engaged in wholesale slaughter of children for the same expedient reasons dictating this legislation, which is forbidden by the natural law (see P. Pringle, Hue and Cry, William Morrow and Company, Great Britain).
In view of the myriad methods of contraception now approved and fully utilized by females of all ages, the pronouncement in Abele v. Markle (342 F. Supp. 800, supra) that women after conception have the unquestioned right to make the sole decision to abort is contrary to the State’s responsibility to preserve and protect life. (Furman v. Georgia, 408 U.S. 238, 364-366, supra.) The contraception [p895] methods available today if used are more than sufficient to control population growth. Witness the fact that we have already reached zero population growth and possibly gone below it. The complete disrespect for the foetus’ right to life is in keeping with the cruelties which antedated the age of the lawmakers of Judaism, and certainly is a return to the barbarism of the English people of the early centuries (see P. Pringle, Hue and Cry, supra).
There is no medical or scientific doubt that foetuses are a group of human beings not a part of his or her mother. Every respected doctor, specializing in this field, treats the unborn child as a second patient different and individually distinct from the mother. Unless we intend to indorse the totalitarian philosophy already practiced of destroying the elderly, the insane, the newly born defective child or other groups of “lesser quality” as defined by the “state”, scrap the Declaration of Independence, distort the meaning of the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments, we should find this legislation constitutionally invalid.
The Appellate Division arrived at the obvious contradiction that even though the foetus is a human being with “a separate life from the moment of conception”, it need not be considered a person under the Fifth Amendment. Again the Appellate Division adopted the theory that the State is supreme and free to degrade the inalienable rights of human beings which were not given to them by the State and cannot be diminished nor taken away by the State. The Appellate Division and the majority agree that the “state”, as in Nazi Germany, could decide what human beings are persons or nonpersons. Human beings are not created by any woman unilaterally — only with the aid of viable semen. Men and women can have intercourse thousands of times and fail to create a foetus. The woman and the man, not only the State, are obliged to recognize the inalienable rights that issue out of the uncontroversial factors flowing out of one’s humanity. There is the sanctity of human life. To pass a law authorizing foetuses’ destruction is akin to establishing a State religion which conflicts with the rights given to those conceived in our democracy. To state that the present law does not violate the freedom of conscience of those who believe abortion to be a crime while the public revenues and public institutions are used is to resurrect the disgraceful argument that the citizens of Nazi Germany knowing of the death camps had an individual freedom of conscience to shrug off the atrocities of Dachau, Auschwitz and the other death camps. The question answers itself once we look at that society under Hitler.
The deeper disease in this legislation is the widening gap between the American self-image of a country that values human life and the reality of a growing preoccupation of the hedonists with a competitive drive for La Dolce Vita. Because some women of means have practiced abortion for years without regard for the then existing laws or the consequences apart from death is no reason to legalize it and conduct a campaign among the poor to convince them that philosophically and biologically they can consider an unborn child as one not a distinct human being with an individual right to life.
The Presidential Commission on Abortion fails to distinguish between an unwanted and unplanned birth and unwanted children. Adoptive agencies all over the United States have long waiting lists of prospective parents eager for a baby. But there are no babies to adopt. Every baby in the United States being aborted because of an alleged belief that the infant is unwanted is being denied life on the basis of an untruth. Our society has for ages allowed the woman to discontinue a responsibility for the developing human organism when that organism has reached a stage of development at which this responsibility can be transferred to another. The argument in Abele v. Markle (342 F. Supp. 800, supra) completely evades this option and relies entirely on the concept that a woman’s [p896] body is “private property” to be used as she wishes without interference from the inalienable rights of the unborn which was created when she chose to use her body in conjunction with the body of a man. I remind you that the woman’s body, her “private property”, cannot unilaterally create a foetus — nor can the body of a man. Incidentally if it is “private property” public funds cannot be constitutionally directly or indirectly used by hospitals to dispose of the foetus. The premise relied on by the courts and the Legislature is a false premise because the issue is not whether the woman has a right to use her body as she wishes (of course she has and does) but rather, if perchance another human being is conceived, that human being has an inalienable right to life that neither she, nor the man, nor any State, has the legal power to destroy.
As long as the proponents of abortion, all of whom I assume condemn genocide, have no rational reason to refuse to assign the same principle of natural law to abortion as they do to genocide, they are inconsistent.
To sum up, conception can be legally avoided — adoption opportunties are enormous — abortion legislation except in rare medical cases is neither necessary, humanly acceptable, legal nor constitutional.
The fundamental nature of life makes impossible a classification of living, human being as nonpersons, who can be excluded from the protection of the Constitution of the United States so that their right to life can be taken from them in spite of the due process clause and equal protection clause.
Such a classification is constitutionally suspect. The relationship between the classification excluding this human group of foetuses from the enjoyment of the right to life and the fabricated purposes for which the classification is made are so imperfect that it follows that the classification is clearly unconstitutional.
For instance, this abortion legislation gives the woman the right without the knowledge of the man to destroy the foetus who has, under the New York State law, the right of inheritance for devolution of property if the father dies intestate. By this act the woman, if she should be the wife, would increase her share in the intestate estate by confiscating the inheritance rights of the foetus.
In answer to the concurring opinion of Judge Jasen, which was filed after this opinion, I merely add that there can be no debate or value judgment when the operating doctors and their nurses examine the bucket in the operating room. They should know they have destroyed living human beings, the remains of which are in the bucket. If they rely on the opinions of the self motivated, they should examine the exhibit at the Smithsonian Institute. The United Press International recently reported the birth of a foetus at 21 weeks in a New York hospital. Was it “less-than-human”?
Accordingly the order of the Appellate Division should be reversed and chapter 127 of Laws of 1970 be declared unconstitutional.
Whether they ignored the sceince which refuted the societal engineering goal of the court, especially the Chief Justice whose daughter influenced him strngly, or not, the court did choose to ignore a federal court ruling made the year before (the Steinberg case in Ohio, IIRC) which stated that the only reasonable counclusion on the life of an individual is to cite that individual life begins at the conception of the new individual. As cpforlife has written, the court has a societal engineering bias which carried over into the next evil, the Doe v Bolton case which stripped the faux barriers the Roe decision supposedly put in place, ‘to favor life of the unborn valuable’.
Justice Harry Blackmun wrote in the majority opinion for Roe v. Wade, "The appellee and certain amici [pro-lifers] argue that the fetus is a 'person' within the language and meaning of the Fourteenth Amendment. In support of this, they outline at length and in detail the well-known facts of fetal development. If this suggestion of personhood is established, the appellant's case, of course, collapses, for the fetus' right to life would then be guaranteed specifically by the [14th] Amendment."
Norma McCorvey, the former “Jane Roe” of Roe v Wade became pro-life in 1995
And is currently Director of the Crossing Over Ministry http://www.crossingoverministry.org/
From Catholic New York August 17, 1995
‘Jane Roe’ Rethinks— Pro-life advocates welcome Norma McCorvey’s change
By BRIAN CAULFIELD (excerpt) http://www.priestsforlife.org/testimony/janerethinkscny95.html
“What has happened to her is happening to many abortion providers and to even more people in the general public,” Father Pavone, a priest of the archdiocese and national director of Priests for Life, told CNY. “People do not move from a pro-life to a pro-abortion position. Overwhelmingly the flow of movement is in the opposite direction.”
Ms. McCorvey’s involvement in the nation’s most important abortion case began in Dallas in 1970 when she was seeking an abortion and met two lawyers who were looking for a plaintiff to test Texas’ abortion laws. Under their guidance, Ms. McCorvey sued to contest the abortion prohibition and lost, but the Supreme Court reversed the decision Jan. 22, 1973, and ruled that abortion was legal in all 50 states. Ms. McCorvey remained an anonymous figure until the late 1980s when she announced her identity, revealed that she had never been raped, as she had testified in the original case, and that she had gone through with the pregnancy and given up the baby girl for adoption.
See also:
Roe v. McCorvey by Norma McCorvey with Gary Thomas http://www.leaderu.com/common/roev.html
My Journey into the Catholic Church, By Norma McCorvey http://www.priestsforlife.org/brochures/myjourney.htm
Norma McCorvey’s Pro-Life Ministry and Website http://www.priestsforlife.org/testimony/normamaster.htm
that used to be my tagline
bump for later
As one would expect with mass murder on the agenda, lies were used extensively to make the case for open access to abortion for any reason ... the fatehr of lies, a murderer from the start was pushing the evil via activist judges.
The current oval office resident ahs gone even further than the evil of aborting alive unborn children, by working on several occasions to prevent from being cited in law as illegal the killing of just born alive children ... Obama worked to protect the hienous killing method known as 'induced labor abortion' where an alive child is forced to be born so prematurely that they cannot survive without heroic medical intervention. As testimony in the U.S. congressional hearings showed, sometime these poor little ones took as much as eight hours to succumb, struggling to breath, abandoned, dying alone unattended. The Pres_ _ent is a deeply wicked man, the darling of the blood-drenched democrap party and too many of its dead-soul voters.
U.S. Abortion Laws Before Roe v Wade
Roe v Wade made abortion “legal” through all nine months of pregnancy. The word “legal” is in quotations because this Supreme Court decision created a Constitutional “right” to abortion that is nowhere remotely found in the Constitution itself. Roe and its companion case Doe v Bolton, ruled that state laws that banned or restricted abortions were unconstitutional and cannot be enforced. Many states still have these laws on their books, which could be enforced if Roe is overturned. Therefore overturning Roe v Wade would not make abortion illegal but would allow the 50 state legislatures to decide the law via the democratic process. Reports vary but it is estimated that some 30 states would ban or restrict abortion.
A BRIEF SURVEY OF US ABORTION LAW BEFORE THE 1973 DECISION
By Brian Young (excerpts) http://www.ewtn.com/library/PROLIFE/LIFBFROE.TXT
In the years prior to and immediately after the American Revolution, colonists and citizens followed the rule of law brought by British settlers, the “common law.” Rather than being a code of statutes passed by a legislature and printed in a book, the common law was a set of legal standards established in England through court decisions and legal custom.
According to Sir William Blackstone, the renowned 18th century English jurist, under common law, the abortion of a ‘quickened’ fetus was a ‘very heinous misdemeanor.’ At that time the penalty for misdemeanors could be severe; loss of a limb, confiscation of property or life in prison.
‘Quickening’ - when a pregnant woman first feels her child move - generally occurs in the fourth month. Scholars have noted that the common law requirement of a ‘quickened’ baby for the crime of abortion was probably based on a very practical consideration. Since there were no pregnancy tests in the 18th century, evidence that a baby’s movement had been felt might have been the only way to establish with any certainty in a court of law that a pregnancy had existed.
The abandonment of the “quickening” requirement coincided with the 19th century discovery of how conception takes place. The public, lawmakers and jurists were becoming aware of the scientific fact that life begins when a sperm enters an ovum.
Abortion Statutes of the 19th & 20th Centuries (excerpts) http://www.missourilife.org/law/preroe.htm
During the first decades of the 1800’s, scientists began to understand the cellular basis of life and for the first time were able to observe the process of fertilization in mammals. As the stages of development became clear, it also became clear that abortion kills a living human being, no matter what the stage of the child’s development. The resulting scientific knowledge about the process of conception and development led to efforts to enact stronger bans on abortion. In addition, scientific progress allowed for surgical means of performing abortion, and abortion was perceived to be on the increase. Beginning in 1859, the American Medical Association called for strong anti-abortion laws and vigorous enforcement of them. In view of the claim by twentieth century abortionists that physicians did this only to protect their own profession or solely to protect women’s health, it is useful to quote the doctors themselves on why they wanted action by the states:
“The first of these causes is a wide-spread popular ignorance of the true character of the crime—a belief, even among mothers themselves, that the foetus is not alive till after the period of quickening.
“The second of the agents alluded to is the fact that the profession themselves are frequently supposed careless of fetal life; . . .
“The third reason of the frightful extent of this crime is found in the grave defects of our laws, both common and statute, as regards the independent and actual existence of the child before birth, as a living being.
“In accordance, therefore, with the facts in the case, the Committee would advise that this body, representing, as it does, the physicians of the land, publicly express its abhorrence of the unnatural and now rapidly increasing crime of abortion; that it avow its true nature, as no simple offence against public morality and decency, no mere misdemeanor, no attempt upon the life of the mother, but the wanton and murderous destruction of her child. . “ Volume 12, Transactions of the American Medical Association, pp. 75-78 (1859).
The AMA adopted the recommendation described above and sponsored initiatives in all states, spurring most legislatures to enact strong prohibitions upon abortion that swept away the “quickening” distinction. In the remaining states, abortion remained prohibited by common law.
A BRIEF SURVEY OF US ABORTION LAW BEFORE THE 1973 DECISION
by Brian Young (excerpts) http://www.ewtn.com/library/PROLIFE/LIFBFROE.TXT
Pro-abortion historians claim that these laws were passed primarily, if not solely, to protect women from possibly fatal abortions. Concern for pre-term babies was not a factor, they claim. Yet, as law professor Joseph Dellapenna has noted, all surgeries at that time involved substantial risks of death. If legislators were motivated to pass anti-abortion statutes only to protect women, why did they not protect other patients by banning other potentially dangerous fatal elective surgeries?
Coincidentally or not, during this period of pro-life legislative activity Congress passed and 28 states ratified the 14th Amendment, prohibiting any state from depriving “any person of life, liberty, or property without the due process of law.”
By 1910, every state except Kentucky had passed an anti-abortion law (and Kentucky’s courts had declared abortion at any stage of gestation to be illegal).
By 1967, not much had changed. In 49 states, abortion was a felony; in New Jersey, it was a high misdemeanor. Furthermore, 29 states banned abortion advertising, and many outlawed the manufacture or distribution of abortifacients. In 1967, though, state abortion laws began to change, but only after years of organized campaigns by pro-abortion forces.
The American Law Institute (ALI) proposed, in its 1959 model criminal code for all the states, a “reform” abortion law. The model bill, approved by ALI in 1962, declared that abortion should be permitted for the physical or mental health of the mother, for fetal abnormality, and for rape or incest.
While leaders of the American legal community were promoting radical changes in state abortion law, a 1962 case in Arizona generated sympathetic press coverage of the notion of “justifiable abortion.”
Mrs. Sherri Finkbine, a married mother, made public her intention to abort her fifth child. She had taken some tranquilizers/sleeping pills her husband had brought home from a trip to England. The pills turned out to be Thalidomide, a drug that had become associated with birth defects. Fearful of giving birth to a handicapped child, Mrs Finkbine traveled to Sweden, where she had her baby aborted.
In June 1967, the American Medical Association voted to change that body’s long-standing opposition to abortion. With a new resolution, the AMA now condoned abortion for the life or health of the mother, for a baby’s ‘incapacitating’ physical deformity or mental deficiency, or for cases of rape or incest.
That same year, Colorado, North Carolina, and California became the first states to adopt versions of the ALI “reform” abortion law. By 1970, though, four states - New York, Alaska, Hawaii and Washington - passed laws that basically allowed abortion on demand. Of those four, New York’s was the only law without a residency requirement and the state quickly became the nation’s abortion capital.
The pro-abortion onslaught was beginning to face opposition, though, as pro-life forces organized. In 1972, the New York legislature voted to repeal the state’s liberal abortion law, but Governor Nelson Rockefeller vetoed the repeal. Ballot questions in Michigan and North Dakota in 1972 attempted to decriminalize abortion; the measures were defeated by majorities of 63% and 78%, respectively.
Just as pro-lifers were beginning to turn the tide however, the Supreme Court handed down Roe vs Wade in January 1973. With one judicial stroke, over 200 years of legal protection for the unborn was rendered null and void. For the first time in American history, abortion was the “law of the land”.
It most certainly would if the court asserted the obvious truth that the child is a person. It would be recognized to be illegal on every square inch of American territory.
Thanks for post 20. I have not finished it yet but the first few paragraphs look interesting.
RE: Post 28
“It most certainly would if the court asserted the obvious truth that the child is a person.”
That is among the biggest “if’s” in the world today.
I would love for a Personhood Amendment to become adopted and be part of our Constitution, or for SCOTUS to declare the unborn Constitutional persons deserving equal protection. I support any effort to advance the Personhood movement, but think it important to point out some sad realities that people must be aware of.
This article http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/796422/posts shows that “No present or past Justice has ever taken the position that the unborn child is, or should be regarded as, a “person” as understood in the Fourteenth Amendment, including the late Justice White, perhaps the most eloquent critic of Roe v. Wade. And in the Carhart case, the Court refused even to consider Nebraska’s argument that a partially born child is a constitutional person.”
While I don’t agree with everything in the article, this section outlines why even the 4 “good” justices on the Right would not go the Personhood route:
“But there is more than silence to indicate the Justices’ views. Dissenting in Casey, Justice Antonin Scalia stated, “The states may, if they wish, permit abortion-on-demand, but the Constitution does not require them to do so.” This statement, in an opinion that Chief Justice Rehnquist, Justice White, and Justice Clarence Thomas joined, quite obviously is not compatible with a recognition of personhood. And in dissenting from the Court’s decision to strike down the Nebraska partial-birth abortion ban, Chief Justice Rehnquist and Justices Scalia and Thomas once more urged that the issue of abortion be returned to the states.
In his brief dissent in Carhart, Justice Scalia stated that “the Court should return this matter to the people—where the Constitution, by its silence on the subject, left it—and let them decide, state by state, whether this practice should be allowed.” Justice Thomas, writing for himself, Chief Justice Rehnquist, and Justice Scalia, began his lengthy dissent by stating: “Nothing in our Federal Constitution deprives the people of this country of the right to determine whether the consequences of abortion to the fetus and to society outweigh the burden of an unwanted pregnancy on the mother.”
Entirely apart from the issue of personhood, there is little basis for believing that any of the Justices would accept the argument that the Supreme Court (or any court) is qualified to state when human life begins. Dissenting in Casey, Justice Scalia, joined by the Chief Justice and Justices White and Thomas, wrote that the question of when human life begins is not “a legal matter” capable of resolution by a court, but, instead, is “a value judgment” that may be made only by the political branches of government. In his concurring opinion in Ohio v. Akron Center for Reproductive Health (1990), Justice Scalia said that the determination of when human life begins is a question not capable of judicial resolution and instead must be left to the political process where compromise and accommodation of divergent views is possible. This theme—that the resolution of the abortion question should be left to the political branches of government—has been a leitmotif of Justice Scalia’s abortion opinions.”
Until all officers of government are required by the people to meet our imperative demand that they keep their oaths of office to "secure the Blessings of Liberty to Posterity," the children will continue to die.
For serious pro-lifers:
He should be impeached.
I wonder which other God-given, unalienable rights he wants to pass the buck on?
Very good point. Verbiage is really important as to the picture it paints in the mind. For myself I like to call the pre-born inside-babies. I have also thought of calling them womb people or people of the womb. This is because these names do not sound clinical but purely human and personal.
For their evil purposes, the majority of the Supreme Court in 1973 chose to ignore the evidence and their hands are stained with the blood of every aborted child since then.
Although the U.S. Supreme Court decided in '73 that abortion is legal, can anyone explain why Scott Peterson of CA was convicted of killing not only his wife Laci but also their eventually-to-be-born baby?
When one considers the beauty of the Life Magazine photo,
it is so surreal that 50 million infinitely valuable and precious
lives have been discarded into the sewers and landfills of
our once great nation.
The blood of the innocents cries out!
Personhood now!
Get involved, carry a petition, start the Personhood movement in
your state if it hasn’t yet begun.
That is absolutely stunning. Hard to imagine how any reasonable person could not embrace his eloquent and well-elucidated reasoning.
Interesting the way he sees the “natural law” applying to the situation. Catholics have been the strongest pro-lifers, the most organized, the most numerous, and given the most money. Not to say there are not also millions of super-dedicated, even heroic, protestants, and even some non-Christians.
What’s interesting is Catholics are taught the philosophy of Natural Law. It is an inherent part of the Faith. It just struck me this perhaps is the reason Catholics seem to so easily embrace the pro-life view. (Of course, I’m talking real Catholics with informed consciences, not “progressives”).
The Catholic position on abortion is absolutely unequivocal...not even in cases of rape or incest, or life of the mother, as many other Christians will accept. This is based upon the Natural Law, as is the Church’s opposition to artificial contraception.
I talked to an evangeical pastor about this. It’s quite interesting that while many of us from different Christian arenas may be united in the pro-life cause, when you break it down to specifics, especially infertility issues, IVF, embryonic research, birth control, eugenics, euthanasia, etc, that we may not be as together as we appear, as our reasoning originates in a different religious philosophy.
I was stunned this Pastor did not even understand the concept of Natural Law. The Catholic Church is 100 percent opposed to all of the above; but that’s not so with many other denominations, as they are not founding their principles on the Natural Law but merely on ethics or Biblical interpretation.
Not sure what that means for how we can work better to end abortion, just an interesting philosophical angle I’ve noticed recently.
Never thought that I'd live to see it on mainstream TV, but Law & Order took on the abortion issue last week with an episode called "Dignity", that showed a solid pro-life argument. That precise statement from Roe vs Wade (re "the medical science of the time"), was repeated on the show and suggested that it was "time to revisit it with today's medical knowledge".
Thank you! I missed that thread.
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