Justice Blackmun's Documents Show Roe v. Wade Almost Fell in 1992

LifeNews.com ^ | 3-4-04 | Steven Ertelt

[cpforlife.org]

Washington, DC (LifeNews.com) -- The papers of former Supreme Court Justice Harry Blackmun, author of the infamous Roe v. Wade decision that legalized abortion, have been opened to the public. The New York Times, which was given first access to the materials, reports that the Roe decision almost fell until Justice Kennedy changed his mind and approached Blackmun with the idea to uphold parts of a pro-life law while keeping Roe's framework intact.

According to the Times, Blackmun feared the Roe decision would fall when the Court prepared to heard the case of Casey v. Planned Parenthood, which saw the abortion business take on a pro-life Pennsylvania law limiting abortions.

Then, a letter came to Blackmun from Justice Anthony Kennedy saying he had "welcome news."

Chief Justice William Rehnquist had assembled a group of five justices, including Kennedy, who were ready to overturn Roe. Justices Byron White, who dissented in Roe along with Rehnquist, Antonin Scalia, and Clarence Thomas joined Rehnquist in toppling the pro-abortion case.

The court had decided the Casey decision and Rehnquist was hard at work on writing the majority opinion. Then Kennedy backed out.

After meeting with Kennedy a short time later the Times reports, Blackmun grabbed a memo pad and wrote, "Roe sound."

Nothing in the Blackmun files reveals why Kennedy changed his mind.

Kennedy later joined Rehnquist, Thomas and Scalia in dissenting in the 2000 Carhart vs. Stenberg decision that overturned a Nebraska ban on partial-birth abortions.

Some court observers, and pro-abortion groups, have interpreted his dissent as meaning he is ready now to overturn Roe and that pro-life advocates are one vote away from doing so.

However, in the Carhart case, "Kennedy did not retreat from his 1992 reaffirmation of Roe as guaranteeing legal access to abortion for any reason up to 'viability,'" explains Douglas Johnson, legislative director for the National Right to Life Committee.

Blackmun kept thousands of notes, memos and papers that are beginning to reveal some of the behind-the-scenes decision-making at the nation's high court.

Some of the boxes of memos contain numerous drafts of the Casey decision with marginal notes showing where sometimes Blackmun agreed with his colleagues and, other times, hoping to change their minds on pivotal issues.

As the former legal counsel to the Mayo Clinic, Blackmun appeared to have fell victim of the fallacy that thousands of women died from botched illegal abortions prior to Roe. He viewed the illegality of abortion as a threat to good medical practice, despite the fact that women have been killed and injured by abortion since legalization.

The seeds for Blackmun's defense of abortion as a "privacy right" were sewn years before Roe, according to the Times.

Memos the justice wrote to himself prior to the case of United States v. Vuitch, a challenge to the District of Columbia's statute banning abortions, shows he was ready to frame a right to abortion under the privacy rubric. The high court ultimately decided the 1971 case without addressing the constitutional issue of abortion's legality.

"Here we go in the abortion field," Blackmun wrote in a self-memo acknowledging that the Supreme Court would soon render a landmark decision on the issue.

Blackmun discussed the privacy rights granted for birth control, in the Griswald vs. Connecticut case, and the privacy possession of pornography.

These cases "afford potent precedence in the privacy field," he wrote, adding: "I may have to push myself a bit, but I would not be offended by the extension of privacy concepts to the point presented in the present case."

Yet, Blackmun later writes that the Roe case almost didn't get a hearing, the Times reports: "I don't know why we didn't set it aside. I think probably the implication, the obvious implication, is that we didn't think it was that important at that time."

Regardless of the background scenes that led to the Roe decision, the pro-life community will continue to fight it and seek to overturn what is called the worst Supreme Court decision in history.

"[S]even justices took it upon themselves to operate as a super-legislature, effectively amending the Constitution in order to achieve the policy result they desired, which was legalized abortion on demand," NRLC's Johnson says.

"They negotiated over the scope of the right that they were inventing, and then argued over what language in the Constitution they could use to justify their policy," Johnson added. "The memoranda between justices that were released with the Marshall papers read like memos among the staffers on a congressional committee, drafting a statute."

[cpforlife.org]

1973 United States Supreme Court

“The greatest evil is not done in those sordid dens of evil that Dickens loved to paint but is conceived and ordered (moved, seconded, carried, and minuted) in clear, carpeted, warmed, well-lighted offices, by quiet men with white collars and cut fingernails and smooth-shaven cheeks who do not need to raise their voices.” C. S. Lewis

Note that the only two who voted against the majority in Roe v Wade (against MURDERING babies) are on the right side of the photo. Rehnquist standing and White seated.

[cpforlife.org]

Historic PING of Monumental Pingportions. (Eventhough it's a few days old.)

Justice Blackmun's Documents Show Roe v. Wade Almost Fell in 1992

[PackerBoy]

Never trust a Kennedy.

[cpforlife.org]

Please let me know if you want on or off my Pro-Life Ping List. Let me know if you want on or off my Pro-Life Ping List.

[cpforlife.org]

Boy isn't THAT the truth!!!

[cpforlife.org]

Related threads:

Files of Roe V. Wade Author to Be Unsealed (USSC Justice Blackmun revealed)
ASSOCIATED PRESS | 3/3/04 | GINA HOLLAND
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1089711/posts

Roe v. Wade Was Almost Overturned in 1992
FoxNews.Com ^ | AP
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1090849/posts

Private Files of Roe V. Wade Author Being Released (Kennedy switch prevented overruling in 1992)
AP ^ | 3/3/2004 | The Associated Press
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1090363/posts

Files: Roe V. Wade Was Almost Overturned
Associated Press via San Luis Obispo. com ^ | 3/4/04
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1090533/posts

Papers: Roe V. Wade Was Almost Overturned
AP via Yahoo! News ^ | 03-04-04 | By ANNE GEARAN, Associated Press Writer
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1090640/posts

HISTORY IN THE MAKING: MORE ON "ROE" FILES MOTION TO RE-OPEN ROE V. WADE
Traditional Values.Org ^ | Rev Lou Sheldon
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1089711/posts

[cpforlife.org]

PING

[RoseofTexas]

Is Kennedy still alive?? If not, he already got his BIG reward in heaven. All those children murdered were probably flashed across his face in the judgment room! OOOOO

[Fun Bob]

This guy should have recused himself from this case. Clearly he was biased as to the outcome.

miserable failure miserable failure miserable failure miserable failure war criminal

[cpforlife.org]

Kennedy is still alive & on the SCOTUS.

see current membership & who appointed them
7 by Republicans
AND KENNEDY BY REAGAN!!

Rehnquist, William H. Arizona Nixon January 7, 1972 September 26, 1986*(became chief)
Stevens, John Paul Illinois Ford December 19, 1975
O’Connor, Sandra Day Arizona Reagan September 25, 1981
Scalia, Antonin Virginia Reagan September 26, 1986
Kennedy, Anthony M. California Reagan February 18, 1988
Souter, David H. New Hampshire Bush October 9, 1990
Thomas, Clarence Georgia Bush October 23, 1991
Ginsburg, Ruth Bader New York Clinton August 10, 1993
Breyer, Stephen G. Massachusetts Clinton August 3, 1994

[viaveritasvita]

bump and forward to private email distribution.

[Coleus]

Pope Insists Catholic Legislators Must Never Vote Against Life or Family

VATICAN, March 1, 2004, Pope John Paul II said Saturday that it was an "opportune" time to remind lawmakers and Catholic lawmakers in particular that they may never vote in favor of laws attacking life or attacking the family. The Pope made his comments in a speech to Argentina's new ambassador to the Vatican.

The Pope urged the building of a society "worthy of man" which must therefore be based on "fundamental and irrevocable values" which include life and family. He said laws must protect life "from conception to natural death" and marriage - the "pillar of society . . . the union of man and woman, open to life, which gives rise to the natural institution of the family"

"I consider it opportune to recall that the legislator, and the Catholic legislator in particular, cannot contribute to the formulation or approval of laws contrary to 'the primary and essential norms that regulate moral life', the expressions of the highest values of the human person and proceeding in the last analysis from God, the Supreme Legislator," said the Pope.

He warned, "One must keep this in mind at this moment in which there are not lacking attempts to reduce matrimony to a mere individual contract, with characteristics quite diverse from those that belong to matrimony and the family, and which wind up degrading it, as if it were a form of accessory association within the social body."

He concluded, "For that reason, perhaps now more than ever, public authorities have to protect and favor the family, the fundamental nucleus of society, in all its aspects, knowing that they are thus promoting a social development that is just, stable and promising."

See the full text (in Spanish) at:
http://www.vatican.va/news_services/bulletin/news/14446.php?index=14446&po_date=28.02.2004&lang=en

[Jonah Johansen]

7 Republican Appointments
2 Democratic Appointments

Incredible squandering of political power by the Republicans. Incredible betrayal of their supporters.

[RedMonqey]

"Nothing in the Blackmun files reveals why Kennedy changed his mind."



The wind shifted and his reed of a backbone bent with it.

[cpforlife.org]

Notes:

Robert Bork was nominated to the U.S. Supreme Court by President Ronald Reagan in 1987, which the Senate Rejected.

Anthony Kennedy was Reagan’s second choice appointee and was confirmed by the Senate in early 1988.

Based on Bork’s quote below it is all but certain that he would have joined with Rehnquist, White, Scalia, and Thomas in overturning Roe v Wade in the 1992 Casey v. Planned Parenthood decision.

This is why it is so critically important to vote Pro-Life in EVERY election. Not just for President and Congress but for State and local as well. The issue of Life must be the one factor in determining whom to vote for without compromise or exception.

It almost never happens but if two candidates are truly equally pro-life, then and only then may other factors be considered.

In the January 2003, edition of First Things, in a piece entitled Constitutional Persons: An Exchange on Abortion Robert H. Bork made the following comments about Roe v. Wade:

"Blackmun invented a right to abortion....Roe had nothing whatever to do with constitutional interpretation. The utter emptiness of the opinion has been demonstrated time and again, but that, too, is irrelevant. The decision and its later reaffirmations simply enforce the cultural prejudices of a particular class in American society, nothing more and nothing less. For that reason, Roe is impervious to logical or historical argument; it is what some people, including a majority of the Justices, want, and that is that."

[lentulusgracchus]

Notes on your notes about the Justices:

Arizona is certainly overrepresented with two justices.

Anthony Kennedy proves that you should never, ever, appoint anyone to the Supreme Court from California (Kennedy, Warren).

The Rapist certainly restricted his appointments geographically, didn't he? Nobody from west of the Hudson.

[lentulusgracchus]

Anthony Kennedy's sustaining vote on Casey not to overturn Roe was the subject of a column some time afterward by conservative Catholic columnist Bob Novak. Novak made these relevant arguments:

1. Professor Laurence Tribe, dean of Harvard Law, annually nominates several graduating Harvard Law students to be clerks to the Supreme Court justices. Tribe was using his former students to back-channel lobby the justices, and Justices Kennedy and Souter were particularly susceptible to this influence. Tribe would talk to the clerks and suggest precedents they might retrieve that would bear favorably (from a policy perspective) on the case at hand.

2. Whereas Souter was cultivated at parties by liberal Democratic social doyenne Pamela Harriman (Winston Churchill's daughter and Ambassador and Washington "wise man" Averell Harriman's wife), Anthony Kennedy was lobbied directly by Tribe on the eve of the Casey decision. Kennedy attended a judicial conference in Vienna, and Tribe seized on the opportunity to meet with the justice and lobby him over coffee in a Viennese cafe for three solid hours.

There's your swinging gate.

[lentulusgracchus]

What-he-said bump for Bob Bork.

Too dangerous to allow on the Court. No wonder Joe Biden went after him.

Ninth Amendment my happy foot. The liberals had never even read it before.

[lentulusgracchus]

Incredible squandering of political power by the Republicans. Incredible betrayal of their supporters.

It certainly has been an "incredible betrayal". Whether it was also a "squandering" depends on what their real ends in view were.

The real question is, what are the ends in view of the national Republican leadership, and do the GOP rank-and-file understand those ends clearly? Or are we being consistently and cynically deceived? The juridical careers of these Supreme Court justices would seem to suggest that in fact we are.

[viaveritasvita]

7 Republican Appointments 2 Democratic Appointments Incredible squandering of political power by the Republicans. Incredible betrayal of their supporters.

Very good point!