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Posted on 12/07/2004 3:26:17 PM PST by Ed Current
A recent Associated Press survey showed a surprisingly large percentage of Americans in favor of upholding the Supreme Court's 1973 Roe v. Wade abortion decision, but the poll question itself was misleading, telling respondents Roe legalized abortion only in the first three months of pregnancy – rather than throughout the entire nine months.
According to the poll, conducted Nov. 19-21 by Ipsos-Public Affairs, 59 percent of Americans want President Bush to nominate Supreme Court justices who would uphold Roe v. Wade. Some 31 percent of respondents wanted new justices who would overturn the decision and 10 percent were unsure.
The question posed by Ipsos on behalf of the Associated Press was as follows:
"As you may know, President Bush may have the opportunity to appoint several new justices to the U.S. Supreme Court during his second term. The 1973 Supreme Court ruling called Roe v. Wade made abortion in the first three months of pregnancy legal. Do you think President Bush should nominate Supreme Court justices who would uphold the Roe v. Wade decision, or nominate justices who would overturn the Roe v. Wade decision?"
In reality, Roe v. Wade struck down all laws restricting abortion in all 50 states, in effect legalizing abortion throughout the entire nine months of gestation.
According to the Roe decision, during the first trimester abortion is legal; after the first trimester and until "viability" the state may regulate only issues such as who will perform the abortion and where it will be performed. Even after viability, the state cannot prohibit a woman from having an abortion if it is deemed necessary for the preservation of her health – "health" being characterized by the court as including mental, psychological and financial well-being.
Here's how the Supreme Court put it in Roe:
(a) For the stage prior to approximately the end of the first trimester, the abortion decision and its effectuation must be left to the medical judgment of the pregnant woman's attending physician.
(b) For the stage subsequent to approximately the end of the first trimester, the State, in promoting its interest in the health of the mother, may, if it chooses, regulate the abortion procedure in ways that are reasonably related to maternal health.
(c) For the stage subsequent to viability the State, in promoting its interest in the potentiality of human life, may, if it chooses, regulate, and even proscribe, abortion except where necessary, in appropriate medical judgment, for the preservation of the life or health of the mother.
The ruling actually gave examples of how states might regulate abortions in the second trimester before the fetus is viable. Specifically:
Examples of permissible state regulation in this area are requirements as to the qualifications of the person who is to perform the abortion; as to the licensure of that person; as to the facility in which the procedure is to be performed, that is, whether it must be a hospital or may be a clinic or some other place of less-than-hospital status; as to the licensing of the facility; and the like.
After viability, the power of the state to prohibit abortions is extremely limited – many say non-existent – because of the phrase "health of the mother." Roe defined "health" to encompass mental health, psychological health and financial health:
Specific and direct harm medically diagnosable even in early pregnancy may be involved. Maternity, or additional offspring, may force upon the woman a distressful life and future. Psychological harm may be imminent. Mental and physical health may be taxed by child care. There is also the distress, for all concerned, associated with the unwanted child, and there is the problem of bringing a child into a family already unable, psychologically and otherwise, to care for it. In other cases, as in this one, the additional difficulties and continuing stigma of unwed motherhood may be involved. All these are factors the woman and her responsible physician necessarily will consider in consultation.
Critics are crying foul.
"Roe v. Wade allows absolutely no limits on reasons for abortion until nearly six months into pregnancy," National Right to Life legislative director Douglas Johnson told LifeNews.com. "It is way past time for the news media to stop distorting the real terms of Roe v. Wade."
The Associated Press "paint[s] a greatly exaggerated picture of public support for the Supreme Court's abortion policy," Johnson added, according to the report.
The misleading characterization of Roe in the AP-Ipsos survey question was repeated in a Nov. 28 Associated Press story by Will Lester, which stated that Roe v. Wade legalized abortion in the first three months of pregnancy.
The poll was apparently a follow-up on another AP-Ipsos survey conducted at the beginning of November, which posed the same question with the same misleading summary of Roe v. Wade. The Nov. 19-21 poll, which asked other questions besides the one discussed here, surveyed by phone 1,000 adults nationwide and has a margin of error of ± 3 percent.
Ipsos-Public Affairs referred WorldNetDaily to the Associated Press for comment, but repeated requests to AP over several days have not been answered.
In the companion case of Doe vs. Bolton, the Court defined the scope of the "health" exception as follows: "The medical judgment may be exercised in the light of all factors -- physical, emotional, psychological, familial, and the woman's age -- relevant to the well-being of the patient. All these factors may relate to health." (Doe, 410 U.S. at 192).
What this means, as the analysis of the University of Detroit Law Review points out, is that the Supreme Court's decisions "allowed abortion on demand throughout the entire nine months of pregnancy" (Vol. 67, Issue 2, p.157, note 3).
"As noted before, the Supreme Court did not invent abortion. There might be plenty of abortion, perhaps authorized or permitted by state laws, even without Roe and Casey. Moreover, the Court is, arguably, not directly responsible for the wrong moral choices of individuals that the Court's decisions permit. Finally, the Court is not responsible - cannot be responsible, consistent with its constitutional role - for correcting all injustices, even grave ones. But the Court is responsible for the injustices that it inflicts on society that are not consistent with, but in fact betray, its constitutional responsibilities. To the extent that the Court has invalidated essentially all legal restriction of abortion, it has authorized private violence on a scale, and of a kind, that unavoidably evokes the memories of American slavery and of the Nazi Holocaust. And by cloaking that authorization in the forms of the law - in the name of the Supreme Law of the Land - the Court has taught the American people that such private violence is a right and, by clear implication, that it is alright. Go ahead. The Constitution is on your side. This is among your most cherished constitutional freedoms. Nobody ought to oppose you in your action. We have said so.
The decision in Casey, reaffirming Roe and itself reaffirmed and extended in Carhart, in my view exposes the Supreme Court, as currently constituted, as a lawless, rogue institution capable of the most monstrous of injustices in the name of law, with a smugness and arrogance worthy of the worst totalitarian dictatorships of all time. The Court, as it stands today, has, with its abortion decisions, forfeited its legal and moral legitimacy as an institution. It has forfeited its claimed authority to speak for the Constitution. It has forfeited its entitlement to have its decisions respected, and followed, by the other branches of government, by the states, and by the People. The enthusiasm of liberal intelligentsia for the Court's abortion decisions, the sycophancy of the law professorate, of the legal profession, and of our elected officials, and the docility of the American people with respect to our lawless, authoritarian Court rivals the pliancy of the most cowardly, servile peoples toward ruinous, brutal, anti-democratic regimes throughout world history. We suffer people to commit despicable acts of private violence and we welcome - some of us revere - a regime that destroys popular government for the sake of perverted, Orwellian notions of "liberty." After a twentieth century that saw some of the worst barbarisms and atrocities ever committed by humankind, at a time when humankind supposedly had progressed to more enlightened states, we still have not learned. The lesson of the Holocaust - "Never Forget" - is lost. We fail to recognize the amazing capacity of human beings to commit unthinkable, barbaric evil, and of others to tolerate it. We remember and are aghast at the atrocities of others, committed in the past, or in distant lands today. But we do not even recognize the similar atrocities that we ourselves commit, and tolerate, today."
Michael Stokes Paulsen, The Worst Constitutional Decision of All Time, 78 Notre Dame L. Rev. 995, 1003-1007 (2003).
bump
If people knew the truth about abortion in this country, abortion would be as restrictive as possible.
Thanks for the link.
There is another approach to Roe that many folk don't know about:
www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1294959/posts
The nazi's killed 8 million jews...
The liberals have killed 40 million babies... and counting...
i hope abortion goes down in the history books are the largest genocide in our times
PING
Back in the 80's I was discussing this with a woman at work and she thought I was lying when I told her that not only was abortion made legal up to the moment of birth, her daughter could be taken from school and get an abortion without her ever knowing about it. Since she knew her daughter couldn't even get an aspirin or any other medication, she couldn't imagine that something that serious could be done without her knowing about it. I reminded her that abortion was the only medical procedure that was protected by politics.
Please FreepMail me if you want on or off my Pro-Life Ping List.
Catechism of the Catholic Church and what it says about those who support abortion
Nothing could be further from the truth.
I have had to force newspaper editors to retract editiorials on this aspect of the USSC decision.
The court based its decision on the fact that since religion and science could not decide (up to that time) when life begins, they didn't have to, either.
Roe author Justuce Harry Blackmun wrote: "We need not resolve the difficult question of when life begins. When those trained in the respective disciplines of medicine, philosophy and theology are unable to arrive at any consensus, the judiciary, at this point in the development of man's knowledge, is not in a position to speculate as to the answer."
It appears the Roe Court (or some of them) actually believed that it wasn't possible to determine when the life of a human being begins. But, by not resolving this factual issue, the Court left unresolved the legal question regarding the rights of an unborn child. So, the need to provide an answer to that question is inescapable.
Cutting edge millenium technology offers proof positive that life begins at conception. The issue of when life begins is no longer a difficult question. Scientific and medical evidence proves, without doubt, that human life begins at the moment of conception and that the child is a complete, separate, unique and irreplaceable human being from the moment of conception throughout gestation.
Since 1973, advances in technology have allowed us to obtain new information about human life on a molecular level. This information resolves all doubts that abortion is the act of killing a human being and that this tiny human experiences pain even during early gestation.
At the time of the Roe v Wade decision, abortion was completely illegal in 33 states except when necessary to save the life of the mother. The remaining 17 states allowed abortion in various circumstances. The most permissive, New York, allowed abortion for any reason up to 24 weeks, though New York did not allow third trimester abortions for "emotional health" as required by the Supreme Court.
In recent years, the abortion right has been extended to partial-birth abortions (sometimes termed infanticide) so that a perfectly viable child in the birth canal, in the process of being born, can be aborted in a most gruesome way, if the mother so chooses.
FemiiNazi idealogy is famously written into the USSC decision.
Thanks to FemiNazis, the unborn child has literally no protection in the womb, and is considered fair game by any and all saline/suction-wielding abortionists.
The USSC decision specfically states that under the equal protection clause of 14th Amendment, the unborn child is not considered a "person" and therefore has no legal rights under US law (14th Excerpt: "All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof......").
Roe v Wade author Blackmun wrote that "the unborn have never been recognized in the law as persons in the whole sense" and are not entitled to constitutional protection until birth.
Here, Blackmun was aided by tenets of the Jewish faith, and possibly other faiths, who teach that life begins at birth, not in the womb.
However, the official right-to-life position is that life begins at conception. Pro aborts insist that laws built on those religious beliefs infringe on their constitutional right of freedom from religion, yet they rarely if ever mention that the concept of life beginning at birth is a religious belief.
FemiNazis made sure that
Roe v Wade made the "Right to Choose" paramount. The mother's rights over the womb are absolute.....up to and including the ninth month of pregnancy.
AP can't be trusted.
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