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Posted on 01/18/2012 4:32:03 PM PST by Morgana
BOSTON, MASSACHUSETTS, January 18, 2012, (LifeSiteNews.com) – On Tuesday, the Massachusetts Appeals Court threw out a lower court’s ruling that would have forced a mentally ill woman to undergo an abortion and be forcibly sterilized against her will.
Norfolk Family and Probate Court Judge Christina Harms had ruled on January 6 that the 32-year-old could be “coaxed, bribed, or even enticed…by ruse” until she was sedated for the procedures.
The woman, who is identified only by the pseudonym “Mary Moe,” is approximately five months pregnant.
Moe, who suffers from schizophrenia and bipolar disorder, had a previous abortion in her history. She reportedly described herself as “very Catholic,” and told the court she “wouldn’t do that (abortion)” again. However, despite the testimony of a court-appointed specialist determined Moe would not choose abortion, and the fact that Moe herself reportedly became “agitated and emotional’’ when Judge Harms mentioned her previous abortion, the judge ruled that the specialist’s findings were inconclusive.
Instead, Harms ruled that Moe was not mentally competent to decide whether to have the baby, and said that if she were mentally competent, she would choose to have an abortion so she could resume taking medication to treat her illness. She added that Moe’s opposition to abortion stemmed from her “substantial delusional beliefs.” Although no one had sought sterilization, Harms also ordered Moe sterilized “to avoid this painful situation from recurring in the future.” The request that Moe abort originated with the state Department of Mental Health.
Appellate Court Associate Justice Andrew R. Grainger overruled the decision, noting Harms’ orders contradicted a 1982 state Supreme Court ruling allowing all the right to procreate. He added that Harms “simply produced the [sterilization] requirement out of thin air.” Another judge in a lower court will make a final ruling.
Pro-life advocates expressed thanks at the Appeals Court’s decision and dismay at the original ruling.
Terry Donilon, a spokesman for the Archdiocese of Boston, told LifeSiteNews.com the original ruling was “outrageous.”
“It’s barbaric to force anyone to undergo a sterilization or abortion,” constitutional expert John W. Whitehead of the Rutherford Institute told LifeSiteNews.com. “To force someone to go against their clearly expressed religious beliefs” is a clear violation of the First Amendment, he added.
“It’s not up to the state to determine who has a child and who doesn’t,” he said. “If permitted, it’s totalitarian.”
“The nation should take note at how close we are coming to the forced abortion policy of communist China,” Troy Newman of Operation Rescue wrote in a statement e-mailed to LifeSiteNews.com. “Can we now dispense with the ‘pro-choice’ label?”
“The abortion cartel has never wanted choice. They exist on an insatiable diet of more and more abortion.”
Others were surprised such measures were still being performed in the name of public health. “I didn’t realize that forced sterilizations were going on anywhere,” said Howard Trachtman of the National Alliance on Mental Illness Massachusetts. Daniel Pollack of Yeshiva University, said, “My guess is it happens a lot more than we know.”
The case demonstrates “the lingering shadow of eugenics, which has never left the ‘progressive’ agenda, despite its ugly history,” Father Shenan J. Boquet, president of Human Life International, http://hli.org told LifeSiteNews.com.
Although Harms prescribed a compulsory abortion to help stop Moe’s mental illness, abortion may have triggered her psychological issues in the first place. Court records show Moe had a “psychotic break” after her abortion and has been hospitalized numerous times for schizophrenia and bipolar disorder.
In 2003, researchers at the Elliott Institute found women with a history of previous abortion were nearly three-times as likely to have bipolar disorder, and a 2002 study by the American Journal of Orthopsychiatry observed that post-abortive women were being hospitalized for mental illnesses including schizophrenia.
In 2011, Dr. Priscilla Coleman of Bowling Green State University found nearly 10 percent of all mental illness in post-abortive women was “attributable to abortion.”
Brian Camenker, director of MassResistance, told LifeSiteNews.com, “this shows is just how dangerous these lower courts are.” Harms, who was appointed by Governor Michael Dukakis in 1989, retired on January 11. Camenker, who has long observed judicial trends in his home state, ranked Dukakis “probably the second worst [governor] in memory” for judicial appointments.
Fr. Boquet said he is happy the appeals court rejected “the extreme nature of the initial judge’s decision.”
“This young mother certainly needs help, not more violence in her life,” he wrote. “We pray that she is able to get the help she needs.”
WOW is this part of Romneycare?
Does this judge KNOW that this has been ruled unconstitutional.
1927
In Buck v. Bell, the U.S. Supreme Court rules (8-1) that laws mandating the sterilization of the mentally handicapped do not violate the Constitution. Writing for the majority, Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes makes an explicitly eugenic argument:
“It is better for all the world, if instead of waiting to execute degenerate offspring for crime, or to let them starve for their imbecility, society can prevent those who are manifestly unfit from continuing their kind.”
1936
Nazi propaganda defends Germany’s forced sterilization program by citing the United States as an ally in the eugenic movement, and its laws as proof of its status as same. World War II, and the atrocities committed by the Nazi government, would rapidly change U.S. attitudes towards eugenics
Who are the morons boinking a woman who is so disturbed: schizophrenia and bipolar disorder?
Isn't anyone taking care of Ms. S&B?
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The woman needs help, not to have her baby killed and forced to undergo sterilization. Are there any Catholic organizations that could help her, I wonder.
“Who are the morons boinking a woman who is so disturbed: schizophrenia and bipolar disorder?”
Show me a crazy woman, and I’ll show you a man crazy enough to go to bed with her. Hell, if men refused to sleep with women they thought were nutty, or vice versa, our birthrates would bottom out. The fact that we crave companionship and sex enough to put up with each other is what makes the world go round.
The democrat fascist party and the it's academic arm that provides recruits and rewards the party faithful must be so completely destroyed as a factor in national politics that, to paraphrase Bull Halsey, "democrat is only spoken in Hell".
JMHO
That is what I call "group think." Very few have an independent thought. The Libs I know, see the same movies, read the same books, watch the same news programs, and then discuss those same movies, books, and news programs, etc. and wonder why you're not interested in their conversation. Boring. . .
Generalize much?? Why do you hate people who suffer from mental illness??/
Do you hate people who have cancer or any other non-mental disease??
It’s prejudiced attitudes like yours that make it so hard for the mentally ill.
China is the new ideal for the limo liberal “smart people.”
She should be compensated for the suffering caused to her as the State threatened and attempted to harm her and kill her baby.
The judge should be sent to China where she can chase mothers down in the streets for the communist party.
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For later.
It looks like she had been getting treatment so she may have been relatively normal while on meds.
“thought forced sterilization was outlawed.”
Yes, I think we all thought that. and this woman is 32, I’d like to know who brought this action in the first place.
The difference between a yankee and a damnyankee is that the yankee goes back home.
Although Harms prescribed a compulsory abortion to help stop Moe’s mental illness, abortion may have triggered her psychological issues in the first place. Court records show Moe had a “psychotic break” after her abortion and has been hospitalized numerous times for schizophrenia and bipolar disorder.
In 2003, researchers at the Elliott Institute found women with a history of previous abortion were nearly three-times as likely to have bipolar disorder, and a 2002 study by the American Journal of Orthopsychiatry observed that post-abortive women were being hospitalized for mental illnesses including schizophrenia.
nail on head.
ping
You know as well as anyone how far California has fallen from the days of Ronaldus Maximus. As a native of New England, I lived in Connecticut and had plenty of paternal relatives in the Boston are. If anything, New England's fall has been faster and deeper. As late as the 1970s, both Connecticut and Massachusetts and their Democratic Parties (!!!) were militantly pro-life and socially conservative generally. In 1972 or thereabouts, Connecticut's stiff 1868 anti-abortion criminal statutes were struck down by a federal district court as just tooooo fuddy duddy for our modern sensibilities, inter alia, because they were 19th century laws. Governor Meskill (a pro-life Republican known as "Reagan East" with several adopted children) did not bother appealing but led a bipartisan charge and both houses of the legislature (by 5-1 margins in EACH party) passed the toughest anti-abortion penalties in American history. In the late 1970s, a similar majority of the Massachusetts legislature resolved to call upon Congress to pass a hard-line federal constitutional amendment to permanently outlaw abortion nationally.
We are indeed becoming Red China, courtesy of our smug elitists and polo players who imagine they know better than we do and that "surplus" babies, especially of the poor, need to be butchered in utero. Obama is negotiating to buy, for the post-presidential phase of his life, the palatial beachside mansion of the late Katherine (Planned Barrenhood) Hepburn in the Borough of Fenwick in Old Saybrook, Connecticut, where the views are more pleasant and the weather quite preferable to those in Hyde Park in Sickago and the state Demonrat Parry just as bad and the state Republican just as liberal and futile and worthless as in Sickago.
God bless you and yours!
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