That day—22 January 1973–was a day very much like today, cold, gray, threatening. I was walking around the House Office Buildings, hunting for a job. The previous November, I had been defeated for the State Assembly in New York. I hadn’t wanted to campaign on abortion one way or the other, but I couldn’t avoid it. After anguishing over my decision for weeks, I came out strongly anti-abortion. Immediately, the $25,000 promised to my struggling campaign—a huge sum in those days—was withheld by the New York State Democratic Party. Although I never met him, I was told that Harold Ickes, Jr. had made the decision. “We’re not going to have anyone in the Democratic Party who is anti-abortion,” he was quoted as saying. With that, I lost the race that was said to be a sure thing.

Job-hunting for an anti-abortion Democrat wasn’t easy then. It’s not easy now. Then, in the midst of my search came the thunderous news—the U.S. Supreme Court had struck down the abortion laws of all fifty states.

Broke, unemployed, I could not have been more dejected. With the Court’s radical ruling, I thought it would be this way forever. In my experience, no one—at least no one who was not a segregationist—had spoken out against a ruling of the Supreme Court. We had been schooled to believe that the Supreme Court had the final word.

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Tags: Roe v. Wade

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For those who enjoy going to the movies but want a film that digs deeper into the soul than the pocketbook, the inspiring Christian film To Save a Life opens in theatres today.

High schooler Jake Taylor has it all—basketball stardom, perfect girlfriend, college scholarship, but an old friend’s suicide forces him to discover what he truly values and believes. The film also deals with abortion in a dramatic and touching way, a fitting reminder of what we are fighting for on the anniversary of Roe v. Wade.

Tags: Roe v. Wade, To Save A Life

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Is the unborn child a human life? President Reagan used to say if you were in doubt whether a body you found on the sidewalk was dead or alive, you would never just assume it was dead.

President Obama, by contrast, famously answered Rev. Rick Warren’s question about when the unborn child begins to have human and civil rights by saying “that question is above my pay grade.” But Mr. Obama’s policies all assume the body on the sidewalk is dead.

There’s yet another thing you will never learn reading the papers about Roe. Just where were those abortion laws of the fifty states that were struck down by the Supreme Court that dread day? They were not in the family law codes. Nor in the child custody codes. Not in the medical licensing statutes.

The abortion laws of the fifty states were typically found in the “Homicide” sections.

No state made abortion a homicide in the first degree (“pre-meditated murder,” to most of

us lay people.) This may have been due to wise 19^th century state lawmakers who did not want to prosecute women. And it may have taken account of the difficulty of obtaining convictions where the evidence of the unborn child’s body was hard to find.

Still, that these laws were homicide laws tells you volumes. Some of our younger pro-life friends believe that the Court could not have known about the humanity of the unborn child in 1973. Not so. Yes, we know so very much more now. Yes, we have 4D ultra-sound that we did not have then.

But they knew in 1973. Everyone knew. I recall sitting in the Catholic hospital where my mother worked in the late 1960s. Across from me in the waiting room was an expectant  Filipino woman. She could hardly speak English, but she wore a tee shirt with an arrow pointing down at her tummy. The tee shirt said: “Baby.” Everyone knew what that meant.

The state lawmakers knew as early as 1857, when science discovered that human life begins at conception. And every accurate scientific and medical textbook since has acknowledged this inescapable but, to politicians like Al Gore, inconvenient truth:
“The chromosomes of the oocyte and sperm are…respectively enclosed within female and male pronuclei. These pronuclei fuse with each other to produce the single, diploid, 2N nucleus of the fertilized zygote. This moment of zygote formation may be taken as the beginning or zero time point of embryonic development.”
[Larsen, William J. Human Embryology. 2nd edition. New York: Churchill Livingstone, 1997, p. 17]

President Obama: I have the honor to present to you the human oocyte and sperm. And they didn’t even have to crash your White House dinner. I was introduced to them in high school biology. Sir, I wanted you to meet them.

Since the public has been deliberately misled about Roe v. Wade, it will be necessary to educate people about it. That’s why, when confronted with insistent media questions on “overturning” Roe v. Wade, I hope the pro-life community will resolutely respond:

Roe overturned all fifty state laws that protected unborn children and their mothers. Roe needs to be corrected.

“Overturn” is what happens to SUVs in a ditch. “Overturn” is radical and dangerous. The American people are inherently conservative and reflexively reject that which is radical and dangerous. Liberal activists and journalists know this. That’s why they always frame every question about abortion—or at least the ones they lob at pro-life candidates—in terms of “overturning” Roe.

They know what they are doing. Shouldn’t we?

Tags: Abortion, Roe v. Wade

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The Gallup Company created quite a stir last spring when they announced that, for the first time, a majority (51%) of Americans consider themselves pro-life. We would think, therefore, that a majority would also favor “overturning” Roe v. Wade, the 1973 Supreme Court ruling that gave us abortion-on-demand. Not necessarily.

First, we must remember that the American people have been misled by the major news media about Roe v. Wade since that dark and dreary day 36 years ago.

The media regularly call Roe a “landmark decision.” Landmark is a good thing. It connotes something historic and of great weight. You never hear the infamous 1857  Dred Scott ruling that upheld slavery in the territories called “landmark.”

Almost never will a story about Roe include the critique of Yale Law School Dean, John Hart Ely. Prof. Ely, although he favored liberalizing our abortion laws, was unimpressed by the legal reasoning behind Justice Harry Blackmun’s Roe v. Wade ruling: “It is not constitutional law and it gives no impression of an obligation to be constitutional law.” According to Bob Woodruff’s behind-the-scenes book on the Supreme Court, the Justices’ clerks were even more dismissive, calling the opinion “Harry’s abortion.”

Harvard Law Professor Archibald Cox was a friend of the Kennedy family. He, too, was not impressed with the land that Roe was marking:

[Blackmun’s opinion] fails even to consider what I would suppose to be the most important compelling interest of the State in prohibiting abortion: the interest in maintaining that respect for the paramount sanctity of human life which has always been at the centre of Western civilization, not merely by guarding life itself, however defined, but by safeguarding the penumbra, whether at the beginning, through some overwhelming disability of mind or body, or at death.

Continuing to blast Roe, Cox wrote:

The failure to confront the issue in principled terms leaves the opinion to read like a set of hospital rules and regulations, whose validity is good enough this week but will be destroyed with new statistics upon the medical risks of child-birth and abortion or new advances in providing for the separate existence of a fetus. . . . Neither historian, nor layman, nor lawyer will be persuaded that all the prescriptions of Justice Blackmun are part of the Constitution.

President Kennedy’s appointee to the Supreme Court, Justice Byron R. “Whizzer” White was one of two votes against Roe on January 22, 1973, and faithfully ever after. Justice White condemned the ruling as an example of “raw judicial power.”

But the media, in their worshipful treatment of Roe, rarely include such comments. Nor do they remind Americans that Roe was so radical it overturned the abortion laws of all fifty states. Even the most liberal state laws on abortion—like those of New York, Washington, California, and Colorado—were overturned by Roe’s yet more radical rule.

Further, the media regularly report that the Supreme Court “legalized abortion in the first trimester of pregnancy.” That’s true, but misleading.

Yes, the Court made abortion legal in the first trimester (three months), but it also so strictly limited the protections a state might afford to unborn children after the first trimester as to effectively give us abortion-on-demand until birth. (And, in some horrific cases, even after birth.)

Describing Roe this way is like describing Hitler’s blitzkrieg in Western Europe like this:

“German forces today overran Belgium and Luxemburg.” Surely they did. But they also simultaneously invaded France!

In practice, Roe legalized abortion in all three trimesters. This makes U.S. abortion law more radical than any other advanced democracy.

So the public has been consistently misinformed about the radical nature of Roe v. Wade.

But it is also misinformed about the reasons given for most abortions. Well over 90% of abortions are done today–and have been done since 1973 for reasons that the American people do not support–reasons of financial hardship or emotional distress.

Liberal Boston Globe columnist Ellen Goodman, who retired earlier this year, famously wrote that the three reasons for abortion are “rape, incest, and me.” She was candidly admitting that pro-abortion groups use the horrors of rape and incest to conceal their true agenda: abortion-on-demand.

The numbers of abortions are typically reported in decimal form—1.2 million. Cynical Communist dictator Joe Stalin said it: “A single death is a tragedy. A million deaths is a statistic.” He should know. By not reporting the annual deaths from abortion as 1,200,000, or the total since Roe was issued as 49,000,000, the press collaborates in minimizing the impact.

By way of comparison, America’s Civil War claimed the lives of 630,000 young men, World War II cost us 424,000. Is there any other way to assess the gravity of a war? The worst riots? The worst flood? The worst earthquake? They’re judged by the numbers of human lives they take.

(continued in Part II)

Tags: Abortion, Roe v. Wade

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