By DEXTER DUGGAN
On the first day of December 2021, the month that commemorates the birth of a Christmas Child, the U.S. Supreme Court heard arguments about results of the permissive abortion that it suddenly thrust on the nation nearly 49 full years ago, shortly after Christmas, in the new year of January 1973.
Enough years to amount to a lifetime for some. Or the ending of tens of millions of preborn babies’ lifetimes. None of the justices in 1973, middle-aged or elderly, is still alive.
Had carrying the burden of pro-abortion extremism for nearly a full half-century begun to exhaust the Court so much that it would no longer consent to responsibility for such a load?
Chief Justice John Roberts questioned U.S. abortion law going so much further than most other countries’, placing this nation at the level of Communist China and North Korea, LifeNews.com posted on December 1. In the past, Roberts hasn’t regarded U.S. permissive abortion as unfavorably as has, say, Justice Clarence Thomas.
The top story on page one of the December 2 New York Times was headlined, “Justices Indicate They Will Uphold Curb on Abortion — Mississippi’s ban after 15 weeks poses a direct challenge to Roe v. Wade.”
Actually, the justices had issued no such declaration, but the pro-abortion Times apparently was worried enough by what was said that it made this concession.
Roberts also wondered if 15 weeks wasn’t time enough to make the abortion decision, and he noted that 15 weeks isn’t much earlier than “viability” as currently recognized medically.
Politico posted on December 1: “Justices Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett . . . were even less sympathetic to arguments against Mississippi’s law. Barrett repeatedly suggested that the option of giving a baby up for adoption obviated the need for abortion, while Kavanaugh cast overturning of Roe and allowing states to enact bans as they see fit as courts ‘returning to neutrality’ on the question of abortion rights.”
LifeNews.com posted an interview at The Daily Signal with Alliance Defending Freedom senior counsel Erin Hawley about the case, Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, during which she said:
“So, Mississippi restricts abortions . . . after 15 weeks; it has robust exceptions for the health and life of the mother. It allows months for women to get an abortion. It is consistent with over 90 percent of the abortion laws nationwide.”
As has been the case for decades, the basics of abortion law ended up on the High Court’s doorstep. It was not always so.
A half-century ago, the infant pro-life movement in individual states had begun defeating the elitist pro-abortion cause that suddenly emerged like a tarantula from its hole and began to victimize a nation caught unaware. Abortion had not yet been federalized.
Think of that passage of time. A 50-year-old pro-lifer from then would be 99 now. A 50-year-old pro-lifer now was just being born.
In 1972, even the New York state legislature, stung by a grievous error it made in 1970, repealed the permissive abortion law it had enacted. However, pro-abortion liberal Republican Gov. Nelson Rockefeller vetoed the repeal.
Also in 1972, the power of energized information and popular sentiment resulted in overwhelming rejection by public vote in November of pro-abortion referenda in Michigan and North Dakota.
However, before pro-lifers could continue building on such successes to affirm traditional protection of the innocent, the Supreme Court jumped in desperately two months later, on January 22, to announce an amazing basic constitutional right previously undiscovered throughout U.S. history to perform abortion nationwide.
This was one of the earlier instances of the High Court’s predilection to be an activist liberal super-legislature furthering what it considered to be socially or culturally necessary, not the work of a neutral judiciary. This generated the response of “social conservatism.”
Although often touted as a “women’s rights” ruling, it actually was framed as conferring the abortion right on doctors supposedly exercising their professional judgment. The 1973 opinions decided by 7-2, Roe v. Wade and Doe v. Bolton, were written by Justice Harry Blackmun, who once served as counsel for Minnesota’s renowned Mayo Clinic.
Blackmun made the grave error of viewing potential abortionists as the kind of upstanding medical professionals he associated with, hardly the actual profile of someone whose focus would be to end defenseless preborn babies’ lives as often as possible.
It was as if Blackmun had written an authorization to apply the death penalty by professional executioners who viewed tens of millions of their already born, innocent fellow citizens as deserving extermination. Whatever Blackmun had thought he was doing, he was dead wrong.
Radical abortion pioneer Bernard Nathanson, MD, was thrilled by Blackmun’s decision but came to realize how wrong this was. Nathanson later became a pro-lifer and then an actual practicing Catholic (as distinct from today’s brand of fanatical pro-abortion phony Catholic like left-wing Democrats Joe Biden and Nancy Pelosi).
Eventually succumbing to cancer in 2011 in New York City, Nathanson even pleaded for babies’ lives from his deathbed. Blackmun, on the other hand, never apologized for his deadly error, even though permissive abortions soared into the millions and any illusion Blackmun may have had that he resolved this social dilemma was destroyed.
On January 4, 2016, as that year’s anniversary of Roe and Doe soon was to arrive, the Time magazine website posted a brief portion of historian Daniel K. Williams’ new book, Defenders of the Unborn: The Pro-Life Movement Before Roe v. Wade (Oxford University Press). Time headlined this, “What You Don’t Know About the Abortion Fight Before Roe v. Wade.”
Williams noted the media depiction of the pro-life movement being a Catholic cause, “but by 1972, that stereotype was already outdated.” What “had looked like a last-gasp battle against the forces of progress” was transformed when pro-lifers “changed their strategies, and figured out how to win legislative battles. In 1971, 25 states considered abortion legalization bills. Every one of them failed to pass,” Williams wrote.
Led Astray
The energy and enterprise were on the pro-life side, then the High Court’s extremist activists parachuted in to abort everything. Although not as extreme as today, dominant media even then were pro-abortion, and were led further and further astray by the fanatical New York Times.
Pro-life activities weren’t worth publicizing. Deep, cogent criticisms of Roe and Doe were ignored. The fight was over, media megaphones declared, even as the Times did its lying best to make the nation think Roe was some sort of mild, reasonable, popular measure.
Now, as 2021 winds toward a close, pro-abortionists were left to sputter on December 1 that no matter how wrong a Supreme Court decision may be, it still must prevail unless some major change has occurred.
Well, how about the major change of advancing medical science? None of 1973’s justices ever saw a preborn baby clearly dancing about on a sonogram, and the Court that year pretended to tell us when the Constitution set the age of “viability,” which was about as sensible as saying the Constitution disclosed the maximum speed at which a rocket could fly.
As December began, strongly pro-abortion Justice Sonia Sotomayor — another of those bad Catholics whose careers got ahead courtesy of pro-abortion fanatics like Democrat Barack Obama, who named her to the High Court — was aware of preborn babies moving around in the womb. But Sotomayor ghoulishly likened this to jerking by a brain-dead body.
The abortion warriors never seem to miss a chance to cheapen themselves.
Sotomayor also made the incredible suggestion that if the Court stopped behaving as the nation’s abortion dictators, this would be a terrible stain on its reputation — as if the Court hadn’t revealed itself as a thoroughly political body since 1973, inventing and negating laws to suit a highly ideological agenda.
Politico quoted Sotomayor: “Will this institution survive the stench that this creates in the public perception that the Constitution and its reading are just political acts? I don’t see how it is possible. If people actually believe that it’s all political, how will we survive? How will the Court survive?”
Washington attorney Megan Wold posted at Real Clear Politics on December 1 that the Supreme Court should defend itself by overturning rather than upholding Roe.
Wold wrote: “The majority’s opinion in Roe has undermined the court’s legitimacy for nearly a half-century. Roe relied on dubious reasoning to remove a contentious policy issue from the reach of the American people, placing all abortion policy in the hands of the unelected and unaccountable judiciary. As a result, Roe has politicized the Court and poisoned the judiciary.”
The Roe Court delivered its opinion despite knowing that more than half the states banned abortion except to save a mother’s life, that the Hippocratic Oath had forbidden abortion for thousands of years, “and that abortion had been restricted under civil, canon, and Anglo-American common law,” Wold wrote.
As just another example of Roe’s irrationality — an overreach that even Bill Clinton-appointed pro-abortion Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg subsequently criticized — Wold pointed to the Court’s claiming that the 14th Amendment protected choosing abortion, even though 30 of the then-37 states in the U.S. banned abortion by the time that amendment was ratified.
Pelosi And The Pope
As to viability, even The Washington Post noted on December 1: “In 1973, babies born at 28 weeks of pregnancy were thought to have little chance of survival. In the following decades, however, that timeline compressed by about one week every 10 years, thanks to medical advances and better understanding of treatments.”
The Post story added: “These include the administration of steroids to the mother before a premature delivery to help with a baby’s lung development, and new instruments for performing delicate surgery on tiny babies.”
Bad Catholic pro-abortion fanatic Pelosi, who had dashed off to Rome in October to exchange loving smiles with Pope Francis, was in her usual mode as a “hitman” for the “murder” that is abortion, to use the Pope’s own terms, as she warned that the Court better protect it.
The Washington Examiner posted on December 1 that Pelosi — using her familiar euphemisms — said the Court had the “responsibility to honor the Constitution, the law, and this basic truth: Every woman has the constitutional right to basic reproductive health care.”
The Mississippi law at issue, Pelosi huffed, is “part of a nationwide assault against women’s freedoms” and “is brazenly unconstitutional and designed to destroy Roe v. Wade.”
Demeaning mothers who don’t work outside the home, and pushing the propaganda line that they must be “freed” from giving too much attention to childbearing, with the assistance of such tools as permissive abortion, goes back to the early days of the radical feminist movement that detested men.
These feminists completely broke with historic feminism, which saw abortion as an evil, not a necessity.
In addition to Roe and Doe themselves, left-wingers live in a fantasy world where permissive abortion is wonderful and the public celebrates it every day. But the Washington Examiner noted on December 1:
“That didn’t happen last month in blue Virginia. Democratic gubernatorial nominee Terry McAuliffe spent millions telling voters that his opponent would sign a restrictive abortion law like the one that had just taken effect in Texas. Exit polling shows that the voters who voted based on abortion actually broke for the Republican, Gov.-elect Glenn Youngkin, by 20 points.”
The Court is expected to announce its opinion by next June.
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