Sunday, January 22, 2017

On the Day January 22 1973

America Embraces Abortion

On the Day January 22 1973


Khen Lim
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Image source: CNS News

The decadence that has plagued America has arguable roots. Notwithstanding the fundamental issue of the Adamaic sin that afflicts all of mankind, America has seen sin creeping into society from way back when. Some argue that it was the rock and roll era. Some others believe it’s the Woodstock hippiedom and the marijuana revolution. A few even go further back in time to the Wild West days.

There’s no way of telling which one is correct and beyond academic interests, it perhaps serve very little importance. I think all of them carries its own element of decadence that evolved over time but I am of the opinion that the biggest wheel of change began to move on January 22 1973 when America turned its back on the sanctity of birth and legally embraced one of the ugliest and abominable sins. 
We call it Abortion and the landmark decision is infamously called Roe vs Wade and was handed down by Justice Harry Blackmun. From that day onwards, despite dozens of state anti-abortion statutes, abortion was thereafter considered lawful when performed within the first trimester of pregnancy.
Although the decision was based on two different cases, it was the one of the unmarried woman from Dallas, Texas that weighed in with the greatest significance. In the Lone Star State, the state law required full consent from a panel of doctors and hospital officials before abortion can be carried out unless the woman was at risk of death. 
Realising she was pregnant sometime in 1969, 21-year-old unmarried Norma Leah McCorvey assumed that getting an abortion was possible in cases of rape and/or incest. So she lied that she was raped but then she had no police report to substantiate her claim. That drove her to obtain abortion illegally but even that was impossible since the police had permanently shuttered the illegal clinic. Knowing she had no recourse left, she decided to find a lawyer who would sue for the right to abort her baby.
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(L-R) Sarah Weddington and Linda Coffee (Image source: roevwade-ef2015.weebly.com)
Norma finally sought the services of two female lawyers by the names of Sarah Weddington and Linda Coffee, both of who were into women’s rights and advocacies and were actually seeking pregnant women looking for abortion. Obviously they were glad to take up the case but out of a need to safeguard her privacy, they called their plaintiff with the pseudonym ‘Jane Roe’ instead. 
On March 3 1970, at the Dallas federal district courthouse, Coffee filed the complaint as ‘Roe vs Wade,’ which was later escalated to a class-action lawsuit against the State of Texas represented by defence district attorney, Henry Wade. The grounds for the lawsuit was the illegal constitutionality over its existing abortion laws.
Decided simultaneously with a companion case, Doe vs Bolton, the United States Supreme Court ruled 7 to 2 in favour of the prosecution, finally awarding the right to have an abortion based on the issue of privacy under the Due Process Clause of the 14th Amendment. 
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Image source: The New York Times
The privacy angle took into account that a woman should have the right to determine if she wanted to or not want to bear children and in that sense, Roe’s lawyers argued that Texas laws were simply too vague to be reliant on. As such state law was in direct contravention of the 9th and the 14th Amendments of the U.S. Constitution. In their argument, they pointed to the 9th Amendment as the means to protect a citizen’s rights to privacy in the event that other parts of the Constitution failed to while the 14th Amendment ensured that no state law could dilute a citizen’s basic rights without due process.
When the case was decided on this day, forty-four years ago in 1973, the Court declared:
“[The] right to privacy, whether it be founded in the 14th Amendment’s concept of personal liberty and restrictions upon state action, as we feel it is, or, as the District Court determined, in the 9th Amendment’s reservation of rights to the people, is broad enough to encompass a woman’s decision whether or not to terminate her pregnancy.”
Throughout the three years that the case took to trials before reaching the Supreme Court, it gained not just national but worldwide notoriety for the nature of the suit. It alone aroused so much unbridled passion and sparked fierce controversy between those who were for and those who were against abortion. 
And through all the legal proceedings and media battles, Norma was not to be seen anywhere. In fact she never once attended even one trial. Remember that during the Sixties, abortions were unregulated because there was no binding federal law for it. Many states, though, had banned the practice with the exception of the mother being at risk of death.
Women’s liberal advocacy groups maintained that without legalising abortion, women were in graver danger as they either sought illegal black market services offered by unlicensed physicians or if that was too difficult, they face worse risks of having to abort the babies on their own. 
This prompted some states including California and New York to begin legalising the practice but because the federal government had yet to define the rule, these same liberal groups launched their action through the U.S. Supreme Court. With Roe vs Wade actively working its way to the highest court of the land by then, the groups saw it as their best opportunity to exploit all they could, to weaken the resolve of the lawmakers. And of course, the result was catastrophic.
Two years following the decision, Texas law was challenged and invalidated by a ruling of 7 to 2 in court. By then, the damage was irreversible – using the same privacy angle, a majority of justices across the land successfully repeated it, convinced that this privacy was upheld and implied by the 9th and the 14th Amendments of the U.S. Constitution. 
And so it was by then, no state legislation had the right to prevent a woman from having an abortion within the first trimester – three months – of her pregnancy. The die was cast and unborn babies would have no defence of their lives because no matter what state law that was left to protect them within those three months, they would be automatically overturned. It could only worsen and worsen, it did.
In 1992’s Planned Parenthood vs Casey, the Court went further by upholding the centrality that all women reserved the right to abortion all the way until foetal viability, meaning that Roe’s term-limited decision was no longer relevant. While the Roe case made it clear that ‘viable’ meant ‘potentially able to live outside the woman’s womb, albeit with artificial aid,’ the Casey case sharpened the focus to refer viability to anywhere up to 23 or 24 weeks in light of advances in medical technology.
To say that Roe vs Wade had reshaped national politics is understating the obvious. Abortion took centre stage and promptly divided the nation into two defined and bitterly opposing camps – those who fought for women’s advocacy and defiantly won and those whose interest laid in the unborn who now found themselves struggling to uphold the sanctity of life. 
Deceptively called pro-choice, this was now the group that the law safeguarded against those who called themselves pro-life, whose religious and moral views were now at odds with society at large. However with Roe vs Wade, grassroots movements had ignited what would become an intensely fought battle that also defined the progressivist God-defying liberals on one side and the God-fearing conservatives on the other.
By establishing rights to abortion, the Roe vs Wade landmark decision fuelled denunciations from none other than the National Council of Bishops. It also ignited the pro-life movement to agitate against the courts by creating an ant-Roe litmus test when it came to judicial appointees throughout the Reagan and Bush administrations, from 1981 to 1993.
While the Supreme Court’s decision was in favour of Roe, it did not come in time to help Norma McCorvey obtain a legal abortion and ironically, because she could not access even an illegally operated service, she gave birth to a daughter in 1965, way before the District Court ruled in her favour five years later. Norma’s own life up to that point was a troubled one.
Married to Woody McCorvey at the age of 16 while working at a restaurant, she left him after allegations of physical spousal abuse. Even so, Norma herself had run into trouble with the law much earlier than that. A product of a violent alcoholic mother and a father who abandoned the family three years earlier, Norma, a part Cajun and Cherokee by descent, identified herself as a lesbian soon after Melissa, her first child, was born. 
She also became an alcoholic herself and was hardly home, leaving the baby with her alcoholic mother. On her return from one of her weekenders with her friends, Melissa was gone and in her place, her mother used a baby doll as a substitute and subsequently reported Norma to the police for having abandoned her own baby and requested that they force her out of her home.
For weeks, her mother withheld information from Norma as to the whereabouts of her baby daughter but eventually allowed her ‘visiting rights’ to see her. Norma was later allowed back to her mother’s home to live. On waking up one morning after a previous hard day’s work, her mother told her to sign some ‘insurance papers.’ 
Ignorant of her legal rights and probably incapable of reading the contract properly, she duly but unknowingly signed them, not realising that she was surrendering all her legal parenting rights to Melissa to her mother. As it turned out, those were adoption and not insurance papers.
Now having complete legal custody over the baby girl, Norma was permanently kicked out of her mother’s home. The following year, in 1966, she became pregnant again and gave birth to her second child who was then put up for adoption. Three years later, in 1969, Norma was pregnant again. This time, she returned to Dallas where her friends suggested that she lie and claim rape so that she could obtain legal abortion, which invariably became the notorious Roe vs Wade case.
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Flip Benham (left) with Norma (right) at an Operation Rescue campaign (Image source: Walker Ministries)
Through the following three years of trials, leading eventually to the Supreme Court, Norma was never present at any of the proceedings. Following the landmark decision, she finally revealed herself as the name behind ‘Jane Roe,’ citing her need for an abortion because she was unemployed and emotionally depressed. It was only much later that she confessed that she was made a ‘pawn’ by Weddington and Coffee, two hugely ambitious women lawyers who purely used her to overturn Texas’ law against abortion.
In her 1984 autobiography called ‘I Am Roe,’ Norma expressed great remorse at her lies that culminated in the abortion laws that swept right across the whole nation, changing the fabric of society for the worse. 
In the same year, Norma became an integral part of the pro-life movement following her fateful book-signing encounter with Flip Benham, an evangelical minister and National Director of ‘Operation Rescue.’ Eleven years later in 1995, she was baptised. Summarily she walked out of her job at an abortion clinic and became an advocate for Operation Rescue’s campaign against abortion.
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Image source: Creation Wiki
It was in her second book, ‘Won By Love’ in 1998 that Norma finally revealed why she went pro-life:
“I was sitting in O.R.’s offices when I noticed a foetal development poster. The progression was so obvious, the eyes were so sweet. It hurt my heart, just looking at them. I ran outside and finally, it dawned on me. ‘Norma,’ I said to myself, ‘They’re right.’ I had worked with pregnant women for years. I had been through three pregnancies and deliveries myself. I should have known. Yet something in that poster made me lose my breath. I kept seeing the picture of that tiny, 10-week-old embryo, and I said to myself, that’s a baby! It’s as if blinders just fell off my eyes and I suddenly understood the truth – that’s a baby!
“I felt crushed under the truth of this realisation. I had to face up to the awful reality. Abortion wasn’t about ‘products of conception.’ It wasn’t about ‘missed periods.’ It was about children being killed in their mother’s (sic) wombs. All those years I was wrong. Signing that affidavit, I was wrong. Working in an abortion clinic, I was wrong. No more of this first trimester, second trimester, third trimester stuff. Abortion – at any point – was wrong. It was so clear. Painfully clear.”
Norma eventually professed she was no longer a lesbian. Till today, she remained actively in pro-life campaigns and demonstrations. In fact she rallied against former-President Obama at his commencement address at the University of Notre Dame. The irony of this event was not lost on Norma, who by now, was a Roman Catholic. Despite the university’s strong affiliation with the Catholic Church, Obama’s pro-abortion stand stood in stark conflict and was viewed controversially.
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Norma McCorvey, pro-life advocate (Image source: LifeNews)
Roe vs Wade continues to resonate today throughout not just America but has left an undeniable impact throughout the world. Abortion is what it is today because of this landmark decision, which may be why it continues to weigh heavily in Norma’s conscience and why she continues to fight so hard against the abortion movement. While liberal women’s groups were all ecstatic, there is absolutely no denying whatsoever that whatever manipulated science evidence says, the foetus in the womb is human and in fact, modern technology has irrevocably proven that premature infants have successfully survived at increasingly younger ages.
Both sides of the decision have waged continuing battles till today. Lobbying by pro-life groups gave rise to the Right-to-Life Amendment that was introduced in Congress but it failed to gain much-needed traction. On the other hand, the National Abortion Rights Action League probably did far more to advance their cause despite the 1976 Hyde Amendment that was introduced to prohibit the use of federal Medicaid funds for abortions. 
Formed in 1916, Planned Parenthood Federation of America is perhaps the most abominable and most visible ‘success’ story of the pro-choice women’s advocacy and yet in a 1963 pamphlet, they actually opposed abortion, saying, ‘An abortion kills the life of the baby after it has begun.’ So why the huge change?
Some of us believe that the 1963 anti-abortion stance was never a sincere one. After all, that was during a time when abortions were illegal throughout America. What we think the ‘real’ Planned Parenthood surfaced was when the abortion lobbying became intense enough to mount a serious legal challenge. That’s when they began their march to become America’s – and likely the world’s – largest chain of abortion operators and certainly the most political lobby front. 
In a December 2015 article, CNS News reported that Planned Parenthood released its 2014-2015 annual report, citing 323,999 abortions in the fiscal year ending September 2014 while receiving grants as much as $553.7 million from Obama’s administration till June 2015. Not long prior, in 2013, Planned Parenthood performed even more abortions – 327,653 in all – and prior to that, as many as 334,000 in 2008.
Some sources suggests that Planned Parenthood’s first official abortions began as early as 1970 in Syracuse, New York, the very first day that abortions were legally defensible in the state. Seven years after that 1963 pamphlet, George Langmyhr, its chairman, wrote in their issue of Clinical Obstetrics & Gynaecology, saying:
“We support the view that when an unwanted pregnancy has occurred, abortion services should be available, with the decision essentially being made by the patient and her doctor… In summary, Planned Parenthood hopes that abortion will become even more available and supports the efforts of others in seeking reform and repeal of outdated laws.”
In other words, Planned Parenthood had no intention of simply offering abortion services but would want to be at the forefront of expunging all anti-abortion laws from every state of America and to replace them with their progressivist agenda of terminating the lives of unwanted babies no matter the motive or the reason. 
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Protesters at 2009 March for Life Rally against Roe v Wade (Image source: Wikipedia)
Since then, Planned Parenthood had gone from strength to strength and with society’s decadence becoming increasingly more alarming every year, their brazen support of abortion went far beyond the basic brief of the organisation to include active lobbying for outright political dominance nationwide. With power virtually left unchecked in the eight years of Obama’s presidency, Planned Parenthood has become a very politically powerful force unto itself. Had Hillary Clinton won the 2016 Elections, there is no knowing how much more damage the organisation could do to women’s welfare.
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Melissa Farrell caught on video (Image source: Life Dynamics)
With the new President Trump in power at least for the next four years, there is much hope that Planned Parenthood could finally be defrocked and with wings clipped or crippled. Plans are afoot to defund the organisation at both state and federal level. 
As recent as last year, their Director of Research, Melissa Farrell was caught on stealth video by the Centre for Medical Progress revealing how Planned Parenthood utilised illegal accounting trickery to conceal profits gained through the sale of aborted baby parts. From another video, Ms Farrell, who oversaw the organisation’s foetal tissue supply program, can be heard saying:
“We had two levels of invoicing for them. We had it worded as ‘per consent.’”
‘Per consent’ was Planned Parenthood’s covert budgeting code for ‘per specimen’ for foetal tissue. Even more revealing details on the video recordings can be found here.
While earlier attempts to cut funds at federal level in 2011 ran aground against Planned Parenthood’s powerful Senate juggernaut and Obama’s White House representation, state level legislations saw some success in Kansas, Texas, Indiana, North Carolina, Wisconsin and Tennessee with all of them constricting funding in one way or another. And even as they fought these states all the way, at every junction in the courts, the public became even more aware of how convoluted public funding was used to finance their abortion activities.
Late news as recent as just a few hours as of writing now reveal that President Trump will actually sign an executive order to defund not just Planned Parenthood at the domestic level but very possibly, also its international affiliate. At the 43rd anniversary of Roe vs Wade, Trump’s signing of the executive order will not come easy. Senator Jeanne Shaheen (D-N.H.) pledged to fight the president all the way even if the matter would run its course through Republican-dominated Senate and House before it faces a presidential veto.
Just to underscore how acceptance of abortion is so widespread, Amnesty International said that Trump’s signing would “send a dangerous message to the world that the reproductive rights of women and girls and refugees’ rights are not a priority.” 
None of this should be surprising, given the pervasiveness of the liberal movement throughout the world. According to the pro-abortion Guttmacher Institute, American foreign aid amounting to no less than $600 million was actually focused on ‘family planning’ for the fiscal year of 2016, coming to the ‘aid’ of 27 million women worldwide.
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Image source: Brietbart
While the pro-life movement isn’t necessarily Christian, every Christian should be pro-life. Life itself is the single most important gift that God gives to each and every one of us. It is the gift of life that is specifically protected by the Sixth Commandment in Exodus 20:13. Through the ages, it is the sanctity of life that God uses to advance His Word. Our lives are precious not only to our own family and loved ones but also to God, our Creator. Our lives matter so much that God’s inherent focus of His covenant is none other than us.
It is with all this in mind that Christians broadly condemn the Court’s decision in Roe vs Wade as one that is deeply stenched in immorality and debauchery. Christians view this decision as a legal defiance of God’s laws and principles, using the law of the land as a broad brush to express individualism and secularism at the expense of obeying the Lord and upholding the sanctity of human life. 
The Bible teaches us that our bodies are not ours to do as we wish but are the temple of God, given to us on loan and therefore should be valued at all times. After all, it is this human life that is created in His image that we must constantly remind ourselves in light of the secular embrace of abortion.

Bibliography:
1.   Brennan, Christopher (Jan 2017) Trump Could Reinstitute Anti-Abortion ‘Mexico City Policy’ on Anniversary of Roe v. Wade in NY Daily News. Available at http://www.nydailynews.com/news/national/trump-expected-reinstitute-anti-abortion-mexico-city-policy-article-1.2950843
2.   Ertelt, Steven (Feb 2016) Video Catches Planned Parenthood Hiding Profits from Illegally Selling Aborted Baby Parts in LifeNews. Available at http://www.lifenews.com/2016/02/03/video-catches-planned-parenthood-hiding-profits-from-illegally-selling-aborted-baby-parts/
3.   Ertelt, Steven (April 2016) New Documents Prove Planned Parenthood Illegally Profited from Selling Aborted Baby Parts in LifeNews. Available at http://www.lifenews.com/2016/04/20/new-documents-prove-planned-parenthood-illegally-profited-from-selling-aborted-baby-parts/
4.   Ertelt, Steven (Jan 2017) President Donald Trump Will Sign Executive Order Sunday to Defund International Planned Parenthood in LifeNews. Available at http://www.lifenews.com/2017/01/20/president-donald-trump-will-sign-executive-order-sunday-to-defund-intentional-planned-parenthood/
5.   Goins-Phillips, TrĂ© (Jan 2017) Report: Trump Will Sign Executive Order to Defund International Planned Parenthood This Weekend in The Blaze. Available at http://www.theblaze.com/news/2017/01/20/report-trump-will-sign-executive-order-to-defund-international-planned-parenthood-this-weekend/
6.   Guttmacher Institute (May 2016) Just the Numbers: The Impact of U.S. International Family Planning Assistance. Available at https://www.guttmacher.org/sites/default/files/article_files/just-the-numbers-2016.pdf
7.   Johnson, Ben (Jan 2016) Planned Parenthood Reveals Its 2014 Stats: 323,999 Abortions, $553.7 Million from US Taxpayers in LifeSite News. Available at https://www.lifesitenews.com/news/planned-parenthood-performed-323999-abortions-and-received-553.7-million-fr
8.  Mattox, Casey (Jan 2013) Jane Roe of Roe v Wade Never Had An Abortion, Her Daughter is 43 in LifeNews. Available at http://www.lifenews.com/2013/01/28/jane-roe-of-roe-v-wade-never-had-an-abortion-her-daughter-is-43/
9.  McCorvey, Norma and Meisler, Andy (May 1994) I Am Roe: My Life, Roe v Wade and Freedom of Choice, First Edition (New York City: HarperCollins). Available at https://www.amazon.com/Am-Roe-Life-Freedom-Choice/dp/0060170107
10. McCorvey, Norma (Jan 1998) Won by Love, First Edition (Nashville, TE: Thomas Nelson). Available at https://www.amazon.com/Won-Love-Norma-Mccorvey/dp/0785272372
11. National Right to Life Committee (Feb 1998) ‘Jane Roe’ Tells True Story Behind Roe vs Wade – Normal McCorvey Says, ‘Pure and Simple, I Lied’ in HighBeam Research. Available at https://www.highbeam.com/doc/1G1-55342471.html   
12.  National Right to Life Committee (Feb 1998) ‘Arbitrary Legislation’ from the Bench – An Inside Look at the Making of Roe vs Wade in HighBeam Research. Available at https://www.highbeam.com/doc/1G1-55342476.html
13.  O’Bannon, Randall K. (2013) 40 Years: Planned Parenthood Becomes Abortion Empire in National Right to Life News, Vol 40, Issue 1. Available at http://www.nrlc.org/archive/news/2013/201301/AbortionEmpirePage8.html#.WIRF0Pl96M9
14.  Pan, Patricia Yuu (no date) Roe v Wade: How Abortion Became Legal in the United States in Ventura, John (Feb 2005) Law for Dummies 2nd Edition (Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons). Available at http://www.dummies.com/store/product/Law-For-Dummies-2nd-Edition.productCd-0764558307,navId-322490,descCd-tableOfContents.html
15.  Reagan, Ronald (May 2001) Abortion and the Conscience of the Nation, New Edition (Sacramento, CA: New Regency Publisher). Available at https://www.amazon.com/Abortion-Conscience-Nation-New-issue/dp/0964112531
16. Reardon, David C. (Jan 2002) Aborted Women, Silent No More (La Crescenta, CA: Elliot Institute). Available at https://www.amazon.com/Aborted-Women-Silent-No-More/dp/0964895722
17.  Starr, Penny (Dec 2015) Planned Parenthood’s New Annual Report: 323,999 Abortions; $553.7M in Government Money in CNS News (Media Research Centre). Available at http://www.cnsnews.com/news/article/penny-starr/planned-parenthoods-new-annual-report-323999-abortions-5537m-government
18. Terrell, Timothy D. (undated) Pro-Life Principles II: The Right-to-Life Amendment in Chalcedon – Equipping to Advance the Kingdom (Chalcedon Foundation). Available at http://chalcedon.edu/research/articles/pro-life-principles-ii-the-right-to-life-amendment/

19. U.S. Supreme Court (January 1973) Roe vs. Wade. 410 U.S. 113 (1973). Available at https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/410/113/case.html






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