The Hidden Agenda for Legalizing Abortion

By Maria Gallagher, Legislative Director

Fair and impartial.  Those are the qualities that judges are supposed to aspire to--especially those who wear the black robes on the nation's highest court.

But the groundbreaking book "Abuse of Discretion" shows quite clearly that the men who sat on the Supreme Court at the time of the heartbreaking Roe v. Wade case had quite personal reasons for nullifying abortion laws in all 50 states.

For instance, in an interview with an NPR reporter after his retirement, Justice Lewis Powell revealed that he had aided a law firm "office boy" to avoid prosecution in connection with the man's involvement in an illegal abortion which led to a woman's death. Justice Harry Blackmun, who wrote the Roe decision, had a daughter who became pregnant while unmarried seven years before Roe.  Justice Thurgood Marshall saw abortion as a solution to the plight of low-income African-Americans, arguing that poor women should have the same "right" to abortion as wealthy women.

  

As the author of "Abuse of Discretion," Clarke Forsythe, writes, "Justices Powell and Marshall played pivotal roles in influencing Blackmun to extend the ostensible limit (to abortion) from the end of the first trimester to viability (of the unborn child)."

  

Meanwhile, Justice William Brennan planted the seed for the flawed legal reasoning used in Roe. Brennan's former law clerk, Edward Lazarus, once wrote, "Brennan knew well the tactic of burying bones--secreting language in one opinion to be dug up and put to use in another down the road."

By connecting the concept of privacy with the decision to have an abortion, Brennan fashioned for himself the backbone of Roe.

  

And it was that twisted, tortured legal spine that led to abortion on demand, for any reason, during all nine months of pregnancy...to the heinous practice of partial-birth abortion...and to an abortion center in West Philadelphia where babies born alive were brutally killed and mothers overdosed, maimed, and, mistreated to the point of medical manslaughter.

  

To his credit, however, Justice Powell once referred to Roe and its companion abortion case, Doe v. Bolton, as "the worst opinions I ever joined."

  

No truer words have ever been said by a Supreme Court Justice.  For justice's sake, Roe must be reversed. 

Maria Gallagher is the Legislative Director for the Pennsylvania Pro-Life Federation.