Roe v. Wade - the Truth

Abortion did not start in America, it is mentioned in the Bible. And even making it legal did not start in America, but how America goes so goes the world. Therefore the landmark case of Roe v. Wade should be marked as the pin that changed the world.

How did Justice Harry Blackmun, who wrote the majority opinion in the most controversial Supreme Court decision in history, Roe v. Wade, divine the right to abortion from the 14th Amendment's supposed "right to privacy," when there simply is no right to privacy in the 14th Amendment or anywhere else in the Constitution?

Let's pause for a moment on Roe v. Wade – a decision that opened the door to over 40 million abortions. If we're exploring how and why judges feel perfectly justified in ignoring the Constitution's original intent, let's consider one illuminating little story involving Blackmun, the hero of Roe v. Wade, and his pregnant daughter.

In March 2004, when Blackmun's private papers were finally released to the public decades after the momentous 1973 Roe decision, his daughter, Sally Blackmun, revealed something remarkable.

Talking to Womens Enews, Sally Blackmun disclosed for the first time that her father consulted with members of his family after being assigned responsibility for writing the majority opinion on Roe v. Wade.

"Roe was a case that Dad struggled with," Blackmun told the feminist news service. "It was a case that he asked his daughters' and wife's opinion about."

Most pertinent among those opinions would have been Sally's. Seven years before Roe v. Wade, while she was a 19-year-old sophomore at Skidmore College in Saratoga Springs, N.Y., Sally Blackmun discovered she was pregnant.

"It was one of those things I was not at all proud of, that I was not at all pleased with myself about. It was a big disappointment to my parents," she told Womens Enews. "I did what so many young women of my era did. I quit college and married my 20-year-old college boyfriend. It was a decision that I might have made differently had Roe v. Wade been around."

Shortly after the wedding, Sally Blackmun lost her child to a miscarriage. Although it took six years to complete her graduation requirements, she questions whether she would have graduated at all had her child been born. Getting pregnant had caused a major dent in the life she had planned. In those same six years, her hastily formed marriage collapsed. By then it was 1972 – the same year her father sought her input on Roe.

At the time of the Roe decision, Sally Blackmun lived and worked in Washington, D.C. Although Supreme Court decisions are generally made without advance announcement, Justice Blackmun notified his daughter so she could be present in court when the decision was read.

"I remember that it was very tense in the courtroom, very crowded. The decorum is such that people aren't yelling and screaming and carrying on. We didn't know how he was going to come down on it. And I was very pleased with the decision and the fact that it gave women that right of choice," Blackmun told Womens Enews. "Dad always felt that it was the right thing to do and the necessary thing to do toward the full emancipation of women in this country. So we certainly were in favor of what he did."

The obvious question: Did U.S. Supreme Court Justice Harry Blackmun's passion for championing abortion rights have anything at all to do with his own daughter's out-of-wedlock pregnancy experience and the pain, embarrassment and trauma it caused the Blackmun family? Do we need to guess what sort of advice Sally – who later became an attorney and chairwoman of Planned Parenthood of Greater Orlando – might have given her father? And is this how a Supreme Court decision, especially one responsible for over a million abortions ever year for three decades, is supposed to be made?

Is this what we've come to? Judges just make rulings based on their personal whims, emotions and family traumas, oblivious to the fact that they're changing the course of history in profound and destructive ways?

How did we get from having justices who reverenced the Constitution and honored the intent and wisdom of the founders, to today's justices? The judge said that the Constitution implied woman's right to privacy but I ask where is this? Where does the Constitution say that women have rights over children? We have the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, everyone.

Supreme Court Justice White gave in part, this dissenting opinion in the case:

"With all due respect, I dissent. I find nothing in the language or history of the Constitution to support the Court's judgment. The Court simply fashions and announces a new constitutional right for pregnant mothers [410 U.S. 222] and, with scarcely any reason or authority for its action, invests that right with sufficient substance to override most existing state abortion statutes. The upshot is that the people and the legislatures of the 50 States are constitutionally dissentitled to weigh the relative importance of the continued existence and development of the fetus, on the one hand, against a spectrum of possible impacts on the mother, on the other hand. As an exercise of raw judicial power, the Court perhaps has authority to do what it does today; but, in my view, its judgment is an improvident and extravagant exercise of the power of judicial review that the Constitution extends to this Court.

"The Court apparently values the convenience of the pregnant mother more than the continued existence and development of the life or potential life that she carries. Whether or not I might agree with that marshaling of values, I can in no event join the Court's judgment because I find no constitutional warrant for imposing such an order of priorities on the people and legislatures of the States. In a sensitive area such as this, involving as it does issues over which reasonable men may easily and heatedly differ, I cannot accept the Court's exercise of its clear power of choice by interposing a constitutional barrier to state efforts to protect human life and by investing mothers and doctors with the constitutionally protected right to exterminate it. This issue, for the most part, should be left with the people and to the political processes the people have devised to govern their affairs."

The former "Jane Roe," Norma McCorvey, announced in 1995 she had become a Christian and now has a pro-life ministry called Roe No More.

"I long for the day that justice will be done and the burden from all of these deaths will be removed from my shoulders," McCorvey said in a statement. "I want to do everything in my power to help women and their children. The issue is justice for women, justice for the unborn, and justice for what is right."

McCorvey will ask for a reversal of the judgment today in the federal district court in Dallas. The Texas attorney general's office and Dallas district attorney each have 20 days to respond.

McCorvey said she was "used" by pro-abortion attorneys in their quest to legalize the procedure. Seeking an abortion at the age of 21, McCorvey made up a story that she had been raped. She was put in touch with two attorneys who aimed to challenge the Texas abortion statute.

"Plain and simple, I was used," she said. "I was a nobody to them. They only needed a pregnant woman to use for their case, and that is it. They cared, not about me, but only about legalizing abortion. Even after the case, I was never respected – probably because I was not an Ivy League-educated, liberal feminist like they were."

Armed with the truth, let us do something about it.