Lies and fraud of Roe v. Wade

"Robert Bork's America is a land in which women would be forced into back-alley abortions, blacks would sit at segregated lunch counters, rogue police could break down citizens' doors in midnight raids, schoolchildren could not be taught about evolution, writers and artists could be censored at the whim of government."

That was Teddy Kennedy back in the days before the media revolution of the Internet and talk radio would have blown such slanders to smithereens within hours. It was 1987, and back then corrupt politicians could malign and lie about good men with impunity – and rely on Dan Rather and Peter Jennings to cover for them and cheerlead their elitist agenda during the evening news.

Sen. Kennedy, one of the most hypocritical public figures of our lifetime, was leading the charge to deny one of the most principled a seat on the Supreme Court. And what was it about Robert Bork that so threatened Kennedy and other Senate liberals?

Nominated to the high court by President Ronald Reagan, Bork was an "originalist." Widely acknowledged as a brilliant constitutional scholar and judge, Bork believed the Supreme Court should interpret the Constitution according to its original intent – the meaning and purpose of the founders who conceived, drafted, debated and ratified the document as the supreme law of this land.

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And so, he was maligned, mocked, rejected – in other words, "borked," a nasty Beltway verb named after him. And the No. 1 issue that Senate Democrats and their supporters feared most from Bork's presence on the court was the overturning of Roe v. Wade.

Ironically, Bork admits that for most of his life he was pro-abortion. But he was not pro-Roe.

As Bork explained in his best-selling book, "Slouching Towards Gomorrah":

For years I adopted, without bothering to think, the attitude common among secular, affluent, university-educated people who took the propriety of abortion for granted, even when it was illegal. The practice's illegality, like that of drinking alcohol during Prohibition, was thought to reflect merely unenlightened prejudice or religious conviction, the two being regarded as much the same.

If Bork approved abortion at the time of Roe v. Wade (he has since come around to a very different position), why would he oppose the Supreme Court decision that made abortion legal?

It was because, as a constitutional expert and an originalist, Robert Bork knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that the U.S. Constitution in no way encompassed a "right" to abortion.

Radical deformation

"I objected to Roe v. Wade the moment it was decided," Bork wrote, "not because of any doubts about abortion, but because the decision was a radical deformation of the Constitution. The Constitution has nothing to say about abortion, leaving it, like most subjects, to the judgment and moral sense of the American people and their elected representatives."

Bork compared Roe to another infamous ruling: "Roe and the decisions reaffirming it are equal in their audacity and abuse of judicial office to Dred Scott v. Sanford. Just as Dred Scott forced a southern pro-slavery position on the nation, Roe is nothing more than the Supreme Court's imposition on us of the morality of our cultural elites."

And what, exactly, was the "morality of our cultural elites"?

Why, "freedom and equality" of course. But not the kind of "freedom and equality" the founders valued and fought and died for.

Bork offers a disturbing insight into the radical feminist-inspired pro-abortion worldview behind Roe v. Wade. "No amount of discussion, no citation of evidence, can alter the opinions of radical feminists about abortion," Bork states, illustrating his point with a story. "One evening I naively remarked in a talk that those who favor the right to abort would likely change their minds if they could be convinced that a human being was being killed. I was startled at the anger that statement provoked in several women present. One of them informed me in no uncertain terms that the issue had nothing to do with the humanity of the fetus but was entirely about the woman's freedom."

Such a supremely selfish brand of "freedom" is chilling enough, but Bork then explained what "equality" meant to Roe's backers, including those on the Supreme Court. "Justice Harry Blackmun, who wrote Roe and who never offered the slightest constitutional defense of it, simply remarked that the decision was a landmark on women's march to equality," explains Bork. "Equality, in this view, means that if men do not bear children, women should not have to either. Abortion is seen as a way for women to escape the idea that biology is destiny, and from the tyranny of the family role."

Thus was the pathological contempt and hatred so many radical feminists have for men and marriage – and yes, for children too – turned into the law of the land.

Today, two decades after Bork was shamefully blocked from his rightful place on the Supreme Court – and all because he dared to proclaim publicly that the Constitution should be interpreted according to its original meaning – new nominees to the high court are always afraid to talk about abortion.

Thus, in recent memory Americans have watched the "abortion dance" on TV. First, Supreme Court nominee John Roberts, and later Samuel Alito politely fended off prying questions – couched in code words like "privacy" and "super-precedents" – about their views on Roe v. Wade.

But the one thing always left out of the high-profile national debate is the issue of abortion itself – and the actual merits of the infamous court ruling that delivered unrestricted abortion to America.

What if this nation finally had, for the first time ever, a real national dialogue about abortion and Roe v. Wade?

What would happen if we stopped the "abortion dance"? Let's find out. Are you ready?

Inventing new constitutional rights

Very simply, there is no right to abortion in the Constitution. Period. It's not there. Moreover, the very suggestion would have struck the framers of the Constitution as absurd or downright demonic. But how then can modern judges "discover" a constitutional right to abortion when no previous judge discerned it in the first 180 years of the Constitution's existence?

First of all, understand that pretending to find the right to kill society's most innocent members – especially in a document created precisely to protect individual rights, first and foremost the right to life – would be too brazen and transparent a hoax to attempt outright. So the abortion "right" had to be "discovered" within another right – the "right to privacy."

Thus, the marketing of the "constitutional right to abortion" was a two-part magic trick. First, reach inside the Constitution "hat" and pull out the "right to privacy," and then reach inside the right-to-privacy "hat" and pull out the right to abortion. Got that?

Minor problem: The "right to privacy" is also not found in the Constitution. In fact, here's what Justice Harry Blackmun wrote in his majority opinion justifying the Roe decision:

"The Constitution does not explicitly mention any right of privacy."

That's right. He actually said that. But after this plainspoken admission that there is no "privacy right" in the Constitution, Blackmun goes into full legal spin mode, throwing around the names of various cases, and wondering aloud whether the newfound "privacy right" is mystically buried within the Ninth Amendment or the Fourteenth Amendment:

In a line of decisions, however, going back perhaps as far as Union Pacific R. Co. v. Botsford, 141 U.S. 250, 251 (1891), the Court has recognized that a right of personal privacy, or a guarantee of certain areas or zones of privacy, does exist under the Constitution. In varying contexts, the Court or individual Justices have, indeed, found at least the roots of that right in the First Amendment, Stanley v. Georgia, 394 U.S. 557, 564 (1969); in the Fourth and Fifth Amendments, Terry v. Ohio, 392 U.S. 1, 8-9 (1968), Katz v. United States, 389 U.S. 347, 350 (1967), Boyd v. United States, 116 U.S. 616 (1886), see Olmstead v. United States, 277 U.S. 438, 478 (1928) (Brandeis, J., dissenting); in the penumbras of the Bill of Rights, Griswold v. Connecticut, 381 U.S., at 484-485; in the Ninth Amendment, id., at 486 (Goldberg, J., concurring); or in the concept of liberty guaranteed by the first section of the Fourteenth Amendment, see Meyer v. Nebraska, 262 U.S. 390, 399 (1923). These decisions make it clear that only personal rights that can be deemed "fundamental" or "implicit in the concept of ordered liberty," Palko v. Connecticut, 302 U.S. 319, 325 (1937), are included in this guarantee of personal privacy. They also make it clear that the right has some extension to activities relating to marriage, Loving v. Virginia, 388 U.S. 1, 12 (1967); procreation, Skinner v. Oklahoma, 316 U.S. 535, 541-542 (1942); contraception, Eisenstadt v. Baird, 405 U.S., at 453-454; id., at 460, 463-465 (WHITE, J., concurring in result); family relationships, Prince v. Massachusetts, 321 U.S. 158, 166 (1944); and child rearing and education, Pierce v. Society of Sisters, 268 U.S. 510, 535 (1925), Meyer v. Nebraska, supra.

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This right of privacy, whether it be founded in the Fourteenth Amendment's concept of personal liberty and restrictions upon state action, as we feel it is, or, as the District Court determined, in the Ninth Amendment's reservation of rights to the people, is broad enough to encompass a woman's decision whether or not to terminate her pregnancy.

Translation: Speaking for the majority, Blackmun declares that killing our unborn children is a "fundamental" right "implicit in the concept of ordered liberty." He isn't quite sure whether the mystical "right to privacy" – in the bowels of which is buried the even more mystical "right to abortion" – is found in the Ninth Amendment or, as his brethren on the court "feel" it is – in the Fourteenth Amendment. And of course, as Blackmun adds for good measure, "at least the roots of that right" can be divined from the First, Fourth and Fifth Amendments. Anyway, the court just knew there had to be an expansive right to privacy – and within it the right to kill our children – somewhere in the Constitution, even if they weren't sure exactly where it was.

It is on tenuous, tortured pseudo-scholarship like this that we have staked the future of Western Civilization, condemning an entire class of people – unborn babies – to agony and death upon the whim of others.

If there is no right to abortion in the Constitution, why did Blackmun and the majority of the Roe court invent one?

"Radical individualism is the only explanation for the Supreme Court's creation, out of thin air, of a general and undefined right of privacy," says Bork. "The Court used the invented right, allegedly to protect the sanctity of the marital bedroom, to strike down a dormant Connecticut statute prohibiting the use of contraceptives. But marital privacy was shortly transformed into individual autonomy when the Court invalidated a Massachusetts law restricting access to contraceptives by single persons. That in turn led to Roe v. Wade and the right to abortion. Whatever one's feelings about abortion, the decision has no constitutional foundation, and the Court offered no constitutional reasoning. Roe is nothing more than the decision of a Court majority to enlist on one side of the culture war."

The Roe court's seduction into the radical secular worldview pushed by cultural elitists can be seen reflected in an interesting personal vignette in the life of Justice Blackmun around the time of Roe v. Wade.

It just so happens that Blackmun's 19-year-old daughter Sally had become pregnant out of wedlock, quit college and married her boyfriend. Her pregnancy, a painful embarrassment for the Blackmun family, also temporarily derailed the life course Sally Blackmun had charted for herself. If she could have obtained an abortion legally, she told Womens Enews years later, her life might have gone better.

Sally Blackmun, who later became a honcho in Planned Parenthood, advised her father about Roe v. Wade. As she told the feminist news service, "Roe was a case that Dad struggled with. It was a case that he asked his daughters' and wife's opinion about." And indeed, Blackmun apparently listened to his family: "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," said daughter Sally. "So we certainly were in favor of what he did."

The power of lies

If Roe v. Wade is a legal fraud, passed in response to cultural and media pressures from the elitist class, then the way it was sold to Americans was just as fraudulent.

In "The Marketing of Evil" I reveal what Bernard Nathanson, co-founder of NARAL and one of the prime movers behind legalized abortion in New York, told me about how he and his pro-abortion colleagues managed to market legalized abortion to America. Their efforts paved the way for Roe v. Wade a few short years later.

"We persuaded the media that the cause of permissive abortion was a liberal, enlightened, sophisticated one," recalled the movement's co-founder. "Knowing that if a true poll were taken, we would be soundly defeated, we simply fabricated the results of fictional polls. We announced to the media that we had taken polls and that 60 percent of Americans were in favor of permissive abortion. This is the tactic of the self-fulfilling lie. Few people care to be in the minority. We aroused enough sympathy to sell our program of permissive abortion by fabricating the number of illegal abortions done annually in the U.S. The actual figure was approaching 100,000, but the figure we gave to the media repeatedly was 1 million."

NARAL's brilliantly deceitful marketing campaign, bolstered by fraudulent "research," was successful. In New York, the law outlawing abortion had been on the books for 140 years. "In two years of work, we at NARAL struck that law down," said Nathanson. "We lobbied the legislature, we captured the media, we spent money on public relations. … Our first year's budget was $7,500. Of that, $5,000 was allotted to a public relations firm to persuade the media of the correctness of our position. That was in 1969."

New York immediately became the abortion capital for the eastern half of the United States.

"We were inundated with applicants for abortion," recalled Nathanson. "To that end, I set up a clinic, the Center for Reproductive and Sexual Health (C.R.A.S.H.), which operated in the east side of Manhattan. It had 10 operating rooms, 35 doctors, 85 nurses. It operated seven days a week, from 8 a.m. to midnight. We did 120 abortions every day in that clinic. At the end of the two years that I was the director, we had done 60,000 abortions."

In "The Marketing of Evil," I explain many sophisticated and powerful manipulation techniques used to market evil. But when it comes to abortion, one technique shoots right to the top of the list: It's called lying. To make killing little unborn babies sound good, you have to lie about it.

Nathanson today admits he and his abortion colleagues lied left and right. What's the most powerful abortion marketing slogan of all? "Women are dying." It just seems to trump all other points. In the years before Roe v. Wade, we always heard that 5,000 to 10,000 women were dying every year in the U.S. from illegal, botched abortions. This is what Nathanson and his abortion marketer cohorts were claiming. But it wasn't true – not even close – and they knew it.

Do you know how many women actually died from illegal, botched abortions in 1972, the last full year before Roe v. Wade? According to the Centers for Disease Control, it wasn't 5,000 or 10,000, it wasn't even 1,000 – it was 39. Thirty-nine!

Suppose we were told 10,000 U.S. soldiers had died in the Iraq war, and that death rate influenced us to pull out, and then things got immeasurably worse because we left? And suppose we later found out that 10,000 Americans hadn't actually died in Iraq, but only 39. Wouldn't we feel betrayed?

Americans were betrayed by abortion marketers. The groundswell of support for legalized abortion that led to Roe v. Wade was based on lies and fraud, just as the court case itself was based on lies and fraud. And to this very day, the abortion industry is based almost entirely on lies and deception and dishonest marketing. Vulnerable women are still being deceived into believing their unborn babies are not human beings, only to find out too late, in the recovery room or perhaps later in life, that they ended the lives of their own children. It's hard to contemplate a crueler trick one could play on a mother.

Collision course

However, the good news is that Roe v. Wade is on a collision course with reality. Science is on the side of life, as far more is known today about prenatal development than in 1973. Much more is known about the devastating long-term physical and psychological harm to the mother undergoing an abortion. And with this march of medical knowledge, the humanity of the unborn baby becomes harder and harder to deny.

Legal abortion is based so deeply and flagrantly on denial that it simply can't go on forever – not in America. One day the fictional issue of "choice" – the laughably dishonest "position" created expressly for the abortion cause, to distract attention away from dead babies – will melt under the light of public comprehension that "the fetus" is, in reality, a precious and priceless human being.

Let's stop dancing and start talking reality. Next time there's a Supreme Court nominee confirmation hearing, instead of genteel debate couched in bloodless and obtuse code words like "stare decisis" and "privacy," we should have a knock-down drag-out fight in the U.S. Senate about abortion, with 100 million people watching on broadcast and cable TV.

Let's have a true national discussion – for the first time. All we've had for the past 34 years has been lies, spin, shameless media cheerleading, biased polls and carefully crafted political fence-setting: "I'm personally opposed to abortion, but I wouldn't want to impose my personal religious beliefs on others."

Coward.

Let's get all the facts on the national table and see what Americans really think about abortion. How about broadcasting video footage of actual abortions, as we do of every other type of surgical operation? How about showing what babies look like when they're in the womb, the stunning development, the heartbeat, the fingernails, the eyebrows, the smiles – as well as the pain they feel when we pull their limbs off with forceps or jab scissors into the back of their skull? How about nationally televised panel discussions of women who have had abortions revealing how it ruined their life and health? How about featuring some of the dozens of peer-reviewed studies that show a significant correlation between abortion and breast cancer?

If we ever had an honest and open national debate where complete information was actually provided to Americans on abortion, the vast majority would cross the line to the side of life. This is not a matter of liberal versus conservative. Most of us, regardless of political or religious persuasion, are opposed to torturing and killing children.

I look forward to the time when Supreme Court nominees will do what Sen. Zell Miller advised on Hannity & Colmes when questioned about the Samuel Alito hearings:

"I yearn for the day," said the former Democratic senator, "when somebody is asked what their position is on abortion, they just look right at the person who asked them and said, 'Abortion is an abomination in the eyes of God, and there's nothing in the United States Constitution that protects it,' and not just dance around, tiptoe around the issue."

Let's stop dancing and tiptoeing around the truth. It's not American.

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