ENDEAVOUR FORUM NEWSLETTER No. 120, NOVEMBER 2005

 

 

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US  SUPREME COURT PARALLELS BETWEEN SLAVERY AND ABORTION

AUGUSTO ZIMMERMANN

Extract from a paper “Abortion - A Crime Against Humanity”  presented at the Right to Life Association Conference, July 2005

In a famous case decided in 1857, the US Supreme Court declared that black people had no human rights and, therefore, were entirely subject to the rights of slave-owners. A century later, in 1973, this very court also decided that unborn children had no human rights and, therefore, were entirely subject to the rights of women. Similarities between both sentences are too obvious to be just ignored. One of the justices who gave his dissenting vote on the abortion case declared quite prophetically: "From now on, women are free to abort for any reason and for no reason at all".

In 1857, the U.S. Supreme Court, in its famous Dred Scott case, defended slavery in these terms: 1) black slaves belong to their masters; 2) black slaves are not human persons before the law; 3) black slaves can only acquire human rights if they become free individuals; 4) those who think slavery is morally wrong do not need to have slaves, but shall not impose their 'personal' opinion upon others; 5) masters have the right to do whatever they want with their property, including black slaves; 6) slavery is better for the black people. Otherwise, they would have to face complex moral choices which their so-called 'inferior' condition does not allow them to resolve satisfactorily.

In 1973, the U.S. Supreme Court, in Roe vs. Wade, employed these arguments to decriminalise abortion: 1) unborn children belong to their mothers; 2) unborn children are not human persons before the law; 3) unborn children can only have human rights if they are born alive; 4) those who think abortion is morally wrong do not need to have an abortion, but shall not impose their 'personal' opinion upon others; 5) women have the right to do whatever they want with their property (bodies), which includes unborn children; 6) abortion is better for unwanted and/or disabled children. Otherwise, they would suffer on account of maternal rejection and/or mental and/or physical condition.

As can be seen, the US Supreme Court adopted a similar reasoning  to decide on both cases of slavery and abortion, with judges denying the moral status of black people and unborn children. If we compare the arguments used by the court to justify slavery and abortion, it becomes clear that unborn children were regarded as the same beings of an inferior order as black people from a century earlier.

Whereas the judicial ruling on slavery provided legal justification for the loss of personal freedom, the decision on abortion has since then justified the slaughter of millions of innocent human beings. Norma McCorvey, plaintiff in Roe vs. Wade, has realized that she was misled and manipulated by feminist lawyers. She has petitioned the US Supreme Court for the reversal of the decision in which the killing of unborn children was legalised in the US.....               In Roe vs. Wade , a seven-to-two decision from non-elected justices of the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that all state laws forbidding abortion were 'unconstitutional'.......

Legally speaking, the ruling was based on the assumption that the Fourteenth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution, which guarantees personal liberty as part of due process, would encompass a supposed right of privacy providing for abortion. However, even Justice Blackmun himself confessed in his reasoning that the constitution doesn't mention any right such as this. In his dissent vote, Justice Rehnquist observed that it was a mistake to talk about privacy on this matter, since abortion by a physician cannot be 'private'. But the dissent of Justice White is particularly relevant in order to observe the arbitrariness of the decision: "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 and, with scarcely any reason or authority for its action, invests that right with sufficient substance to override most existing state abortion statutes. 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".

To strip the unborn child from any legal protection, Justice Blackmun explicitly declared in his reasoning that the court would "not need to resolve the difficult question of when life begins". Thus the judgment was arbitrary medically. If Blackmun wasn’t so sure of when life begins, he had the moral obligation of opting for the lesser moral risk, not endorsing a possible act of murder.             

Joseph P. Witherspoon, a  jurisprudence professor at the University of Texas Law School, commented on  the occasion that the decision violates the intent of the Fourteenth Amendment:  “The failure of the Court in Roe v. Wade  was a failure to be faithful to the law or to respect the legislature which framed it. Careful research of the history of these two amendments will demonstrate to any impartial investigator that there is overwhelming evidence supporting the proposition that the principal, actual purpose of their framers was to prevent any court, and especially the Supreme Court of the United States, because of its earlier performance in the Dred Scott case [the slavery  case], or any other institution of government, whether legislative or executive, from ever again defining the concept of person so as to exclude  any class of human beings from the protection of the Constitution and the  safeguards it established for the fundamental rights of human beings, including slaves, and the unborn from the time of their conception”......

 

 

 

 

 

 

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