Donald K. Allen for President

Top of the Week

September 15, 2008

Each week from now until Nov. 4 I will explain my plans for America. This week’s topic is,

“Abortion In America”

I’m always amazed at the discussions about “when does life begin?” It’s as if some people believe life springs from death, or from non-living “tissue.” Both the mother’s egg and the father’s sperm are alive, and their union is equally alive. Life doesn’t begin at conception, it continues. Embryonic development begins at conception, and supposedly becomes a “fetus” after the second month. That is “when the body structures are in the recognizable form of its kind,” (Webster) or appears to look human, with fingers, toes, and the form of a tiny baby human.

In 1970 Norma L. McCorvey discovered she was pregnant and decided she didn’t want to be. She discussed her predicament with two young, ambitious Texas attorneys, Linda Coffee and Sarah Weddington, who were seeking a way to challenge Texas’ anti-abortion law. Using the justification of rape, McCorvey became the pawn in one of the most divisive decisions ever handed down by our Supreme Court. Denying her “right” to have an abortion was first considered a violation of the Ninth Amendment, regarding rights retained by the people. It was later determined that the law denied McCorvey’s right to due process of law, the Fourteenth Amendment.

During this litigation, which obviously took more than nine months, McCorvey gave birth and put the baby up for adoption. The Supreme Court decision was handed down in 1973, allowing abortion during the first two trimesters (6 months) of pregnancy. In his book, “The Marketing of Evil,” David Kupelian reveals that much of the documentation presented to the Supreme Court in Roe vs. Wade was falsified in that the statistics were greatly exaggerated to make their case more compelling. The numbers of deaths due to botched abortions was multiplied, as was the number of teen abortions.

During research for his book, Kupelian interviewed Bernard Nathanson, a co-founder of America’s abortion movement. “Nathanson today admits he and his abortion colleagues lied left and right. They fabricated statistics and poll results and fed them to a willing news media. 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.”

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), it wasn’t 5,000 or 10,000, it wasn’t even 1,000 - it was 39. The Supreme Court was deceived, and truly should never have consented to hear the case. In doing so, the Court was not interpreting the Constitution, but was legislating new law. The American media, and subsequently the American public, also believed the information that was being presented, and this created enormous support for the Supreme Court’s decision.

The development of ultrasound was a big threat to the abortion industry. Abortion clinic nurses use ultrasound to determine the size of the baby, and that also determines the price of the abortion. The pregnant woman is never allowed to see the ultrasound or even hear the sound of the baby’s heart so that her conception of the procedure is simply “removing tissue.” Abortion clinics had much higher staff turnovers when ultrasound was introduced, because the nurse or technician could actually see what it was in the womb, and repeatedly assisting in the death of developing babies was too stressful.

Abortion to prevent birth after rape or incest, or to preserve the life of the mother is the rationale that allowed abortions to legally be performed. Today, however, those three factors amount to less than five percent of the abortions performed in this country. The overwhelming majority of all abortions, ninety-five percent, are done as a means of birth control. Only 1% are performed because of rape or incest, 1% because of fetal abnormalities, and 3% due to the mother’s health problems.

According to the CDC, about 16 women for every 1,000 women aged 15-44 years have an abortion, and for every 1,000 live births, about 241 abortions are performed.

How about Norma McCovey? How does she feel about abortion today? “It was my pseudonym, Jane Roe, which had been used to create the ‘right’ to abortion out of legal thin air. But Sarah Weddington and Linda Coffee never told me that what I was signing would allow women to come up to me 15, 20 years later and say, ‘Thank you for allowing me to have my five or six abortions. Without you, it wouldn't have been possible.’ Sarah never mentioned women using abortions as a form of birth control. We talked about truly desperate and needy women, not women already wearing maternity clothes.”

I believe that Roe vs. Wade should be overturned, and the laws governing abortion be returned to the states’ discretionary legislation. It’s time we took the Supreme Court back to the Constitutional constraints it originally held in interpreting the Constitution, not writing new law. I would appoint Supreme Court justices that are open to this repeal, and are for strict Constitutional interpretation.