After Roe v. Wade plaintiff Norma McCorvey became a Christian and revealed that she had not been gang raped as her legal team had claimed, many Americans came to understand that this landmark ruling that legalized abortion was based on a lie.
So was the companion case of Doe v. Bolton. Plaintiff Sandra Cano said her attorneys tricked her into signing a statement seeking an abortion, something she says she did not want. In 2005, she told a congressional hearing, “Doe v. Bolton is based on a lie and deceit. It needs to be retried or overturned.”
But the deceptions didn’t begin with Roe and Doe. The Supreme Court’s creation and abuse of a “right to privacy” not found anywhere in the Constitution was hatched in a series of cases in the mid-1960s and early ’70s.
Here’s how they pulled it off. In Griswold v. Connecticut (1965), the Court struck down a Connecticut law forbidding contraception sales even to married couples. The justices could have done so on the grounds that it was an anachronistic law that few observed or enforced. Instead, they chose to create a constitutional “right to privacy,” basing it on the sanctity of marriage and grounding it in the heretofore unknown “penumbra” of constitutional rights.
“We deal with a right of privacy older than the Bill of Rights — older than our political parties, older than our school systems,” wrote Justice William O. Douglas in Griswold. “Marriage is a coming together for better or worse, hopefully enduring, and intimate to the degree of being sacred.”
Ironically, the four-time-married Douglas went on to do as much as any justice to demolish protections for life, marriage and decency.
If the Court had stopped at Griswold’s celebration of marriage, it might even have shored up the status of the family in the nation’s laws. The Court “could have filled the gap left by the Founding Fathers [who made no mention of family in the Constitution] by serving as the starting point for a new family-oriented reading of the Constitution,” the late Michael Schwartz wrote in “The Supreme Court of the United States versus the American Family.” “But that is not how constitutional interpretation developed.”
Instead, the justices engineered the most consequential bait-and-switch in legal history: They shifted the moral capital of the “sanctity of marriage” to unmarried relationships and then to individuals and finally to “marriages” without even a bride.
In 1972, another contraception case made it to the high court. Bill Baird, who went on to run abortion clinics, challenged a Massachusetts law against selling birth control devices to unmarried couples. In Eisenstadt v. Baird, the Court dishonestly appropriated Griswold’s recognition of the sacredness of marriage.
Mr. Schwartz explains: “The right of privacy was invented as an expression of the sanctity of marriage and rooted in the priority of the family over the state. In Eisenstadt, the Court threw that doctrine overboard, and made privacy a purely individual right.”
The very next year, in Roe v. Wade and Doe v. Bolton, the Court once again misused the “right of privacy” established through the sanctity of marriage in order to strike down all state laws against abortion.
The radical nature of Roe and Doe went even beyond establishing a “right” to abortion. It launched a legal revolution against the family.
“The legalization of abortion represents an extreme form of imbalance in the relation of the individual to the family, permitting one family member to kill another,” Mr. Schwartz wrote, “and it marks the first instance in our legal history since the Roman Republic that intra-family killing has been tolerated by the public authority.”
Using more legal sleight-of-hand, the Court obliterated fathers’ rights to have a say in whether their sons or daughters were aborted. And in another series of cases, the Supreme Court created “children’s rights,” including the right of a minor girl to obtain an abortion without the consent of her parents or in some instances without even notifying them.
By 2015, after reducing families to an afterthought, the Court was ready in Obergefell v. Hodges to create a new constitutional “right” to same-sex “marriage,” the final assault on the family.
With the “right to privacy” and individual autonomy firmly established, people also began to assert the “right” to kill themselves or assist others to do so. By 2017, several states — California, Colorado, Montana, Oregon, Vermont and Washington, plus Washington, D.C., had legalized the brave new world of physician-assisted suicide, which is ripe for abuse.
When tens of thousands of people head up Constitution Avenue to the Supreme Court this Friday in the 45th annual March for Life, they will be asking, once again, that our leaders find a way to reestablish a culture of life by righting terrible wrongs that are based on lies and deceit.
A good start would be overturning Roe v. Wade.
• Robert Knight is an author and Washington Times contributor.
© Copyright (c) 2018 News World Communications, Inc.
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This content is published through a licensing agreement with Acquire Media using its NewsEdge technology.
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As we see again, the professional politicians and their lawyers have corrupted this country and its laws by the will of a immoral few.
Thank GOD for us “Deplorables” may we continue to defeat these immoral few.
Scruffy, Well stated!
We had BETTER defeat the immoral few, Scruffy, because if God utterly destroyed Canaan–and the Israelites who had adopted their ODIOUS Moloch worship that included the abomination of infant sacrifice–what will he do to a nation that slaughters MILLIONS of innocents every year for CONVENIENCE? Our God ABHORS the shedding of innocent blood–and there is a HORRENDOUS price to be paid by those who fail to understand that truth, and the EVIL LIBS, through Federal funding of Planned Parenthood and other measures–have managed to stain the hands of ALL OF US with that innocent blood!
The clock is ticking–and our time to escape his divine wrath is running out, if it is not ALREADY too late.
Just in case Hillary is still wondering “what happened?”, I believe President Trump was elected by divine intervention, in SPITE of all the voter fraud committed by the LYING Commucrats, in answer to the fervent prayers of Christians, and he is this nation’s LAST CHANCE to return to its Christian-Judeo ROOTS and stop the evil and depravity that has corrupted our country.
ONCE again, showing liberal judges, don’t make their rulings IN ACCORDANCE with the law, but what they FEEL the law should be..
“this landmark ruling that legalized abortion was based on a lie”
One of the early examples of Libs making people up for us to weep over, so we can pass good-intentioned laws, which are then immediately perverted (again by the Libs) into something like paying crack addicts to have gay sex with animals.
Whoa! That escalated fast!
But not fast enough for the Libs. You remember how Joe Biden accidentally slipped up by saying he was for gay marriage before Obama could. Obama, Hillary, and every other leading Lib got on the gay train overnight.
Remember Al Gore bringing people to tears about that “poor Welfare mom in Florida” who would suffer if we cut back on Welfare? Made up.
He later excused himself by saying it could potentially happen. Meanwhile millions of Americans are suffering by having to pay taxes so the Libs can use Welfare to break the family apart.
If you ever hear a Lib talking about some poor so-and-so they know personally who will suffer if those Evil Republicans have their way, challenge them immediately. State on the record that you don’t believe such a person actually exists, due to the Lib compulsion to make up fake poster children for their cause du juor. Let everyone know that you think the Lib is making the person up for unearned sympathy and demand to get a name for this person “they know so well”.
Better yet, say “FINE IF You feel that its wrong for that person to go without, then YOU FINANCIALLY SUPPORT THEM”..
How many more court rulings are based on a LIE? If judges would rule by what the LAW says, and not on what they FeeL IS RIGHT, we would be better off. If a law is wrong, legislation is needed to modify, or end, it, NOT a court ruling.
This is why i keep saying ALL THESE liberal SJW activist judges need to be REMOVED from the benches, and all their rulings overturned.