THE ROE REVOLUTION

The Roe Revolution
by William Norman Grigg

The Supreme Court’s 1973 abortion decision imposed a new moral order in which life is no longer a God-given right but a conditional privilege.

‘‘I’m not answering these questions!" sputtered Senator Barbara Boxer (D-CA). "I am not answering these questions!" Boxer had been driven into impotent rage by the gentle but persistent questioning of Senator Rick Santorum (R-PA) regarding her support for the form of infanticide commonly called "partial-birth abortion." Santorum, the chief sponsor of a measure intended to ban the gruesome practice, wanted Boxer to examine this question: At what point does a child acquire the right to life?

"I think when you bring your baby home, when your baby is born … the baby belongs to your family and has all the rights," Boxer replied in a desperate attempt to deflect the question. Seeking to illuminate Boxer’s answer, Santorum probed further: "So you would accept the fact that once the baby is separated from the mother, that baby cannot be killed?" Boxer reluctantly agreed that a baby who had "been birthed and is now in its mother’s arms … is a human being" and therefore "would then have every right of every other human being living in this country."

Very well, persisted Senator Santorum, what "if the baby was born except for the baby’s foot, if the baby’s foot was inside the mother but the rest of the baby was outside, could that baby be killed?" Unable to defend her position rationally, Boxer responded clumsily: "The baby is born when the baby is born. That is the answer to the question." In fact, this answer left the question begging. Santorum pointed out that "what you are suggesting is if the baby’s foot is still inside the mother, that baby can still be killed." "No, I am not suggesting that in any way!" replied Boxer, despite the fact that her standard for conferring "rights" upon the baby depended upon the baby’s physical separation from the mother. Undaunted by his colleague’s dogmatic refusal to offer clear answers to his queries, Santorum observed that under Boxer’s definition, "if the baby’s toe is inside the mother, you can, in fact, kill that baby." "Absolutely not," responded Boxer. Having at long last received a solid reply from Boxer, Santorum pressed further: "How about if the baby’s foot is in?" It was at this point that Boxer disintegrated into a sputtering mess.

But although she struggled with Santorum’s questions, she had no difficulty reiterating — again and again — her unqualified support for the Supreme Court’s Roe v. Wade decision: "I support the Roe v. Wade decision"; "I agree with the Roe v. Wade decision"; "I stand by Roe v. Wade"; "Roe v. Wade … is what I stand by."

This exchange, which took place during the October 20, 1999 Senate floor debate on partial-birth abortion, offered a fascinating glimpse of the pro-abortion mind-set. It is important to remember that in a partial-birth abortion, the child is delivered feet-first, with only a few inches of the skull left inside the mother. At this point the abortionist punctures the child’s skull, removes his brain, crushes the emptied skull, and disposes of the now-lifeless body of a fully developed child. As the House Judiciary Committee has pointed out, there "is no substantive difference between a child in the process of being born and that same child when he or she is born. Clearly, the child is as much a ‘person’ when in the process of being born as that child is when the process is complete."

During a September 1996 Senate floor debate with Senator Santorum, Senator Russ Feingold (D-WI), another champion of Roe and, therefore, a defender of partial-birth abortion, casually endorsed the "right" of abortionists to kill fully-born children who somehow survive the procedure. If a baby were "delivered except for the head, and for some reason that baby’s head would slip out … would it then still be up to the doctor and the mother to decide whether to kill that baby?" asked Santorum. Feingold replied, "I would simply answer your question by saying [that] … the health of the mother [would be] a sufficient standard that would apply to that situation. And that would be an adequate standard." "That doesn’t answer the question," observed Santorum. "Let’s assume that this procedure is being performed for the reason that you’ve stated, and the head is accidentally delivered. Would you allow the doctor to kill the baby?" "I am not the person to be answering that question," responded Feingold. "That is a question that should be answered by a doctor, and by the woman who receives the advice from the doctor."

Although most critiques of the 1973 Roe decision focus upon the Stalinesque abortion toll (nearly 40 million victims, and counting) that is the decision’s most obvious legacy, relatively few understand the true significance of that decision. By enshrining as the supposed law of the land the concept that the state has the power to abandon an entire class of human beings to murderous violence, Roe has effectively nullified the right to life altogether.

If a child’s "personhood" is not defined by biology but by the consent of others, then it makes no difference whether the child is in the womb, in the process of being born, or has already drawn his first breath. For him, life is a conditional privilege rather than a God-given right that the government must protect. Boxer did not want to concede this point and so evaded Santorum’s probing questions; Feingold, perhaps unwittingly, was more forthcoming.

Moreover, if a state can "grant" a right to kill one category of human beings via abortion, then it can "grant" a right to kill other categories of human beings such as the sick or injured (euthanasia). And if a state can "grant" a right to kill, then it can also "assume" a right to kill. The logical implication of the Roe revolution, regardless of whether Boxer and Feingold fully comprehend it, is not just abortion on demand and infanticide but the gulags and gas chambers.

In the materialist worldview that inspired Roe, the human individual is a product of impersonal evolutionary processes, a relatively advanced simian devoid of either an eternal soul or God-given rights. In the totalitarian society that inevitably results from the application of materialist premises, the state views itself (not God) as the ultimate authority, and all property belongs to the state — including the lives of the individual subjects. During the 1950s, Mao Zedong’s Communist regime sought to expand the population of mainland China for economic and military reasons; in recent decades Mao’s successors, with the approval and financial support of the United Nations, have imposed a strict one child per family quota, and have employed forced abortion and infanticide to enforce that policy. The late Nicolai Ceausescu, the former Communist dictator of Romania, summarized the totalitarian view of abortion: "The fetus is the socialist property of the whole society."

By way of contrast, the central tenet of the American concept of government, as expressed in the Declaration of Independence, is that men were "endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, among them life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness." To protect those rights certain limited and revocable powers are conferred by the people upon government, including the power to take life — through war and capital punishment — in specific and limited circumstances. Nowhere in the Constitution was the central government delegated the power to kill children at whim.

In 1962, as the American Law Institute (ALI) debated a model statute intended to guide "reform" of state abortion laws, attorney Eugene Quay summarized the constitutional case against abortion: "The state cannot give the authority to perform an abortion because it does not have the authority itself. Those lives are human lives, and are not the property of the state." The 1973 Roe decision, by invalidating all existing state laws against abortion, was built upon the same premise expressed by Romanian despot Ceausescu, namely that the unborn child is disposable property over which the central government has total authority.

Writing for the 7-2 majority, Harry Blackmun composed an opinion notable for its singular absence of citations from the Constitution or judicial precedent, but rather for what Justice Byron White condemned as an exercise in "raw judicial power" on behalf of a social revolution. In his dissenting opinion, White commented that the Roe decision was not an act of judicial interpretation, but a judicial coup in which a rogue Court imposed a new "order of priorities on the people and legislatures of the states."

The new order imposed by Roe was not the product of spontaneous social evolution. Rather, it represented the triumph of a well-orchestrated covert effort, inspired by eugenicist ideology, presided over and funded by a cadre of elitists who collaborated with gutter-level radicals in an effort to subvert America’s constitutional order and centuries of moral tradition.

Writing in the Fall 1998 issue of Human Life Review, author Mary Meehan observes that, according to the accepted version of history, "brave civil libertarians and women’s rights advocates, encouraged by liberating currents in the 1960s, dared to raise the abortion issue in public and to prompt serious debate about it.... The U.S. Supreme Court gave them a huge victory with its 1973 Roe v Wade decision." However, continues Meehan, "A wealth of inside information, now available in private and government archives, suggests that the eugenics movement (devoted to breeding a ‘better’ human race) led to population control, which in turn had enormous influence on the legalization of abortion.... Moreover, far from fighting a lonely battle, abortion supporters received enormous aid from the American establishment or ‘power elite.’"

According to Meehan, "John D. Rockefeller 3rd and his family, and their foundations provided much of the money" to advance the designs of the eugenicist movement. Rockefeller’s grandfather, John D. Rockefeller, and his son, John D. Jr., "were members of the American Eugenics Society, and JDR 3rd helped keep the eugenics group afloat financially during the Depression." The eugenicist movement claimed the support of many other luminaries in the American elite: "Mary Harriman, widow of railroad baron E.H. Harriman, gave large sums to support the Eugenics Record Office," continues Meehan, as did George Eastman of Eastman Kodak.

One of the chief beneficiaries of this largesse was Margaret Sanger, who founded the Birth Control League — later re-named Planned Parenthood — in 1916. A devoted socialist, Sanger once wrote that she eagerly anticipated "seeing humanity free someday of the tyranny of Christianity no less than capitalism." "It was the radicals — political, economic, and religious — among whom Margaret Sanger found her first supporters, and she herself was one of them," observed an admiring profile in the Spring 1965 issue of The Humanist. Sanger acted as a liaison between silk-hat eugenicists such as the Rockefellers (with whom she shared membership in the American Eugenics Society) and the street-level radicals who flocked to her banner.

With diabolical guile, Sanger used the social upheaval fomented by her radical comrades to illustrate the supposed need for totalitarian population control measures. In 1931, following a march by radicals on the nation’s Capitol, Sanger told George Eastman (one of her chief financial angels) that "the army of the unemployed — massed before the Capitol yesterday morning — reminded one very forcibly that birth control in practice is the only thing that is going to help solve this economic … problem." In 1932, Sanger proposed that a Population Congress be convened for the purpose of giving "certain dysgenic groups" — including, but not limited to, "morons, mental defectives, [and] epileptics" the choice of "segregation or sterilization." A second group, which would include "illiterates, paupers, unemployables," as well as various types of criminals, would be consigned to "farms and open spaces as long as necessary for the strengthening and development of moral conduct" — in other words, to an American gulag. All told, Sanger believed that "between fifteen and twenty million Americans [should have been] segregated or sterilized," observes Meehan.

It should surprise no one that Sanger and the American eugenicist movement openly embraced Adolf Hitler’s totalitarian National Socialist (Nazi) movement. The April 1933 issue of Sanger’s Birth Control Review, which was devoted to the subject of eugenic sterilization, featured an article by Dr. Ernst Rudin, a high official of the Nazi regime.

Sanger’s comrades in the eugenicist movement felt just as comfortable as she did in the company of the Nazis. During a 1935 population congress in Berlin, Clarence Campbell, president of the Eugenics Research Association, offered a banquet toast to "that great leader, Adolf Hitler!" Hitler was a devoted fan of the American Eugenics Society (AES), and sent personal messages to commend AES authors Leon Whitney (author of The Case for Sterilization) and Madison Grant (author of The Passing of the Great Race). However, the eugenicist elite recognized that its penchant for the Nazis wouldn’t play well with the American public. As he assumed command of the AES in 1938, Frederick Osborn complained that the public was "opposed to the apparently excellent sterilization program in Germany because of its Nazi origin" and urged his colleagues to modulate their rhetoric and eschew public praise of the Nazi program. The AES was kept alive during this period by the financial support of John D. Rockefeller 3rd.

It was during the 1930s that the pro-Nazi American eugenicist movement began its crusade to legalize abortion. Mary Meehan points out that during the 1920s, abortion was regarded by the medical establishment and elite opinion in general as "a criminal venture." However, Meehan reports, by 1933 the eugenicist march through America’s institutions had advanced to the point that prominent activists began openly "advocating substantial loosening of anti-abortion laws." These were tentative first steps on a path to a United Nations-led global eugenicist campaign in which abortion would play a significant role.

In 1939, the Rockefeller Foundation — which continued financing the pro-Nazi labors of the American Eugenics Society — prepared for war with the Axis and its aftermath by financing a secret project called "Studies on American Interests in the War and the Peace." Conducted by the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) on behalf of the U.S. State Department, this Rockefeller-funded initiative created the framework for what would become the United Nations. Among the studies prepared for the project was a paper by eugenicist Frank Notestein that called for "propaganda in favor of controlled fertility as an integral part of a public health program."

This admonition was eagerly endorsed by Julian Huxley, the first director-general of the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO). In his 1947 book UNESCO: Its Purposes and Its Philosophy, Huxley declared, "though it is quite true that any radical eugenic policy will be for many years politically and psychologically impossible, it will be important for UNESCO to see that the eugenic problem is examined with the greatest care, and that the public mind is informed of the issues at stake so that much that is now unthinkable may at least become thinkable."

The horrors of World War II — the atrocities committed by Hitler’s Reich, as well as the indiscriminate bombing of civilian populations by both sides, culminating in the horrors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki — place Huxley’s statement in a chilling context. After all, what was "unthinkable" in the aftermath of Auschwitz and Hiroshima? Huxley explained that one of UNESCO’s "major tasks" would be to offer "a restatement of morality that shall be in harmony with modern knowledge and adapted to the fresh functions imposed on ethics by the world of today." Rendered into plain English, UNESCO’s mandate was to eradicate the moral and ethical obstacles to the creation of the total state on a global scale. To this end, UNESCO and its allies began a propaganda barrage to indoctrinate the masses into believing that population was a "global problem" to be managed by a governing elite.

In 1952, to assist in propagandizing on behalf of "unthinkable" eugenicist notions, John D. Rockefeller 3rd and AES’s Frederick Osborn founded the Population Council. As Mary Meehan points out, the work of the Population Council was to convince "government leaders in poor nations that they had a serious population problem" and then show them "how to solve it through population control." Pursuing the same objective on a parallel track, Margaret Sanger and like-minded eugenicists created the International Planned Parenthood Federation.

"By the early 1960s," wrote Michael S. Teitelbaum of the CFR’s Study Group on Population and U.S. Foreign Policy in the Winter 1992-93 issue of Foreign Affairs, "elite public opinion on population matters — Republican and Democratic, conservative and liberal alike — had shifted closer to that advanced by Rockefeller a decade earlier. Key figures in the Kennedy administration initiated the first U.S. foreign policy initiatives on population, in spite of opposition from the Catholic Church...." This global anti-natalist onslaught included domestic propaganda about the "need" for Americans to limit family size as well, and abortion entered the official equation for the first time. In 1963, according to journalist Benjamin Bradlee, a confidant of JFK, Kennedy told him privately that "he was all for people solving their problems by abortion (and specifically told me I could not use that for publication in Newsweek)."

Kennedy understood, as did eugenicist conspirators behind the scenes, that the American public still wouldn’t support the normalization of what had always been a vicious criminal practice. To engineer a radical change in public attitudes, the eugenicist conspiracy seized upon an audacious strategy: It would selectively reveal to the public the murderous criminal underworld of illegal abortion, indict opponents of abortion as responsible for the death and squalor of that tragedy, and urge legalization of abortion as a remedy.

Dr. Bernard Nathanson was a founding member of the National Association for the Repeal of Abortion Laws (NARAL), which is now the National Abortion and Reproductive Rights Action League. Nathanson is now one of the most outspoken and capable opponents of the abortion industry. In his 1996 memoir The Hand of God, Nathanson describes himself, Lawrence Lader, and the other founders of NARAL as "the radicals, the Bolsheviks. We would settle for nothing less than striking down all existing abortion statutes and substituting abortion on demand." Toward that end NARAL conducted a propaganda campaign in which all opposition to abortion was denounced as a Catholic plot against women’s rights.

"Our favorite tack was to blame the church for the death of every woman from a botched abortion," recalls Nathanson. "There were perhaps three hundred or so deaths from criminal abortions annually in the United States in the sixties, but NARAL in its press releases claimed to have data that supported a figure of five thousand." This myth of a pre-Roe "back-alley bloodletting" is angrily invoked by abortion advocates to parry any proposed restrictions on the vile practice. (Abortion advocates are not noticeably troubled by the fact that legalized abortion claims the lives of scores of women each year.)

NARAL co-founder Lawrence Lader displayed "remorseless contempt for the egalitarian principles to which he paid such meticulous lip service," recalls Nathanson. Lader’s elitism, continues Nathanson, "made it … easy for him to understand the Rockefellers and the other principalities and powers with whom he had to deal...." In the late 1960s, acting in league with New York Governor Nelson Rockefeller, Lader "led a political blitzkrieg, which in the space of eighteen months demolished [an abortion] statute that had been on the books for more than a century and was considered untouchable." When New York’s new statute went into effect in July 1970, the criminal class that ruled that state’s underground abortion industry — characterized by Nathanson as "an extraordinary variety of drunks, druggies, sadists, sexual molesters, just plain incompetents, and medical losers" — was permitted to ply its despicable trade in public, with the state’s imprimatur.

Laws against abortion, wrote Planned Parenthood President Alan Guttmacher in 1963, could only be changed "inch by inch and foot by foot, but not a mile at a time.... I am in favor of abortion on demand, but feel from the practical point of view that such a social revolution should evolve by stages." By 1970, the incremental approach described by Guttmacher had brought about abortion on demand in New York and California, and the eugenicists in the federal government were tuning the atmosphere for the forthcoming Roe v. Wade revolution.

When the Medicaid law was enacted in 1965, few of its supporters anticipated that it would be used to circumvent state restrictions on abortion. Yet during the early years of the Nixon Presidency "one or more officials responsible for Medicaid started paying for abortion on a state-option basis" at a time when abortion was still a crime in most states, observes Mary Meehan. "The primary fear of the family planning services," declares a 1970 paper written by two interns at the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare (HEW), "has been that Congress might cut their appropriations if it were to become known that taxpayers’ money was being used to give abortions." For this reason, the paper continued, "for the next two or three years, the primary thrust of the Administration and of HEW officials must remain relatively covert."

In other words, by 1970 it was established federal policy to engage in a conspiracy to subvert existing abortion laws and defraud the taxpayers for "two or three years" — at which point, whether by design or coincidence, the Roe decision removed all remaining impediments to abortion.

It must be remembered that the Roe revolution was a product of the eugenicist conspiracy, and that its purpose was not to liberate women but to nullify the right to life. Few have been as explicit on this point as eugenicist C. Lalor Burdick. In 1970 Burdick told a correspondent that it would soon be widely accepted "that bum pregnancies of whatever character should ipso facto be terminated. And so would come the next step, namely, that the lowest grade people [as determined by performance factors] are not to have children either."

In 1971, as the Roe revolution was reaching its climax, eugenicist Edgar R. Chasteen published The Case for Compulsory Birth Control, which was vetted and endorsed by numerous population control heavyweights, including Garrett Hardin, Paul Ehrlich (author of The Population Bomb), and several leaders of Planned Parenthood. Because of the "crisis" of overpopulation, opined Chasteen, "our only real alternative is between direct and compulsory control of population size and … indirect and humane policies" involving the subversion of the traditional family, the encouragement of "alternative lifestyles," and other social engineering schemes.

Above all else, insisted Chasteen, population control requires that the public be indoctrinated in what would become the central tenet of the Roe decision — namely, that "rights" are granted to the individual by the state. "There are no rights if there is no society," wrote Chasteen. "There is no society if there is no government. It is possible to have government without rights but impossible to have rights without government."

This brings us, once again, to the question that the flustered Senator Boxer refused to answer: At what point does a human being acquire the right to life? As an acolyte of the abortion ethic, Boxer’s only honest answer would have to be, "Never." From that perspective, "rights" are conferred or revoked by the state at whim.

The culture of death created by the Roe revolution has made dramatic strides during the Clinton era. Under the reign of Bill Clinton, the power of the central government is used not to protect innocent life, but to service the needs of the abortion industry: Federal marshals patrol abortion clinics; federally enforced "bubble zones" around abortion clinics are used to prohibit peaceful protest and sidewalk counseling; and pro-life activists are kept under federal scrutiny. One of President Clinton’s first acts was to restore taxpayer subsidies for abortions overseas. By exercising his veto, Mr. Clinton held up payment of U.S. "back dues" to the UN until an arrangement was made whereby taxpayer subsidy of UN-administered abortion programs could resume; this illustrates that, from Mr. Clinton’s perspective, the subsidy of abortion and other population control programs is the UN’s single indispensable function. And the President has repeatedly vetoed legislation banning "partial-birth" infanticide.

But let it not be forgotten that the same totalitarian assumptions expressed in Roe are woven through many of the other crimes against decency perpetrated by Bill Clinton and his cohorts. Mr. Clinton’s "Wag the Dog" military strikes against Sudan, Afghanistan, and Iraq displayed a depraved willingness to sacrifice innocent lives on the altar of political spin control. The ongoing UN embargo against Iraq, which prohibits the delivery of food and medicine to the subjects of the despotic Saddam Hussein, has resulted in the death, by starvation and disease, of up to one million Iraqi children; asked about this ongoing atrocity, Secretary of State Madeleine Albright blithely replied that this death toll was "worth it." And the NATO-directed terror bombing of Yugoslavia focused almost entirely upon defenseless civilian targets.

These war crimes — violations of the Christian "just war" tradition and what the Constitution calls the "law of nations" — are inspired by the same death ethic encapsulated in Roe. Significantly, the practice of abortion by Nazi "doctors" was condemned as a war crime at Nuremberg. British commentator Malcolm Muggeridge observed in 1980 that "it took no more than three decades to transform a war crime into an act of compassion, thereby enabling the victors in the war against Nazism to adopt the very practices for which the Nazis had been solemnly condemned at Nuremberg."

It is still possible to arrest America’s descent into the culture of death. Ironically, our nation’s hope resides in the fact that the Roe revolution was brought about by a small, dedicated cadre committed to the abolition of Christian-style civilization. The restoration of respect for life and our constitutional order will require the organized efforts of millions of Americans who understand and cherish the principles of liberty.