The Truth about Roe
by Fr. Roger J. Landry - January 20, 2006
In a powerful January 9 address to the diplomatic corps accredited to the Holy See, Pope Benedict XVI argued that the way to peace can only happen through a joint commitment to the truth. The truth, he said, is the soul of justice. It establishes and strengthens the right to freedom and opens the way to forgiveness, reconciliation and new hope.
He went straight after the culture of lying and brainwashing that has undermined peace, characterized modern totalitarian governments and warped the political and diplomatic environments of many otherwise free countries. "The lie," he said, "often parades itself as truth, but in reality it is always selective and tendentious, selfishly designed to manipulate people, and finally subject them." If the truth sets one free, then the lie always enslaves both individuals and peoples.
The validity of Benedict's globo-political analysis can be readily seen in the history of the horrible anniversary our nation marks on Sunday. On January 22, 1973, the Supreme Court released both Roe v. Wade and Doe v. Bolton, which made abortion legal in all nine months of pregnancy.
These decisions first featured false logic. Roe was so poorly argued from a legal point of view that abortion supporters, like Yale Law School professor Jack Balkin, have felt compelled to write books such as the recently-released "What Roe v. Wade Should Have Said." There is no justifiable constitutional right to abortion where the opinion placed it. The Supreme Court itself, in its 1992 Casey v. Planned Parenthood decision which upheld the legality of abortion, likewise sought to distance itself from Roe's rationale. It said regardless of "the soundness or unsoundness of [Roe's] constitutional judgment," it should be upheld since "people have organized intimate relationships and made choices that define their views of themselves and their places in society, in reliance on the availability of abortion in the event that contraception should fail."
But beyond the commonly-admitted faulty logic of the decision, many of the principal protagonists in favor of Roe and Doe now admit that the evidence submitted to the court was a series of lies. Dr. Bernard Nathanson, co-founder of the National Abortion Rights Action League who performed over 60,000 abortions including one on his own child, describes the various levels of mendacity. The first series of lies were at the level of slogans: "We in NARAL were in the business of coining slogans principally for the media. We scattered catchy slogans for them to use in their stories, slogans like 'reproductive rights,' 'freedom of choice,' 'pro-choice.' For many years, we've known them to be hollow and meaningless. They're just catchy and, essentially, without substance."
The next level was about facts: "The statistics that we gave to the American public … [were] fabricated regarding the number of women dying from illegal abortions annually. All of these matters were pure fabrication and still persist to this day. We spoke of 5,000 to 10,000 deaths a year. I confess that I knew the figures were totally false. It was a useful figure, widely accepted, so why go out of our way to correct it with honest statistics?"
Even the women after whom the cases were named (via legal pseudonyms) admit they were lied to. Sandra Cano is the Doe in Doe v. Bolton. She sought a lawyer to try to obtain a divorce from an abusive husband and get her children out of foster care. The attorney who agreed to help her told her that her case would be used to advance women's rights. Then, in legal arguments, she stated that her client had applied for an abortion but was turned down, which was patently false. Forged documents were submitted in the trial. It's no surprise that her lawyer, Margie Pitt Hames, never let Cano testify, because she couldn't testify truthfully.
Similarly, Norma McCorvey, the Roe in Roe v. Wade, also admitted that her whole case was built on falsehood. She was pregnant for the third time. She had previously given one up for adoption and thought she couldn't go through another parting. So she contacted some lawyers asking what options she had, telling them she had been raped. They brought her to a local judge and her infamous court case began.
Once a lie has been told, there are two next moves: either to tell other lies to protect the first, or, humbly, to own up to the lie and start to live in the truth. Nathanson, Cano and McCorvey have all done the latter, and they are personal paradigms for the path our nation has to travel.
Roe is not a "super-duper precedent," as Senator Arlen Specter has tried to advance. It is a legal and moral disgrace, erected on multiple layers of mendacity. Since Roe and Doe, forty-five million are dead as a result of the lie, and at least that many wounded in our nation alone. If we ever seek true peace in our country and to solve the problems of broken families and wounded hearts in both women and men, then we must begin, as Pope Benedict indicates, with a joint commitment to the truth about abortion, its history, and its casualties. This anniversary is a good place to start.
Father Roger J. Landry is pastor of St. Anthony of Padua in New Bedford, MA and Executive Editor of The Anchor, the weekly newspaper of the Diocese of Fall River.
