INSTALLMENT 3: Why the Supreme Court Decision in Roe Versus Wade was Legally Incorrect and Unconstitutional

If you haven't read Installment No. 1, please click here

If you haven't read Installment No. 2, please click here

Please find below the third part of an article written by Timothy J.  Once again, the stars stand for footnotes, which will be put into the series as Tim gets them sent to us.  Read on:

As the Supreme Court was inaccurate and biased with its interpretation of English common law, it also did not obtain the correct view of early American law.  According to the official case document, most restrictive abortion legislation began appearing after the Civil War and was only for the purpose of protecting the interests and health of the mother.  For evidence of the first claim, the Court mentioned Eugene Quay, who had written an appendix of all the abortion legislation passed before 1960.  Interestingly enough, the very proof that the Courts recommended for their position was the thing that disproved their assertion, as Quay had on record that thirty-one of the states had laws punishing abortive practices before the Civil War even started.*  This was not the scarce minority of laws that the Court had claimed existed prior to 1860.  With regard to the second claim, that the laws enacted were solely for the protection of the woman, this too is easily refuted by the fact that the evidence the Court cited works against such claims.   For example, one of the cases the Court used was an 1858 New Jersey case, State v. Murphy, which has a passage that reads “the procuring of an abortion, or an attempt to procure an abortion, with the assent of the woman, was not an indictable offense, as it affected her, but only as it affected the life of the fetus”.* This passage clearly demonstrates that the protection of the mother was not the only legitimate interest at stake, but, yet, this was the case the Court cited as evidence that American law of the 18th century did not protect the interests of the unborn child.   One must therefore conclude that the Court purposely flipped critical information on early American law and relied on a mass of legal language to keep the real truth from emerging.

By now, one should see how the Court knowingly went against the evidence of established historical and legal precedent, but it can also be ascertained that the Court went against the intentions of the United States Constitution as well.  In its examination of the Constitution as a whole, the Court did not once touch upon the critical area of the original intent of the framers of the Constitution, thus making its judgment legally incorrect.  If the Supreme Court had been looking to resolve Roe versus Wade in the most accurate manner possible, then it most definitely would have looked into the framers’ intent, for there is no better way of discerning how the Constitution should be interpreted.  Accordingly, there were several indications about what abortion mentalities were accepted around the time of the drafting of the Constitution.  First of all, two previously cited sources have held that Blackstone and his pro-life principles were well known and accepted by the American people, including the framers of the Constitution.*  Also, by looking in a popular dictionary of the times, a fetus was described as a child, who was in turn described as a living person.*   Finally, Thomas Jefferson, who was one of the leading politicians of his day, wrote a letter praising the man who had drafted a model penal code for Louisiana that included a prohibition of abortion.  There was no record of Jefferson abstaining from expressing his approval of any part of the code and the fact that this statute became so popular was evidence that the majority of the informed public agreed with it.*  Thus, at the time of the framing of the Constitution, it can be ascertained, with a high degree of certainty, that many Americans, including the original drafters, would not have had an abortion mentality.