SCOTUS Ruling Advances Personhood of Preborn, Exposes Eugenics

In a significant pro-life victory, the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling on Tuesday, May 28, 2019, upheld Indiana’s law requiring aborted bodies be given dignified burial or cremation, rather than incineration with surgical by-product or disposal as medical waste. SCOTUS declined to rule on the second challenge, which banned discriminatory abortions based on race, sex, or disability, instead waiting for more lower courts’ rulings in similar cases as pro-life laws increase in many states. While Governor of Indiana, now-Vice President Mike Pence had signed both provisions.

In October, Indiana’s Republican Attorney General Curtis Hill asked the Supreme Court to consider HEA 1337, arguing the “right to abortion declared by our Supreme Court protects only the decision not to bear a child at all, not a right to decide which child to bear,” adding, “our nation knows only too well the bitter fruits of such discrimination.”

A spokesperson for Pence, Alyssa Farah, commended the Supreme Court for “upholding a portion of Indiana law that safeguards the sanctity of human life by requiring that remains of aborted babies be treated with respect and dignity. We remain hopeful that at a later date the Supreme Court will review one of numerous state laws across the U.S. that bar abortion based on sex, race, or disability.”

Justices Ginsburg and Sotomayor said they would have ruled against the law protecting disposal of fetal remains. Justice Thomas was quick to refute the nonsensical dissent, “I would have thought it could go without saying that nothing in the Constitution or any decision of this court prevents a state from requiring abortion facilities to provide for the respectful treatment of human remains.” SCOTUS’ mandating dignified disposal of fetal remains should also help end Planned Parenthood’s illegal selling of babies’ body parts, exposed by undercover videos, profiting multi-millions from gruesome atrocities which drive the exploitative abortion business.

The Supreme Court has permitted state abortion regulations which do not unduly burden women’s ability to terminate pregnancy; however, respecting the dignity of human remains does not interfere with access to abortion. Similarly, Democrats have blocked a congressional vote more than fifty times to provide healthcare to babies born alive after botched abortions, but in no way does such healthcare for human life impede abortion access for women. In fact, Indiana’s HEA 1337 requires women be informed of perinatal hospice care for babies diagnosed with terminal fetal anomalies. Hypocritically, abortion advocates have opposed pro-life laws which give women more information and choices.

The Supreme Court’s recognition that human lives deserve dignified treatment even in death also implies preborn lives may be afforded legal personhood, and not deemed mere property or waste, thus presenting possible future challenges to Roe v. Wade. Many scholars agree Roe was decided wrongly on the law, as it fails to acknowledge the Fourteenth Amendment can most accurately be understood as protecting legal personhood “where life can be shown to exist.” Science has well established for many decades distinct human life begins at conception, and ultrasound evidence clearly shows living babies with detectable heartbeats and remarkable development even in the first trimester, including at the end of the embryonic phase at eight weeks, when the baby has already formed over 90 percent of anatomic structures found in adults.

In fact, when the Fourteenth Amendment was adopted in 1868, several states who ratified it also criminalized abortion, recognized children in utero as persons, referred to the fetus as a “child” in their statutes, and defined abortion as an “offense against the person.”

Further evidence the Fourteenth Amendment’s notion of personhood should apply to preborn lives is found in its drafters’ intent.

Republican Senator Jacob Howard sponsored the Amendment in the Senate, declaring its purpose to “disable a state from depriving any person of life, liberty and property without due process.”

Republican Representative Thaddeus Stevens called the Amendment “a superstructure of perfect equality of every human being before the law; of impartial protection to everyone in whose breast God had placed an immortal soul.”

The primary framer of the Amendment, Republican Representative John Bingham, intended it to ensure “no state should deny to any human being the equal protection of the laws.”

Therefore, any state refusing to protect prenatal life arguably violates the intent of equal protection. While the Founders intended principles of federalism to leave states free to decide a wide range of policies, the principle of limited government also intends government will not exceed Constitutional purposes, and provide a uniform standard for the few core values, and primary among these fundamental rights is the right to life.

Originally drafted to grant citizenship and protect the rights of blacks newly freed by emancipation passed by Republicans after the Civil War to end Southern Democrat states’ practice of slavery, the Fourteenth Amendment’s purpose of equal protection for all human life can arguably also be applied to preborn lives. Other areas of law, including criminal law, often apply to preborn babies, for instance, punishing homicides for both a pregnant mother and her preborn child. Unfortunately, New York Democrats repealed protections for women’s preborn babies killed by domestic violence. To remain consistent with a deceptive abortion agenda which falsely denies science and life in the womb, “progressive” policies ironically lead to such backsliding of feminist protections and human rights.

While abortion is not inherently a partisan issue, such as some pro-life Democrats, including Louisiana’s Representative Katrina Jackson and Governor John Bel Edwards, who recently signed a “heartbeat bill”, it is notable the same political parties generally remain on either respective side of the human rights debate. While Republicans freed slaves, desegregated and passed black citizenship, blacks’ and women’s suffrage and civil rights, Democrats supported slavery and segregation, founded the KKK, opposed citizenship and suffrage, and filibustered against civil rights. Planned Parenthood’s founder Margaret Sanger spoke at KKK events, and originated the Negro Project to exterminate minorities, “unfit,” and poor immigrants primarily via forced sterilization. Planned Parenthood remains the highest killer of black lives.

During the sexual revolution, the abortion agenda hijacked pro-life feminism and targeted black women. Founder of the abortion group NARAL, Larry Lader, was friends with Sanger and also supported abortion for population control. Co-founder Bernard Nathanson stated, “If we’re going to move abortion out of the books and into the streets, we’re going to have to recruit the feminists. We’ve got to keep the women out front— black women especially. Why are they so damn slow…” Nathanson later became pro-life and admitted they had used fabricated polls and falsified statistics to push abortion. Such lies were used by media and considered in the Roe decision, passed by a majority of male Democrat justices.

Abortion perpetuates lies and regression of equal protections, committing human rights atrocities, harming women’s health — even fatally, dismembering viable babies, disproportionately killing minorities, girls, babies diagnosed with disabilities, and babies born alive. Millions of girls are aborted worldwide, and Planned Parenthood performs sex-selective abortions, discriminating against girls, as 40 percent in the U.S. prefer boys, thus aborting over 150,000 girls annually in the U.S. alone.

Justice Thomas noted in his opinion sex-selective abortions in Asia have killed an estimated 160 million females — “more than the entire female population of the United States.”

Sex selective abortions have killed so many girls, it has harmed Asia’s population and economy, compelling bans on such discriminatory abortions, so pregnant women’s blood is now being smuggled for gender tests, and leaving the United States’ permissive abortions among the world’s worst human rights abusers.

President Trump’s 65th district court federal judge Wendy Vitter, confirmed over pro-abortion Democrats’ opposition after one of the longest confirmation processes, stated, “Planned Parenthood says they promote women’s health. It is the saddest of ironies that they kill over 150,000 females a year. The first step in promoting women’s health is to let them live.”

More discriminatory abortions include 87 percent of babies diagnosed with Down syndrome and 64 percent with spina bifida, despite fetal surgery available to improve the condition. The fact babies can be surgical patients while in utero further supports their right to legal personhood protection, as value of human life is inherent, not determined by level of development, while the bigoted suggestion disability could diminish human rights violates principles of equality.

Abortion further violates equal protection by disproportionately aborting racial minorities. In New York, more black babies are aborted than born. Planned Parenthood has been exposed as accepting donations to specifically abort black babies, and targets black and other minority communities, disturbingly fulfilling eugenicists’ suggestion “birth control facilities could be extended more to Negroes than to whites.”  

In fact, Justice Thomas cites the abortion ratio for blacks is 3.5 times higher than whites. Thus, Thomas rightly warned abortion “to achieve eugenics goals is not merely hypothetical.” Concurring with the Supreme Court’s ruling to uphold proper burial for aborted babies, Justice Thomas further noted laws such as Indiana’s ban on discriminatory abortions “promote a compelling interest in preventing abortion from becoming a tool of modern-day eugenics.”

Known as the father of eugenics and coining the term in 1883, which means “well-born,” Francis Dalton, cousin to Charles Darwin, shared the view of eradicating those deemed as inferior.  In fact, the original title of Darwin’s book was On the Origin of Species by means of Natural Selection, Or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life.  

The eugenics movement arose among leftist “progressives” in the United States, Germany and U.K., including ideas of sterilization and euthanasia. By the 1920s, eugenics leaders held prominent positions at Harvard, Stanford, and Yale, and eugenics was taught at 376 universities and colleges, and “many eugenicists believed that the distinction between the fit and the unfit could be drawn along racial lines.”

Justice Thomas cited even the Supreme Court defended forced sterilization in Buck v. Bell in 1927, and by 1931, 28 states had adopted eugenic sterilization laws. Many records were not kept, but in just the records available, over 60,000 people, predominantly blacks, were involuntarily sterilized between 1907 and 1983, and an additional 150,000 low income women were estimated to have also been sterilized, often without their knowledge or consent. Additional human rights violations include indigenous women have also been forcibly sterilized.

Even before the infamous Holocaust, Nazis sterilized those Hitler called “inferior stock,” including blacks and their children, and euthanized elderly, ill or disabled. Enlisting American leftist “progressive” eugenicists, Nazis emulated their eugenic policies of sterilization and euthanasia, eventually applying them to the notorious Final Solution, during which, public support for eugenics waned, and in turn, threatened funding.

Then, American eugenicists, secretly proud their cause had widespread effect, reframed their bigoted agenda and altered rhetoric to deceptively appear as if eugenic policies were helping minorities. Around this same time, recognizing “eugenics goals are most likely to be attained under a name other than eugenics,” in 1932, Sanger’s Birth Control League rebranded itself as Planned Parenthood.

Thus, Justice Thomas rightly warns eugenics in practice continues to this day via discriminatory abortions. Similar dangers arise with euthanasia and socialized healthcare, which inevitably rations patient treatment and endangers vulnerable lives, including those with disabilities or chronic conditions. Eugenicists implemented similar policies by denying welfare and healthcare to undesirable populations, alarmingly similar to Democrats’ ongoing opposition to healthcare for babies born alive after failed abortions.

Sanger supported reducing the “ever increasing, unceasingly spawning class of human beings who never should have been born at all.”

Fellow eugenicist Madison Grant believed “the laws of nature require the obliteration of the unfit, and human life is valuable only when it is of use to the community or race,” in direct conflict with the Founders’ Constitutional inalienable right to life.

Another American racist and eugenicist who supported the Nazis, Lothrop Stoddard, was a Director of Sanger’s Birth Control League and author in her Birth Control Review, and Stoddard’s book The Rising Tide of Color Against White World Supremacy was revered by the KKK.

Justice Thomas outlined a brief history of leftist eugenicists who were believers in social Darwinism, the survival of the fit, and the elimination or extermination of the unfit. Those who had made tremendous wealth as slave owners were now willing to fund eugenic efforts such as Sanger’s idea to segregate the “unfit” and bribe them to rejoin society with sterilization. Sanger also enlisted black ministers to help persuade resistant blacks who recognized such racist “family planning” was trying to keep their birth rate as low as possible: “We do not want word to go out that we want to exterminate the Negro population, and the minister is the man who can straighten out that idea if it ever occurs to any of their more rebellious members.” Low income families and other minorities were also threatened with denial of prenatal care or welfare benefits unless they submitted to sterilization, and some were even coerced to sterilize their children, as young as ten years old.

To this day, Planned Parenthood similarly denies women prenatal care and decreases other services, instead pushing birth control and increasing abortion, despite its health risks. In fact, 78 percent of women are pressured and 64 percent of abortions involve coercion, including Planned Parenthood evades parental consent laws, and women are unknowingly drugged with the dangerous abortion pill.

To make such atrocious practices seem more socially acceptable, Sanger’s Birth Control League used the same deceptive terms such as “criminal” or “unfit,” already desensitized by slavery, to hide the bigoted intent. Planned Parenthood and abortion proponents use similar manipulation of language, including “contents of the uterus” and “reproductive rights,” to hide the horrors of abortion, which in reality starve, poison, or dismember babies in excruciating pain and harm women’s health. An overwhelming 84 percent of women are not fully informed at abortion clinics. By contrast, at safe pro-life clinics, when given the truth about their babies’ development and risks to their own health, 78 percent choose not to abort.

Eugenicists also argued the suffering of the poor or inferior people outweighed any reason to live. Such false “compassion” is echoed by abortion supporters, claiming quality of life concerns to justify killing babies with disabilities or exploiting women’s financial fears of caring for a child. However, pro-life groups give free resources years after birth, and with support, 80 percent of mothers choose life. Additionally there are millions of families waiting to adopt, including babies with disabilities or terminal illness.

In fact, Alabama, which recently passed a pro-life law protecting women’s health and human rights of preborn children, also set a record for adoption of foster children. Further, terminal babies have helped save other lives via organ donation, and studies show parents find comfort and healing by precious time spent with their babies. Babies have also been misdiagnosed, born without predicted disabilities, and defied prognosis. Remarkably, babies can also heal abnormalities in utero, and fetal cells absorbed during pregnancy even protect mothers from disease years later.

Abortion advocates also ignore the deterioration of quality of life after abortion, including life threatening hemorrhage, injury and infection, and risk of future pregnancy complications or infertility. Further, 65 percent suffer PTSD, and men and women develop depression, substance abuse, and even increased suicide risk. By contrast, pro-life organizations provide healing support to post-abortive parents.

Discriminatory abortions and eugenics also decay the quality of society, not only dehumanizing countless lives, undermining family, and disregarding the sanctity of life, but also eliminating untold unique contributions of diverse individuals, such as the myriad talents of people with disabilities, entrepreneurs with Down syndrome and remarkable innovations of those on the autism spectrum.

Justice Thomas astutely recognized the dangerous parallels of abortion which “developed alongside the American eugenics movement.”

Sanger herself acknowledged “birth control is identical in ideal with the aim of eugenics,” and Thomas noted Sanger embraced “the eugenics potential of her cause” and “the notion that birth control” via Planned Parenthood “opens the way to the eugenist.” Critics of Justice Thomas’ opinion mistakenly argued he was criticizing birth control as contraception, but rather, he warned abortion is a tool of eugenic population control.

In fact, eugenicist legislators associated with Planned Parenthood viewed sterilization as “an economic necessity and matter of national preservation.” In truth, however, as abortion harms population growth, it in turn endangers economic stability, causing a $35 trillion loss of productivity since the 1970s.

Ironically, critics inadvertently also revealed hormonal birth control harms women’s health, including infertility, injury, and cancer. The abortion agenda even manipulated medical definitions to hide the fact birth control can cause early abortion, and is used as a tool to increase abortions and exploit women for profit, as over half of women seeking abortion were on failed birth control.

Alarmingly, eugenicists also historically used birth control to bribe poor and minority women to submit to sterilization to avoid unjust prosecution for being unwed mothers, even threatening to take away their children or rescind welfare benefits.

Sanger shared her idea that “the world is going to depend on a simple, cheap contraceptive to be used in poverty stricken slums and among the most ignorant people” with a friend who helped fund the development of the birth control pill. Eugenicists in Sanger’s Birth Control League (which later became Planned Parenthood and still pushes birth control and deception and exploits vulnerable women today) believed “the only possible way of decreasing Negro population is by means of controlling fertility.”

Eugenicists leaders in Planned Parenthood’s Federation of America thus used mandatory birth control to control or eliminate what they viewed as “the menace to the white race,” and used a quota system, disturbingly not unlike Planned Parenthood’s abortion quotas still in practice today. In 1950, Sanger worried, “Even this will not be sufficient; there should be national sterilization of dysgenic types who would die out if the government were not feeding them,” disconcertingly similar to current leftist trends of assisted suicide and infanticide.

Justice Thomas wrote,

“Sanger’s arguments about the eugenic value of birth control in securing ‘the elimination of the unfit’ … apply with even greater force to abortion, making it significantly more effective as a tool of eugenics. Whereas Sanger believed that birth control could prevent ‘unfit’ people from reproducing, abortion can prevent them from being born in the first place. Many eugenicists therefore supported legalizing abortion, and abortion advocates – including future Planned Parenthood President Alan Guttmacher – endorsed the use of abortion for eugenic reasons. Technological advances have only heightened the eugenic potential for abortion, as abortion can now be used to eliminate children with unwanted characteristics, such as a particular sex or disability.”

President and founder of Live Action, pro-life human rights activist Lila Rose, pregnant with her first child, recently recounted at her first ultrasound: the doctor “offered 3 tests whose sole purpose was to detect disability in my baby. I asked the [Dr.], so what if we find something? She said we consider ‘our options.’ Our medical system is on a search & destroy hunt for babies [with] disability. [And] I’m finding a new doc.” The false and bigoted notion babies with disability are “unwanted” or have less value or purpose has sadly become so presumed, doctors have even scheduled abortion appointments without mothers’ consent.

Technological advancements such as ultrasounds and fetal surgeries also reveal the humanity of the preborn. Justice Ginsburg’s dissent criticized Justice Thomas for referring to women who seek abortions as “mothers.” Justice Thomas correctly noted Ginsburg’s opinion “makes little sense.”

It not only contradicts science but insults the countless women who bond with their babies in utero, suffer post-abortion grief, mourn their children lost to miscarriage, or birth moms’ selfless acts of courage and love. Abortion also perpetuates the falsehood that fatherhood doesn’t begin at conception either, thus enabling the misogynistic abandonment of mothers.

Bryan Kemper, the youth director for Priests for Life and author of Social Justice Begins in the Womb, swiftly rebuked Ginsburg, he and his wife having suffered a miscarriage of their son Benjamin at 12 weeks. “The doctor pointed to the container holding our son and said he would ‘take care of that.’ I told him, ‘No, we are going to have a funeral.’ Benjamin is as much my child as any of our living children.” Similar to Indiana’s fetal remains disposal law SCOTUS upheld, “Benjamin is buried in a cemetery, where he was given the dignity he deserved with a funeral and burial. My family visits Benjamin’s gravesite regularly; we go to mourn the loss of one of our family members, not the loss of a pregnancy. Even if we had not had any other children we would still be parents.”

Kemper continued, “It is necessary for the abortion industry to propagate lies” like Justice Ginsburg’s false claim women seeking abortion are “not mothers” to justify killing “innocent human children” via abortion.

“They must continue this narrative in order to try and convince society that the act of terminating the life of a living human person is really just terminating a pregnancy. Abortion is more and more being exposed as one of the most anti-women evils in history, so they must go as far as even denying a pregnant woman is a mother. True feminists are rising up to declare that their equality cannot and will not be bought with the blood of their children. In fact it further strips away equality and the rights of every woman who is killed at the hands of an abortionist, both mother and child.”

Dr. Mildred Jefferson, the first black woman to graduate from Harvard Medical School and the first female surgeon at the Boston University Medical Center, denounced population control and Planned Parenthood. Dedicating her life to caring for the sick, Dr. Jefferson spoke globally about abortion’s violation of humanity:

“I will not accept the proposition that the doctor should relinquish the role of healer to become the new social executioner. It is unconscionably unfair that the victim selected on which to test this social remedy of expendable lives, is the most defenseless member of the human family – the unborn child who cannot escape, cannot riot in the streets, cannot vote.”

Indiana adopted its law banning discriminatory abortions on the 100th anniversary of its 1907 sterilization law. Following this condemnation of eugenics, the Indiana legislature passed the Sex-Selective and Disability Abortion Ban the Supreme Court considered. “Planned Parenthood promptly filed a lawsuit to block the law, arguing the Constitution protects a woman’s right to abort her child based solely on the child’s race, sex, or disability,” thus horrifyingly claiming the Constitution protects eugenics. Justice Thomas cited, “It was against this background that Indiana’s Legislature … express[ed] its regret over … injustices done under eugenic laws… Recognizing that laws implementing eugenic goals ‘targeted the most vulnerable among us’, and ‘urge[d] citizens to become familiar with the history of the eugenics movement’ and ‘repudiate the many laws passed in the name of eugenics and reject any such laws in the future’.” Justice Thomas conceded, “Although the Court declines to wade into these issues today, we cannot avoid them forever… this Court is duty bound to address [the] scope” of abortion. Thomas further warned,

“Enshrining a constitutional right to an abortion based solely on the race, sex, or disability of an unborn child, as Planned Parenthood advocates, would constitutionalize the views of the 20th-century eugenics movement. In other contexts, the Court has been zealous in vindicating the rights of people even potentially subjected to race, sex, and disability discrimination.”