Eugenics, abortion.....and Justice Clarence Thomas

On August 11, 2009 I wrote a blog entitled “Adolf Hitler, The Buck Sisters, and The Four Horsemen” (http://henrymarkholzer.blogspot.com/2009/08/adolf-hitler-buck-sisters-and-four.html), I wrote of the Nazis’ use of eugenics to rid the Third Reich of “undesirables,” and of how American eugenics proponents achieved a Supreme Court victory approving the practice in the United States. “Three generations of imbeciles are enough,” the Court majority said.

On August 20, 2009 I wrote a blog entitled “Yesterday the Imbeciles. Today the Elderly. Tomorrow the Unborn”

(http://henrymarkholzer.blogspot.com/2009/08/yesterday-imbeciles-today-elderly.html)

On February 19, 2019 I wrote the following blog, entitled “Baby-Killing Precedents.”

Back in the Seventies and Eighties when I taught constitutional law at Brooklyn Law School, I enjoyed bedeviling my students by eviscerating Griswold v. Connecticut (contraceptives) and its  successor Roe v. Wade (abortion), two of the most constitutionally indefensible decisions ever to soil the pages of the U.S. Reports. 

Before reading the Court’s opinion, the class’s discussion began with a textual search for "The Right of Privacy" somewhere in the Declaration of Independence, Constitution of the United States, and Bill of Rights. Nope. Not anywhere there. 

Next, we would scrutinize Justice Douglas’s majority Griswold opinion for any Supreme Court precedent that had found "The Right of Privacy" somewhere, anywhere, in the Declaration of Independence, Constitution of the United States, or Bill of Rights. Nope. Not anywhere there, either.

As we used our magnifying glasses, we learned of the majority’s “penumbras” and “emanations,” constitutional nuggets that had somehow lain hidden for a couple of hundred years in several otherwise textually-clear amendments of the Bill of Rights.

Needless to say, none of the students could justify the majority opinion any more than Douglas and his majority brethren did.

So the “pro-choice” students—mostly young New York City females—began to talk policy and morality: Abortion was good policy and perfectly moral. In support of both, they recited the mantra of a woman’s penumbral- and emanational-based "right" to do what she wanted with her body—which was (and is) a euphemism for destroying a fetus. Then, no surprise, the discussion got hot. I deliberately began asking modestly “So abortion in, say, the first month of pregnancy is OK?” Sure. Absolutely. You better believe it. A woman’s right….don’t you know?” Etc.

 

By now you can guess where I went from there, day-by-day, week-by-week, month-by-month.

Inevitably, by pregnancy's mid-term some students were beginning to see the trap, and dropped out of the Socratic dialogue, evidently uneasy about where their professed pro-choice policy/morality stance was leading them.

But some held their ground until the denouement

"So," I asked with as much fake innocence as I could muster, "if a woman has a 'privacy' right to do whatever she wants with her body, she can destroy her baby any time she chooses, even though the infant is outside her body, the mother and child still attached by the umbilical cord?" 

After a few gasps died away, to their credit some students said "no"

Others did not. 

Whether the approval by some of such barbarism was an effort to be consistent, or not to agree with the professor, or for other reasons, it was clear to me that there were some who believed infanticide was, in principle, morally acceptable policy.

Sadly, I wasn't surprised then and I'm not surprised now that there are those (e.g., Virginia's governor and Governor Cuomo and the New York Legislature) who believe it is the government--not the sovereign individual--that decides whose freedom and even one's life is to be sacrificed for the benefit of others. For an example, a moments-before pregnant mother suffering not the joy of birth, but instead experiencing motherhood-remorse who can now in New York and doubtless soon elsewhere sacrifice a baby to whatever her psychological needs are (or may be, what, a day later, a month, a year?) Think slavery, conscription, polygamy, suicide, for whose lives and freedom has been, and is, sacrificed to the needs of others.

My attempts through writing and teaching to continue the work of others in exposing the anti-life premises and consequences of eugenics and abortion are dwarfed by comparison with Justice Clarence Thomas’s recent brilliantly devastating concurring opinion in KRISTINA BOX, COMMISSIONER, INDIANA DEPART- MENT OF HEALTH, ET AL. v. PLANNED PARENTHOOD OF INDIANA AND KENTUCKY, INC., ET AL (https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/18pdf/18-483_3d9g.pdf ). (Scroll down a few pages.)

Sadly, today there are too few truth-tellers, let alone those in a position to be heard by the many. Justice Thomas has done a potentially game-changing service not only to the Court and the American people, but to those of us who respect life—in all its forms.