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(LifeSiteNews) — The Supreme Court is set to hear a case Wednesday that could finally send Roe v. Wade to history’s ash heap, and with it the mountain of lies the court has used to prop up its fake constitutional “right” to murder the unborn.

The Constitution, of course, says nothing about abortion, but that didn’t deter the seven Roe justices from inventing purported “abortion rights” nearly fifty years ago on January 22, 1973.

Citing the right to privacy implicit in the 14th Amendment, the progressive Roe majority claimed to find a “fundamental” freedom to have an abortion, despite the total lack of language on the subject. In doing so, the court leaned on numerous since-debunked historical, legal, and medical arguments, instituting by fiat an illegal nationwide abortion regime based almost solely on lies — one ripe for a long-overdue reversal.

The Supreme Court’s ‘fudged’ abortion history

Roe’s first key falsehood was the “discovery” of an ancient, forgotten “right” to abortion in English common law that allegedly persisted throughout America’s Founding era and most of the 19th century. To back this up, Justice Harry Blackmun, the author of Roe, relied on multiple compromised sources, including law professor Cyril Means Jr., then counsel to National Association for the Repeal of Abortion Laws (NARAL), now NARAL Pro-Choice America.

Even Jane Roe’s pro-abortion lawyers recognized that Means perverted history “as necessary.” His “conclusions sometimes strain credibility,” using “the guise of impartial scholarship while advancing the proper ideological goals,” an internal memo from Roe’s team acknowledged. “Where the important thing is to win the case no matter how, however, I suppose I agree with Mean’s technique: begin with a scholarly attempt at historical research; if it doesn’t work fudge it as necessary,” one attorney wrote.

Means’ junk abortion history nevertheless became the basis for some of Roe’s most crucial arguments. In two articles that Blackmun cited seven times, Means claimed that abortion was hardly an indictable offense under common law, supporting Blackmun’s idea that abortion was “possibly never firmly established as a crime at all.”

But this couldn’t be further from the truth. Means pointed to two common law cases involving abortion, both from the 1300s, one of which actually centered around a bail dispute. The other was decided on evidential and procedural grounds, Prof. Joseph Dellapenna of Villanova University noted in a recent Supreme Court brief.

“Means was simply wrong to assert that only two cases dealt with abortion before 1600 and that the courts in both cases doubted whether abortion was a crime,” Dellapenna wrote.

Cases in the sixteenth century clearly held abortions to be crimes. A coroner’s inquest held death by abortion to be “felonious suicide.” Accusing a woman of offering abortifacients to another supported an action for slander, as such words were sufficient grounds to require a judicial bond for good behavior. A woman was executed for abortion by witchcraft. A woman was “presented” by a coroner’s jury for procuring her own abortion.

And in 1601, the Queen’s Bench held that attempted abortion of a child born alive who died as a result of the act could be tried as murder, regardless of gestational age. Sir Edward Coke, the “Father of Common Law,” argued the case, later stating that abortion of a baby born dead still counted as a “great misprision,” or serious misdemeanor.

Far from condoning abortion, the born-alive case “shows that the common law protected human life as soon as it could be reliably detected,” Judge Amul Thapar of the Sixth Circuit wrote in a blistering critique of Roe earlier this year.

Coke’s assessment reflected those of other top common law authorities, like Sir William Blackstone, who called abortion “a very heinous misdemeanor,” in view of the “right inherent by nature in every individual; and it begins in contemplation of law as soon as an infant is able to stir in the mother’s womb.” By the 1800s, leading American treatises on common law identified abortion as a crime at any point after conception.

‘A blind man following a blind guide’

None of these facts stood in the way of the Roe majority, however, which uncritically embraced more of the abortion lobby’s lies. Along with Means, one of Roe’s principal sources was another leading abortion activist: NARAL co-founder Larry Lader. Justice Blackmun referred to Lader’s propagandic book, Abortion, which also parroted Means’ “history,” at least seven times.

“When Blackmun accepted Larry Lader, a mere magazine writer, as a reliable authority on history, philosophy, and theology, he became a blind man following a blind guide,” pro-life journalist Sue Ellen Browder wrote in her 2015 book Subverted.

Lader apparently made a significant impression on both Blackmun and his 28-year-old liberal clerk George Frampton, who ended up authoring much of Roe, Browder found while examining Blackmun’s papers. Frampton, in fact, drafted the opinion for his boss after being “astonished” by the lack of organization of the justice’s first iteration and pushed Blackmun to circulate his draft without typical fact-checking protocol.

Among the other historical revisions scattered throughout Roe are claims that a wave of early state laws that strictly limited abortion occurred mainly after the Civil War, and that these statutes “were designed solely to protect the woman” and interpreted as such by the courts.

The problem with this, again, is that it’s fiction. By 1864, at least 21 of 36 states had criminalized abortion, according to an analysis by legal scholar Peter J. Riga.

“In 1868, when the Fourteenth Amendment was ratified, a majority of the States and numerous Territories had laws on the books that limited (and in many cases nearly prohibited) abortion,” Justice Clarence Thomas wrote in his powerful dissent in last year’s June Medical Services v. Russo. “It would no doubt shock the public at that time to learn that one of the new constitutional Amendments contained hidden within the interstices of its text a right to abortion.”

And state courts often confirmed the intent of those pro-life laws — most of which explicitly recognized the fetus as a “child” — to protect the unborn. New Jersey’s abortion statute of 1872 was written “to protect the life of the child also, and inflict the same punishment, in case of its death, as if the mother should die,” the New Jersey Supreme Court held in 1881, echoing similar rulings in Ohio and Alabama.

At the same time, Roe couldn’t name even one state that acknowledged abortion “rights” by the end of the 19th century. “That silence is not just deafening,” Judge Thapar wrote. “It should end the debate. Under any test for evaluating the historical pedigree of an alleged right, the right to an abortion does not just miss the mark. It flunks out.”

“As a matter of constitutional interpretation and judicial method, Roe borders on the indefensible,” another Blackmun clerk, Edward Lazarus, came to admit. “A constitutional right to privacy broad enough to include abortion has no meaningful foundation in constitutional text, history, or precedent — at least, it does not if those sources are fairly described and reasonably faithfully followed.”

Roe v. Wade’s medical lies 

But perhaps Roe’s most glaring lies were those it made about the nature of human life. Blackmun at first tried to dodge the issue altogether, writing that the high court “need not resolve the difficult question of when life begins,” even as it unilaterally erased the rights of an entire class of living humans. “When those trained in the respective disciplines of medicine, philosophy, and theology are unable to arrive at any consensus, the judiciary, at this point in the development of man’s knowledge, is not in a position to speculate as to the answer,” he wrote.

The medical understanding that life begins at conception had been cemented as early as the mid-1800s, however, as Blackmun, former counsel to the Mayo Clinic, likely knew.

An 1859 report by the American Medical Association, for example, stressed “the sanctity of fœtal life,” declaring the unborn “endowed with vitality from the moment of conception itself.” “The heinous guilt of criminal abortion, however viewed by the community, is everywhere acknowledged by medical men,” the association said.

If anything, the reality of unborn life was only clearer in 1973. “Fifty years ago, science had already firmly established the dynamics of developing human life in the womb,” the Charlotte Lozier Institute’s Tara Sander Lee noted in National Review:

Validated, objective studies had demonstrated that from the moment of conception, when the sperm fertilizes the egg, the union of the male and female DNA restored the full collection of chromosomes needed to create a new, integrated, human organism with a complete set of unique DNA for his or her entire life.

When Roe v. Wade was decided in 1973, the Carnegie Stages of human development had already been accepted as the standard used by all biologists to describe the first eight weeks of human life. From Carnegie Stage 1a, which marks the beginning of a human life with the first stage of fertilization, culminating with Carnegie Stage 23 in the eighth week, in which the child has already formed 90 percent of his or her bodily structures — including fingers, toes, nose, and lips — the complexity of human life unfolds rapidly.

Despite feigning ignorance about the facts of human development, the Roe majority ultimately did make a call about “when life begins” — or at least when it matters.

In deciding where the State’s “compelling interest” to protect the “potentiality” of life started, Blackmun set the marker at “viability” (falsely equating it with the third trimester). Only then, he wrote, does a baby have “the capability of meaningful life outside the mother’s womb.”

In other words, the unborn may indeed possess “life” before reaching viability. That life just wasn’t “meaningful” enough for the Roe majority. And if a baby did make it past Roe’s arbitrary viability threshold, the court held that his or her life must still be sidelined in favor of a mother’s vaguely defined “health,” a command never justified in the ruling.

Roe’s medical errors don’t even end there. The convoluted case hinged on the assertion, stressed in a brief by Planned Parenthood, that abortion in the first trimester was as safe as, or safer than, natural childbirth. Like the rest of Roe, this “now-established medical fact,” as Blackmun put it, hasn’t held up well.

2012 study that examined the pregnancy outcomes of more than 463,000 women between 1980 and 2004 found that “women who had an early or late abortion had significantly higher mortality rates within 1 through 10 years,” compared to those who delivered their babies.

The “medical fact” of safe abortion didn’t rest on much evidence at the time, either. Nine medical articles submitted in the case to argue that abortion was safer than birth did not even test the claim. The hearings leading up to the court’s Roe decision notably involved no trials and no evidentiary record.

Further lies surrounded Roe v. Wade. The pregnant woman at the center of the case, Jane Roe, or Norma McCorvey, lied about being raped. Bernard Nathanson, who founded NARAL with Larry Lader, eventually admitted to inflating estimates of illegal abortions and maternal deaths they allegedly caused by the tens of thousands. The fake facts of Nathanson (who later converted to Catholicism) and his NARAL colleagues persist within the abortion movement to this day.

More than 62 million abortions later, the devastation wrought by the Supreme Court’s breathtaking incompetence and overreach is tantamount to a genocide.

Even ten years ago, the Roe death toll had surpassed “the Nazi Holocaust, Stalin’s purges, Pol Pot’s killing fields, and the Rwandan genocide combined,” University of St. Thomas law professor Michael Stokes Paulsen observed. “Over the past forty years,” he noted, “one-sixth of the American population has been killed by abortion. One in four African-Americans is killed before birth. Abortion is the leading cause of (unnatural) death in America.”

With Dobbs v. Jackson on the docket, the justices have the first opportunity in a generation to right their Roe atrocity and defend our most vulnerable brothers and sisters – and their constitutional rights.

Let’s pray they make the right choice. Millions of lives count on it.

Raymond Wolfe is a faithful Catholic journalist and editor at LifeSiteNews and is happily married. He formerly worked with the Center for Family and Human Rights.