By Peter J. Smith
WASHINGTON, September 28, 2006 (LifeSiteNews.com) – The Supreme Court plans to hear a suit to reverse the landmark abortion US case, Doe v. Bolton, from the case’s original plaintiff, who claims the facts of the original case were fraudulent and she was misrepresented by attorneys.
The Court plans to consider the case on October 6, which with its companion case Roe v. Wade remains the chief obstacle to national and state laws restricting or prohibiting abortion. Both Doe and Roe were decided by the Court the same day, thereby overturning the nation’s abortion laws. However, it is the “health exception” established in Doe that permitted unfettered abortion from conception until the moment of birth.
According to Insight Magazine, the original Doe, Sandra Cano, plans to argue not only that Court justices have “frozen abortion law based on obsolete 1973 assumptions and prevented the normal regulation of the practice of medicine,” but also that the facts in Doe used to overturn US abortion law were founded upon lies orchestrated by an American Civil Liberties Union lawyer, Ms. Margie Pitts Hames. Ms. Cano says she was manipulated by the ACLU attorney, when she was a pregnant 22-year-old victim of an abusive husband with her three children in foster care.
“What I received was something I never requested—the legal right to abort my child,” Ms. Cano said in an affidavit in 2000.
According to her affidavit filed with the U.S. District Court in New Jersey, Ms. Cano said she approached a legal aid office in Atlanta to file for divorce and custody of her children, where she was taken advantage of by an “aggressive self-serving attorney, Margie Pitts Hames, the legal-aid attorney.”
According to Ms. Cano – who only examined her court records years after the Supreme Court decision – she is “99 percent certain” that she never signed an affidavit saying she did not want or could not care for another baby, and believes Ms. Pitts Hames either forged her signature or slipped the affidavit among the divorce papers she signed. “I never told Margie that I wanted an abortion. The facts stated in the affidavit in Doe v. Bolton are not true.”
Ms. Cano claims that the court records showing she had applied for abortion, was denied the abortion and then sued the state of Georgia were all based on falsehoods, not the reality. In fact, Ms. Cano says she fled to Oklahoma until her mother and her attorney agreed to no longer pressure her to undergo an abortion.
“The basic thing is that Doe v. Bolton was fraud,” she said about the case abortion advocates ironically trumpet as protecting a “woman’s right to choose”.
“None of this was my decision. None of this was me. I don’t understand why no one took it upon themselves in such an important case, a case that allowed a law to be passed to take innocent human lives, to speak to the plaintiff in the case. Why they didn’t speak to me?”
The case has moved to the Supreme Court, since the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled in January 2006 that only the Supreme Court had the authority to reverse its own decisions in Doe v. Bolton or Roe v. Wade.