Staci Fox, president and CEO of Planned Parenthood Southeast headquartered in Atlanta, Georgia said this about the Alabama ban on human slaughter: “[T]hese laws are unconstitutional and they [pro-life advocates] don’t care.”

It’s remarkable that the Founding Fathers managed to make clear to “progressives” that women have a constitutional right to have their offspring offed without ever uttering a single word about it in the U.S. Constitution.

Here are some quotes from liberal scholars and writers on Roe v. Wade collected by Timothy P. Carney, commentary editor at the Washington Examiner and a visiting fellow at the American Enterprise Institute—quotes that shrieking feminists may find wholly unpalatable:

• “One of the most curious things about Roe is that, behind its own verbal smokescreen, the substantive judgment on which it rests is nowhere to be found.” (Laurence Tribe, Harvard Law School professor).

• “As a matter of constitutional interpretation and judicial method, Roe borders on the indefensible. I say this as someone utterly committed to the right to choose” (Edward Lazarus, former clerk to SCOTUS Justice Harry Blackmun).

• What, exactly, is the problem with Roe? The problem, I believe, is that it has little connection to the Constitutional right it purportedly interpreted. 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” (Edward Lazarus).

• “[A]s a matter of constitutional interpretation, even most liberal jurisprudes — if you administer truth serum—will tell you it is basically indefensible” (Edward Lazarus).

• “Blackmun’s [Supreme Court] papers vindicate every indictment of Roe: invention, overreach, arbitrariness, textual indifference” (William Saletan, Slate magazine writer).

• Roe “is not constitutional law and gives almost no sense of an obligation to try to be…. What is frightening about Roe is that this super-protected right is not inferable from the language of the U.S. Constitution, the framers’ thinking respecting the specific problem in issue, any general value derivable from the provisions they included, or the nation’s governmental structure. Nor is it explainable in terms of the unusual political impotence of the group judicially protected vis-à-vis the interest that legislatively prevailed over it.… At times the inferences the Court has drawn from the values the Constitution marks for special protection have been controversial, even shaky, but never before has its sense of an obligation to draw one been so obviously lacking” (John Hart Ely, clerk for U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice Earl Warren).

• Roe “is a lousy opinion that disenfranchised millions of conservatives on an issue about which they care deeply.” (Benjamin Wittes, Senior Fellow, Brookings Institution).

• “[T]he very basis of the Roe v. Wade decision—the one that grounds abortion rights in the Constitution—strikes many people now as faintly ridiculous. Whatever abortion may be, it cannot simply be a matter of privacy…. As a layman, it’s hard for me to raise profound constitutional objections to the decision. But it is not hard to say it confounds our common-sense understanding of what privacy is. If a Supreme Court ruling is going to affect so many people then it ought to rest on perfectly clear logic and up-to-date science. Roe, with its reliance on trimesters and viability, has a musty feel to it, and its argument about privacy raises more questions than it answers…. “[Roe] is a Supreme Court decision whose reasoning has not held up. It seems more fiat than argument…. Still, a bad decision is a bad decision. If the best we can say for it is that the end justifies the means, then we have not only lost the argument—but a bit of our soul as well” (Richard Cohen, Washington Post columnist).

• “Judges have no special competence, qualifications, or mandate to decide between equally compelling moral claims (as in the abortion controversy) …. [C]lear governing constitutional principles… are not present” (Alan Dershowitz, former Harvard Law School professor).

• “In short, 30 years later, it seems increasingly clear that this pro-choice magazine was correct in 1973 when it criticized Roe on constitutional grounds. Its overturning would be the best thing that could happen to the federal judiciary, the pro-choice movement, and the moderate majority of the American people…. Thirty years after Roe, the finest constitutional minds in the country still have not been able to produce a constitutional justification for striking down restrictions on early-term abortions that is substantially more convincing than Justice Harry Blackmun’s famously artless opinion itself. As a result, the pro-choice majority asks nominees to swear allegiance to the decision without being able to identify an intelligible principle to support it” (Jeffrey Rosen, George Washington University Law School professor, former clerk to Judge Abner Mikva).

• “Liberal judicial activism peaked with Roe v. Wade, the 1973 abortion decision…. Although I am pro-choice, I was taught in law school, and still believe, that Roe v. Wade is a muddle of bad reasoning and an authentic example of judicial overreaching” (Michael Kinsley, attorney, political journalist).

• “[I]t is time to admit in public that, as an example of the practice of constitutional opinion writing, Roe is a serious disappointment. You will be hard-pressed to find a constitutional law professor, even among those who support the idea of constitutional protection for the right to choose, who will embrace the opinion itself rather than the result. This is not surprising. As constitutional argument, Roe is barely coherent. The court pulled its fundamental right to choose more or less from the constitutional ether. It supported that right via a lengthy, but purposeless, cross-cultural historical review of abortion restrictions and a tidy but irrelevant refutation of the straw-man argument that a fetus is a constitutional ‘person’ entited [sic] to the protection of the 14th Amendment…. By declaring an inviolable fundamental right to abortion, Roe short-circuited the democratic deliberation that is the most reliable method of deciding questions of competing values” (Kermit Roosevelt, University of Pennsylvania Law School professor).

• “The failure to confront the issue in principled terms leaves the opinion to read like a set of hospital rules and regulations…. Neither historian, nor layman, nor lawyer will be persuaded that all the prescriptions of Justice Blackmun are part of the Constitution” (Archibald Cox, JFK’s Solicitor General, former Harvard Law School professor).

Roe v. Wade is the SCOTUS decision that “progressives” argue absolute fidelity to precedent demands Justices uphold. If they think “lousy,” “indefensible,” “barely coherent,” unintelligible, a-constitutional non-reasoning must be honored in slavish service to the political end of allowing feticide, I hate to imagine what they would have thought about revisiting Dred Scott.

Save these quotes to show your pro-human slaughter friends next time they claim Roe v. Wade is the unchallengeable law of the land and reflects immutable constitutional truths.

Listen to this article read by Laurie:

https://staging.illinoisfamily.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/05/Roe_SCOTUS.mp3

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Written by John C. Eastman

Until her release [last week], Kim Davis, the clerk of rural Rowan County, Kentucky, was confined to a jail cell because she refused to issue marriage licenses over her name to same-sex couples. She has been pilloried in the media for “lawlessness” and compared not to Martin Luther King Jr. for her civil disobedience but to Governor George Wallace of Alabama. Michael Keegen of the grossly misnamed People for the American Way called her actions an “abuse of power” and proposed instead that she should “find another line of work” — that is, resign her elected office — if she “can’t in good conscience fulfill [her] duties.”

The double standard on display is palpable. I don’t recall Keegen or any of the other self-righteous, newfound devotees of the rule of law calling for the resignation of Kentucky’s attorney general when he refused to defend his state’s marriage law — or any of the other state attorneys general who did the same, from California’s Jerry Brown to Pennsylvania’s Kathleen Kane, and several others, including perhaps most notoriously Oregon’s Ellen Rosenblum, who was caught actively colluding with plaintiffs to ensure judicial invalidation of the Oregon marriage law she disliked.

“But Davis was refusing to comply with a decision of the Supreme Court,” it will be argued. So, too, did all those illustrious attorneys general. All of them refused to do their duty and defend their state’s man-woman marriage laws, even though the binding precedent of the U.S. Supreme Court at that time, a 1972 case called Baker v. Nelson, was that such laws were constitutionally valid.

Ms. Davis’s position has also been mischaracterized as asserting that because the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision is contrary to God’s authority, she cannot be compelled to comply with it and therefore can prevent same-sex couples from getting married in her county. Her position — so described — has been belittled by simpletons across the political spectrum as nothing more than the misguided stance of a crazy evangelical clinging to her Bible. But that is not her legal argument at all (however much merit it might have as a reaction to an illegitimate decision by the U.S. Supreme Court). Her actual argument is much more restrained.

Kentucky has a Religious Freedom Restoration Act, which expressly prevents the government from imposing a substantial burden on someone’s religious beliefs unless the government’s mandate is narrowly tailored to further a compelling governmental interest. Because this lawsuit is pending in federal court, the federal Religious Freedom Restoration Act, which contains the same protection, is also applicable. Ms. Davis’s lawyers have simply argued that these federal and state laws require that her religious objection to issuing same-sex “marriage” licenses over her own name be accommodated.

There is no compelling interest here. Even assuming the validity of the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision holding that right to same-sex “marriage” is a fundamental right, no one is being denied the right to marry. As a matter of Kentucky law, the couples seeking to compel Ms. Davis herself to issue them a marriage license can obtain a marriage license from any other county in Kentucky. They can also get one from the county executive of Rowan County. And if the governor would simply call the legislature into special session to deal with the problem that has arisen since the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in June, it would likely even be possible for other clerks in Ms. Davis’s office to issue a marriage license without its being issued on Ms. Davis’s authority (the legislature could simply remove the problematic “under [her] authority” language from the statewide uniform form), or for marriage licenses to be obtained via a statewide online system.

But none of those options would accomplish what the same-sex couple and its chorus of advocates are really after, which is not the “marriage” but forcing Ms. Davis and everyone like her to bow to the new, unholy orthodoxy. In other words, this controversy has all the hallmarks of the one that engulfed Thomas More, who silently acquiesced in but would not condone King Henry VIII’s illicit marriage.

The Religious Freedom Restoration Acts, both the federal law and Kentucky’s version of it, required that Ms. Davis’s religious objection be accommodated as a matter of law. The federal court’s refusal to respect those laws is where the real lawlessness lies in this case. And of course, that lawlessness is quite apart from the not insignificant question of whether the U.S. Supreme Court’s Obergefell decision is itself lawless. Such claims did not originate with Ms. Davis, but with the four U.S. Supreme Court Justices who stridently dissented from Justice Kennedy’s diktat, calling it “illegitima[te],” “indefensible,” “dangerous for the rule of law,” “demeaning to the democratic process,” “a naked judicial claim to legislative — indeed, super-legislative — power,” “pretentious,” “egotistic,” a “judicial Putsch,” “deeply misguided,” a “usurp[ation of] the constitutional right of the people,” a “perhaps irremediable corruption of our legal culture’s conception of constitutional interpretation,” and an “extravagant conception of judicial supremacy.”

That latter point is important to put to rest the other charge that has been leveled against Ms. Davis, namely, that she is violating her oath of office by not upholding the law she swore to uphold. The Constitution requires that all officials, both federal and state, take an oath to “support this Constitution,” and the Constitution itself provides that “this Constitution, and the Laws of the United States which shall be made in Pursuance thereof . . . shall be the supreme Law of the Land.” Neither the oath clause nor the supremacy clause requires fealty to an erroneous decision of the U.S. Supreme Court that is contrary to the Constitution itself. That is not constitutionalism, or the rule of law, but the rule of judges; a claim that although the Constitution is the supreme law of the land, the Constitution is whatever the judges say it is, even if what they say is a patently erroneous interpretation of the Constitution.

Reacting to a similar piece of judicial tyranny in the Dred Scott case, Abraham Lincoln famously said, in his first inaugural address, that although judicial decisions are binding on the specific parties to a case, “the candid citizen must confess that if the policy of the Government upon vital questions affecting the whole people is to be irrevocably fixed by decisions of the Supreme Court, the instant they are made in ordinary litigation between parties in personal actions, the people will have ceased to be their own rulers, having to that extent practically resigned their Government into the hands of that eminent tribunal.”

In short, Ms. Davis was much more faithful to her oath of office, and to the Constitution she vowed to support, than the federal judge who jailed her for contempt, the attorney general of the state who refused to defend Kentucky’s laws, and Justice Anthony Kennedy, who usurped the authority of the states and the more than 50 million voters who had recently reaffirmed the natural definition of marriage, in order to impose his own more “enlightened” views on the nation. One can only hope that Ms. Davis’s simple but determined act of civil disobedience will yet ignite the kind of reaction in the American people that is necessary to oppose such lawlessness, or at the very least bring forth a national leader who will take up the argument against judicial supremacy in truly Lincolnian fashion.

This article was originally posted at the National Review Online.

— John C. Eastman is the Henry Salvatori Professor of Law and Community Service, and former dean, at Chapman University’s Dale E. Fowler School of Law. He is also the founding director of the Claremont Institute’s Center for Constitutional Jurisprudence and chairman of the board of the National Organization for Marriage.

By Matt Barber

The pro-aborts are losing. They know it, and they hate it.

As LifeNews.com reported in January: “CNN released the results of a new poll showing a majority of Americans want all or most abortions prohibited – a clear pro-life majority.”

Indeed, the winds of life are blowing free the foul stench of a pro-abortion culture of death.

This is why President Obama and his fellow pro-abort zealot, HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius, have unilaterally, arbitrarily and unconstitutionally forced, through Obamacare, every taxpaying American citizen to fund “free” abortion-on-demand.

This draconian overreach is in perfect keeping with the 2012 DNC platform, which, for the first time, admits without shame: “The Democratic Party strongly and unequivocally supports Roe v. Wade and a woman’s right to … abortion, regardless of ability to pay.”

Psalm 8:28 commands: “Defend the weak and the fatherless; uphold the cause of the poor and the oppressed.”

To be sure, there can be none more oppressed than the tens of millions who, over four short decades, have been – and will continue to be – slaughtered within the safe haven of their own mothers’ wombs.

With its 1973 Roe decision, the U.S. Supreme Court put the government’s official stamp of approval on mass murder. Since then, the battle lines have been drawn. This is war. They, “pro-choicers,” are the bad guys, while pro-lifers are the good guys. It really is that simple – that black and white. It’s good versus evil.

History will reflect as much.

To the unenthusiastic mother, politically motivated abortion violence is deviously portrayed as an acceptable escape from what may seem a desperate situation. To the innocent child, it is – without fail and without due process – execution by torture.

Consider the horrific practice of Partial-Birth Abortion, innocuously tagged “Intact Dilation and Extraction.” This is a practice so brutal and so needless that even the liberal American Medical Association (AMA) admitted that it is never necessary under any circumstances.

During a partial-birth abortion, the abortionist pulls a fully “viable” child – often kicking and thrashing – feet first from her mother’s womb, leaving only the top of her head in the birth canal. This is so the abortionist can technically claim to be performing an abortion, rather than committing murder.

He then stabs the child through the base of her skull with scissors, piercing her brain until her kicking and moving about suddenly and violently jerks to a halt. Next, he opens the scissors to enlarge the wound, inserts a vacuum tube and sucks out her brains, thereby collapsing her skull.

Her now limp and lifeless body is then cast away like so much garbage.

Appalling, isn’t it? Infanticide by any objective measure.

So, naturally, Mr. Obama, reasonable fellow that he is, agrees with the AMA, correct? He and other “pro-choicers” were the first to applaud the high court when it upheld a ban on this Hitlerian practice, right?

Wrong.

Barack Obama unbelievably called the Court’s decision in Gonzales v. Carhart part of a concerted effort “to steadily roll back the hard-won rights of American women.” In so doing, he revealed to the world that leftist support for abortion “rights” has everything to do with politics and nothing to do with science or “health care.”

Moreover, consider Mr. Obama’s opposition to the “Born Alive Infant Protection Act.” It passed both houses of Congress in 2002 with overwhelming bipartisan support. Born Alive very simply requires that when a baby survives an attempted abortion – when she is “born alive” – further attempts to kill her must immediately cease, and steps must be taken to save her life.

Yet, incredibly, this president, while serving in the Illinois Senate, vehemently opposed the bill’s Illinois twin. He complained that requiring efforts to save the live victim of a botched abortion is “really designed simply to burden the original decision of the woman and the physician to induce labor and perform an abortion.”

Barack Obama’s solution? Finish off the little pest.

So prepare for Obama and other pro-aborts to go utterly berserk now that Arkansas has passed the Human Heartbeat Protection Act. It requires that when an abortion is performed at or after the 12th week, doctors must test for a fetal heartbeat before an abortion is performed. If a heartbeat is detected, a woman cannot have an abortion, except in cases of rape, incest, or if a mother’s life is in danger.

This is common-sense stuff. The human heartbeat has long been indisputable proof of life both within and without the womb.

Still, and not surprisingly, even as the state legislature was overriding the Democratic governor’s veto of the new law – SB 134 – the ACLU and other pro-abort radicals were vowing to challenge it in court.

Mathews Staver, founder and chairman of Liberty Counsel, has vowed to preserve it: “If asked, Liberty Counsel will defend this law without reservation, free of charge for the people of Arkansas, born and unborn,” he said.

“In keeping with medical advances, history and common sense, the Arkansas legislature has said that the life of a 12-week-old unborn child with a detectable heartbeat is protected under the law.”

And well it should be. SB 134 is just the beginning. Brave lawmakers in Arkansas have provided the template for other states to follow.

They’re on the right side of history.

Indeed, history has a way of repeating itself. The Roe decision was not the first time the U.S. Supreme Court has so disgraced our nation. Roe v. Wade represents the twin bookend to the Court’s shameful 1857 Dred Scott decision.

In Dred Scott the Court absurdly held that African-American slaves, even if emancipated, were not fully persons and therefore could never be considered U.S. citizens. Likewise, Roe v. Wade ruled that children in gestation are not fully persons and are therefore not entitled to their most basic civil right: life.

As with Dred Scott, Roe’s fate, I believe, is certain. It’s just a matter of time. History will eventually judge Roe v. Wade every bit as harshly as Dred Scott.

Call yourself “pro-choice”? Shame on you. You’re no better than a modern-day slave master. Dump the garbage and join the right side of history.

There’s plenty of room over here.