The Fake and Deceptive Science Behind Roe V. Wade: Settled Law? vs. Settled Science?

By Thomas W. Hilgers

Our schools and healthcare institutions have abandoned the Hippocratic Oath and the Declaration of Geneva and replaced it with a policy of lethalism ...This is a direct result of the Court's acceptance and promotion of archaic scientific reasoning (Roe v. Wade) that, at best, would be considered pre-medieval and clearly out of touch with scientific reality. Fallout includes the expansion into fetal experimentation, human cloning, embryonic stem cell research, infanticide, and even physician-assisted suicide programs. The respect for life ethic has slowly been removed as the Supreme Court has so strongly supported the “lethalism becomes a way of life” ethic. Especially interesting is the lack of support for any positive solutions to these issues.The recognition is that life at all stages in the womb is precious and able to make extraordinary contributions to our ability to love and to be loved, to bring about peace and to be at peace, to extract love in ways that only a very young and precious life is able to extract, and to express love in ways that can be boundlessly meaningful. As we move to reestablish the human right to live, we must also move beyond lethalism and install positive, life-affirming and meaningful solutions to real human problems.God bless us all as we move in this direction!

• Language: English
• Publisher: Beaufort Books
• Release date: Aug 20, 2020
• ISBN: 9780825308239

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Acknowledgements

Introduction

On January 22, 1973, the United States Supreme Court in a 7 to 2 decision, legalized abortion throughout the United States and throughout the entire course of pregnancy. This decision, written under the name of Associate Justice Harry Blackmun, is noteworthy for its lack of scholarship, extraordinary bias, its pre-medieval approach to pregnancy-related science and its intellectual dishonesty. Clearly it was a decision written out of a pro-abortion mindset. This was a Supreme Court decision that was activist through and through; it ignored and purposely rejected a period of at least 400 years of scientific enlightenment on the understanding of the beginning and the development of human life that existed in the womb for each one of us. Unfortunately, it followed the lead of the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists (ACOG) which presented to the Court data and concepts that one could only consider to be false and/or deceptive. The ACOG is one of the largest pro-abortion lobbying groups in the U.S. and throughout the world. The Court’s decision was anything but fair and impartial!

Over the last 47 years, there have been well over a conservative estimate of 60 million abortions performed in the United States; it may have reached as high as 70 to 80 million. The purpose of this book is to undertake a critical investigation of the Court’s scientific positioning found in Roe v. Wade¹ (Texas) and its companion case, Doe v. Bolton² (Georgia). It will also look at important and vital scientific work that was ignored and/or rejected by the Court while assessing the reliability of data regarding the incidence of criminal (illegal) abortion and the maternal mortality rate related to legally-induced abortion and normal childbirth (that was presented to them by the ACOG). It also discusses the dehumanizing and deceptive intervention of the ACOG on the topics of human embryology and human fetology. Furthermore, this investigation will show that the Court acted within the context of a historically pre-medieval approach to pregnancy-related science so as to justify its ruling. Lawrence Lader, who was described as a leader of the campaign to legalize abortion and at the time of Roe was Chairman (and Co-Founder) of the National Association for the Repeal of Abortion Laws (NARAL), was Blackmun’s most cited reference.³ Except for short sections on continued scientific advances and what has been lost, this book focuses on what was available to the Supreme Court in 1973.

Roe v. Wade

In Section VI of Roe, Blackmun says that, Perhaps it is not generally appreciated that the restrictive criminal abortion laws in effect in a majority of states today are of relatively recent vintage. Those laws, generally proscribing abortion or its attempt at any time during pregnancy, except when necessary to preserve the pregnant woman’s life, are not of ancient or even of common law origin. Instead, they derive from statutory changes effected, for the most part, in the latter half of the 19th century.4 The decision then rejects and ignores the democratic process by which these statutes were arrived at. It was as if that process was deemed to be inferior. In justifying this, he reviewed some of the ancient attitudes regarding the Hippocratic Oath. In reviewing ancient attitudes, he cited the thoughts of Aristotle, Soranus of Ephesus and Galen. That took us from 460 BC to 200 AD.⁵

In discussing the Hippocratic Oath and significantly demeaning it, he relied heavily on L. Edelstein’s book on the Oath written in 1943 before the famous post World War II Nuremburg trials. Blackmun says that Edelstein reached the conclusion that the oath originated in a group representing only a small segment of Greek opinion that was not accepted by all ancient physicians. He points out that the medical writings down to Galen, give evidence of the violation of almost every one of its injunctions. Ultimately, Blackmun concurred with Edelstein’s suggestion that it was a Pythagorean Manifesto and not the expression of an absolute standard of medical conduct. It seemed to Blackmun that this was a satisfactory and acceptable explanation of the Hippocratic Oath’s apparent rigidity.⁶

In doing this, Justice Blackmun brushed aside over 2,000 years of medical history to accept a working hypothesis of one deceased historian as gospel. Apparently, those thousands upon thousands who have taken this oath: I will give no deadly medicine to anyone if asked, nor suggest any such counsel; and in like manner, I will not give a woman a pessary to produce abortion are only the tools of the Pythagoreans.⁷

Figure Intro-1: Oldest known drawing of the uterus from a ninth-century copy of Soranus’ work.⁸

Blackmun relies, in large part, on these early (ancient) physicians and philosophers to help dehumanize the early human embryo and take value away from it. He says that early philosophers believed that the embryo or fetus did not become formed and begin to live until at least 40 days after conception for a male and 80 to 90 days for a female. But Aristotle’s concepts of human procreation were truly ancient and deeply flawed. In the Aristotelian concept, neither the ovaries nor the testicles played a role in reproduction. Aristotle taught that semen was produced in the male ducts and that the testicles were weights to keep the ducts straight.⁸ Blackmun goes on to discuss the common law and in that discussion brings in St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas. That goes back to 354 AD and up to 1274 AD. But knowledge of human reproduction at that stage of history was also not accurate; and, in fact, was steeped in ignorance. For example, in Figure Intro-1, the oldest known drawing of a uterus from a 9th century copy of Soranus’ original work is shown. It is anatomically inaccurate.⁸

A review of the major discoveries in reproductive function shows multiple noteworthy items: The discovery of the sperm cell and the discovery of the human egg; the sperm cell was not discovered until 1677 by Anton van Leeuwenhoek, the inventor of the microscope. He called them Seminal animalcules. It was his thought that in the head of the sperm, there was a little man or homunculus.⁹ This was the visual concept of the sperm as it was imagined in the minds of scientists at the end of the 17th century (Figure Intro-2). The mammalian egg was not seen for the first time until 1827 and that was in a dog and from the ovaries of other mammals.¹⁰ The human egg was not seen until about 1935, but long before Roe.

Figure Intro-2: Left, sketches of sperms as van Leeuwenhoek thought he saw them in 1677 with the aid of his newly invented microscope. Right, homunculus or little man as sperms were imagined to be in the minds of some scientists at the end of the 17th century. (Illustrations printed from woodcuts in Phil. Trans. Royal Society of London, 1677 and 1678; and as seen in Hartman CG: Science and the Safe Period. Williams and Wilkins Company, Baltimore, 1962).

While ignoring that the state of the embryological sciences that he favored was highly inaccurate and steeped in ignorance, Blackmun stood by his idea that it was just a theory that a human life is present from the "moment of conception¹¹ and making it appear as if this was only a doctrinal statement put forth by the Catholic Church. He ultimately states that, In view of all this, we do not agree that, by adopting ‘one theory of life,’ Texas may override the rights of the pregnant woman that are at stake." And yet, this is not a theory, it is a fact! Blackmun in his arrogance came forward to conclude that, "We need not resolve the difficult question of when life begins. 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."12 This is a little bit like taking the membership of the flat earth society and accepting their idea that the earth is flat and considering it to be of equal or greater value to the actual fact that the earth is round. It defies the scientific reality of when life begins which was well established and consistent at the time of Roe. It was not as if Blackmun did not have access to this information. In an Amicus Brief submitted on behalf of another group of physicians, professors and fellows of the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, it was noted that, It is our task … to show how clearly and conclusively modern science — embryology, fetology, genetics, perinatology, all of biology — establishes the humanity of the unborn child.¹³ The Amici then proceeded to present that science.

Blackmun gives only a glancing notice to this information when he recognizes that in support of the personhood of the fetus, "They outline in detail the well-known facts of fetal development (emphasis applied). He recognizes that, If this suggestion of personhood is established, the Appellant’s case, of course, collapses for the fetus’ right to life is then guaranteed specifically by the Fourteenth Amendment."¹⁴ Blackmun recognizes that these facts are "well known" and yet he purposely rejects them by saying there’s no consensus. Along with this, he clearly recognized that if these well known facts were accepted, then their personal desire to come down in favor of the unborn would substantially argue against the court’s pro-abortion position.

Let’s look at a different example. It has been noted that all cells in a malignant tumor arise from a single cell in which the regulatory mechanism of proliferation has been disrupted. While that single cell may not be visible to the naked eye, nor is it visible through multiple levels of cellular division, it is still cancer¹⁵. No one would be so foolish as to say to a woman, for example, who has breast cancer cells present but in a microscopic form that those cells can be ignored. Breast cancer is cancer from the first cancer cell forward.

In writing off what Blackmun called one theory of life¹² (life begins at conception) he says that this would nullify the Appellant’s case collapsing the fetus’ right to life by guaranteeing specifically the Fourteenth Amendment. Blackmun, by one sweep of the pen, re-wrote the modern biology of the beginning and development of human life in utero while at the same time, strongly suggesting that this was only a religious principle and one that need not apply to all individuals who are not of that religious persuasion. That thrust us back to a time before the middle ages by discounting the embryological science that had developed in the previous 400 years because Blackmun, along with six other Justices appeared to harbor a religious bias. It was as inept, deceptive and fake then as it is now. While denigrating the Hippocratic Oath, Blackmun also ignored significant components of modern ethical and biological research. These will be discussed further in this book but a partial list is given at this time:

In addition to that