Allan Parker answers several questions for The Abortion Museum and this is the raw footage of our interview. This footage will assist us in creating a series of museum exhibits on the truth/history surrounding abortion.
Transcript
The transcript was automatically generated and may contain errors.
Welcome to the Pro-Life Team Podcast. My name is Jacob Barr, and in this episode, we’re sharing footage captured for the Abortion Museum. Thank you. My name is Alan Parker. I’m the president of the Justice Foundation, and I’ve had the honor of representing Norma McCorvey, who was Roe of Roe v. Wade, and Sandra Kano, who was the Doe of Doe v. Bolton, in their legal efforts to reverse their original cases.
Together, those two cases, Roe and Doe, brought abortion on demand as a supposed constitutional right to America. I also represent thousands of women hurt by abortion. We’ve collected the largest body in the world of direct sworn testimony of what abortion does to women in the words of the women themselves. It’s called Operation Outcry, and in the Dobbs case that reversed Roe v. Wade, we presented the court with 4,728 legally admissible written testimonies of women who had had abortions, telling the court what abortion did to them. The court has cited the women’s testimonies several times in the last 20 years, as the court has moved away from the supposed right to abortion to a more life and woman and child protective constitutional interpretation. I need to add something else.
I also represent the Moral Outcry petition movement to make abortion illegal and unthinkable all across America. The founder of that was Melinda Thibault, and so that’s another thing that we’re doing now. Thank you. So that’s another thing that we’re doing now. Thank you. Perfect. So this is question number one out of the abortion and the legal abortion question set.
Alan, what are rights, whether civil rights, human rights, or some other kind of rights, and does abortion qualify as one or more of these rights? What are rights? What an interesting question, and it really gets down to the difference between right and wrong, something that most people think there may not be a clear line between right and wrong today, but there is a difference between good and evil, and in the Judeo-Christian tradition of the law and the American tradition of the law, our Declaration of Independence says that we declare these truths to be self-evident, that actually if you think about them, anyone in the world could know this, that all men are created equal and endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights, and among these is the right to life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness. So what is the first right in the Declaration of Independence?
The right to life. Without the right to life, you have nothing. You have no other right that you can exercise. You have no independent existence. So the first duty of government is to protect life, and whether you believe in a Judeo-Christian view of the law or no religion or another religion, every human being says, I should be protected by law. I want a government that protects my life. Otherwise, it’s the law of the jungle.
There are people who would kill you to take your property or to take your life or just to take your money or your home or your wife or your children. There must be law.
No civilization can exist without law. Lawlessness produces anarchy, death, and destruction. So we believe rights come from God, and right is based not on might, but on a moral order that says this is right, this is wrong. Thank you. Some of them might be short. That doesn’t show if it’s over here, does it? All right.
I can put it over here. Thank you. At the other side, behind the base? Oh, behind the base. There you go. That’s a smart idea. I’m going to ask you a question.
I’m going to ask you a question, and then I’m going to ask you a question, and then I’m going to ask you a question, and then I’m going to ask you a question, and then I’m going to ask you a question. Oh, behind the base.
There you go. That’s a smart idea. If you end up wanting to restart at that sentence point, we can always edit out a fragment sentence. All right. Thanks. Okay. If you ever want to.
So question number two is, does legal equal moral? In other words, does legality entirely define morality? And we’re really begging, where do morals come from? Right. Something may be legal, and it may be completely immoral. The classic example of that, that everyone agrees with today, was killing Jews in Germany. The law allowed it.
The law required it. And many Germans defended their actions in killing Jews by saying it was the law. My country said I had to do it. But at the Nuremberg trial, the world, which throughout history has said there’s a higher law than man’s law, said that what you did by killing a whole class of human beings was a crime against humanity. And from a Judeo-Christian tradition, it’s a crime against God. So if you think the law is the final authority, then you actually believe in a dictatorship of man, because it’s man who creates the law. And throughout most of human history, it’s been either a single strong man or a small group of people who rule in the name of everyone else. Awesome. Very excellent.
Question number three, the Dobbs decision, what is it, and why does it matter? The Dobbs decision, excuse me, let me get some water. We appreciate you being here today, Alan. Thank you. Thank you. I remember. All right.
Whenever you’re ready. The Dobbs decision is one of the greatest decisions in American judicial history. It’s as great as Brown v. Board of Education, which ended segregation in America. And why are the two closely related and both great? The Brown v. Board of Education decision reversed a 58-year-old Supreme Court precedent called Plessy v.
Ferguson, which had enshrined segregation, or separate but equal, in the Constitution of the United States, supposedly. It was an 1896 decision after the Civil War, which we fought to end slavery. But everybody thought, oh, segregation is the law of the land. It’s a super precedent. It was 58 years old. Well, the Supreme Court didn’t change the Constitution. The Constitution always said you have equal rights, equal protection, not separate but equal.
It was the Supreme Court that was wrong, not the Constitution. Well, the Dobbs decision did the same thing to Roe v. Wade, which was not part of the Constitution. How do we know that? In Dobbs, they said, clearly, the word abortion isn’t even in the Constitution. There’s no right to an abortion. They found it originally in the shadow or penumbras of the Constitution.
They couldn’t even find the word, of course. And the Supreme Court said it’s as bad as segregation and we need to do the right thing and correct our error. It was the Supreme Court that incorrectly found this right to abortion. It had to be the Supreme Court which changed the law. And so, that’s why Dobbs was one of the greatest decisions in American history. So, I believe now we’re in the de-abortioning phase of American history, just like we had to go through the desegregation phase. What did the people who supported segregation say?
They said, segregation forever, segregation forever. And on the day of oral argument in Dobbs, I was there outside the court waiting for oral argument and they started shouting, abortion forever, abortion forever. I thought, where have I heard that slogan? I know all the abortion slogans. They’d never used that one before. But that’s what the segregationist said in the final days of segregation. And the abortion forever is in the final days of that slogan.
We are going to have an America that is abortion free of legal abortion. And I believe that it’ll be similar to the desegregation, but in only 10 years, we went from 1954 where abortion was, I mean, excuse me, where segregation was a constitutional right, to 1964, 10 years later, where we had a federal law banning segregation. And we will be the same way in the future because of really a better alternative called the safe haven law. I’ll come back to safe haven law later. So this is going to be question number four. What was Roe v. Wade and in your legal opinion, so yeah, what was Roe v.
Wade and in your legal opinion, was it a legally sound decision, constitutional, evidentially strong, responsible jurisprudence, et cetera? And whenever you’re ready. All right. I had the great honor of representing Norma McCorvey, who was the lead plaintiff in the case that came to be known as Roe v. Wade in her legal efforts to reverse her own case.
So what was Roe v. Wade? It was a decision that was an exercise in sheer judicial power. It was an attempt to legislate from the bench. It was the creation of a supposed right that did not exist in the Constitution. And it used Norma McCorvey as the vehicle to create the law that the Supreme Court wanted to create. And it was a disaster in her life.
And every year around the anniversary of Roe v. Wade, she felt tremendous guilt for the death of another million people. She was just a kind of a street person, sold drugs, who did get pregnant, wanted relief from not knowing what to do with the child. This was her third pregnancy. The first child was taken by Norma’s mother to be raised because Norma was kind of a street person. And then the second child she placed for adoption. And the third child, she said, I just want this to be over.
She tried to get an illegal abortion, but public interest lawyers needed a plaintiff for them to go to the Supreme Court to create a new law. And let me just say this. When a Supreme Court changes the Constitution, they become an oligopoly. What is an oligopoly? An oligopoly is government by a few. We are a republic. We want to elect our representatives who pass laws, and then the law must be consistent with the Constitution.
Because the Constitution was drafted by the people, ratified by the people, and gives our whole legitimacy to our form of government. We’re not ruled by a few. We rule ourselves as a society through elected representatives. And the people ratified the Constitution. There’s no right to abortion in the Constitution. There is a right to life in the Constitution twice. The Fifth Amendment and the Fourteenth Amendment say the same thing.
No person shall be deprived of life without due process of law. So the Supreme Court ignored the written words of the Constitution, created a right to abortion. They amended the Constitution without the consent of the people of the United States. That is a usurpation of judicial authority.
It is tyranny by lawyers. That should never happen. What is the proper role of the court? They do have a duty to interpret the words of the Constitution according to the meaning that the people had at the time the words were put in the Constitution. And then they apply the words and the meaning to particular cases or controversies that come up before them. That’s the role of a judiciary. That’s what keeps us from being an oligopoly.
And what do we call oligopolists? Oligarchs. Like you hear the Russian oligarchs? The judges who place their interpretation on the Constitution are oligarchs rather than faithful judges. We need faithful judges who follow the law, not create it. So does that make it a dead Constitution? No. There’s a way to amend the Constitution in the Constitution.
The people propose an amendment. It gets adopted by Congress and then sent to the states. And the states agree. And then the amendment is changed.
We’ve changed it. I think we’re up to 27 amendments at least now. And I’ll give a perfect example. Everybody agrees that women should have the right to vote. And yet women had to persuade men to give them that right because originally only men could vote. But then they passed an amendment and said women have the right to vote. No one ever disputes women’s right to vote because it was adopted by the people.
But Roe was just an opinion of the court. It could be changed by five people and it was. So those who think there should be a right to abortion in the Constitution, they have a duty to go amend the Constitution and convince American people to put that in the Constitution. I don’t think that could ever happen because people who know the truth will protect life. That’s why the right to life is in the Constitution. No group of people, if they all had a choice and an informed vote, would ever vote that it’s legally all right to kill a particular class of human beings. That is evil and it’s wrong. Wow. That was really good. All right.
I hope I’m not being too serious. No, that’s really good. All right. Thank you. So if you could just like your jacket. There you go. Perfect. Thank you.
A little reset. All right. The tie over just a hair. Thank you.
I don’t know why it shifts. I’m not doing anything. It does shift. It’s perfect. Yeah. Yes. Thank you.
Get some water. All right. Thank you. Need to keep you hydrated. I also have sweet tea if you want. That’s an option. Thank you. Okay. So the next question is number five.
Oh, how are we doing on the time? We’re good. 18. 18. Okay. And if you feel me shifting off from looking at the camera, just wave your hand a little behind the camera. It might get my attention on it. Yeah. You’ve been doing really good. All right. Yeah. Thank you.
I got a lot of people praying. Thank you, Lord. That’s good. I can tell.
This is question number five. Up until recently, the Roe v. Wade decision basically got all the attention when people talked about federal abortion policy and Supreme Court ruling. Roe was the reference point. Obviously, the Dobbs decision changed the conversation. But are there other landmark abortion cases that people should know about? Okay. I might put these in two answers, if you don’t mind.
Because there’s two cases, and it’d be kind of long. All right. There is a hidden case on the abortion issue that people absolutely need to know about. That is the Doe v. Bolton case. I represented Sandra Kano, who was Mary Doe of the Doe v. Bolton case, in her legal efforts to reverse that case.
Now, why is it important? It was the companion case to Roe v. Wade, and it created the health exception, which allowed a woman to get abortion on demand up to the moment of birth throughout America. Roe appeared to be somewhat reasonable on its face, having a compromise that most Americans might agree with. In the first trimester under Roe, there was no regulation of abortion allowed, kind of unlimited abortion. In the second trimester, you could regulate abortion to protect the woman’s health. No, excuse me. Yeah. And in the third trimester, this is Roe.
So in the second semester, you could regulate it to protect the woman’s health. In the third trimester, you could even regulate to protect the baby as well, including the court. And Roe even said, after viability, which was about 24 weeks then, you could ban abortion. And viability means the ability to live outside the mother’s womb, albeit with artificial aid. So it sounded like maybe a reasonable compromise. But Roe said, but see Doe v. Bolton. And Doe v.
Bolton was decided the day, same day, and it created a health exception and said, if a mother needs it for her health, then she could get an abortion. Now, that is a very deceptive and appealing lie. I’ll explain a couple of reasons why.
The Doe v. Bolton case was based on fraud. Sondra Kano never wanted an abortion, and yet they purported to take her life and turn it into a health exception. She fled to Oklahoma during the pendency of her own case because under Georgia’s law at the time, they already had a modern therapeutic abortion bill.
And what did that mean? If three judges, excuse me, if three doctors said you needed an abortion for a woman’s health, then she could get an abortion.
So think about it. Georgia law had a health exception. And if you wanted good health care, wouldn’t the opinion of three doctors be better than one doctor, particularly just one doctor who was going to get paid to do the abortion? That’s a biased doctor. But the Supreme Court struck down the three-doctor requirement and said, you know, we would all agree, this is sort of a good paraphrase of the court, that psychological well-being is an aspect of health, and psychological well-being includes happiness. So if a woman would say, I wouldn’t feel good having a baby, I wouldn’t be happy having a baby, I’d be anxious, then her health would have been affected right there. And all she had to do was find one supposed doctor who would perform the abortion, and it was between her and her doctor.
So he would receive payment for performing abortion up to the last minute, and even including partial birth abortion, where three-quarters of the baby is pulled out, and then a cannula suction device pierces the baby’s skull and sucks out the child’s brain. Even that was legal under Dovey Bolton, as horrible as it seems today. So now here’s why this case is important. We asked the Supreme Court, through my clients, the moral outcry petition to make abortion, to reverse abortion, we asked them to reverse Roe, Doe, and Casey. Casey was a case in 1992 where they said, well, maybe Roe was wrongly decided, but women have come to rely upon it, so we’re going to keep Roe for a while, but we reduced it somewhat.
But why do I mention Doe? They did not reverse Doe. They reversed Roe and Casey. They didn’t mention Doe. Well, they mentioned it twice. I think the reason is they thought, well, if there’s no right to an abortion, there’s no right to a health exception. And so they didn’t mention a lot of cases that the case of Dobbs did, in effect, reverse, and I believe they, in effect, reversed Dobbs.
But the women’s health exception, excuse me, yeah, I think they did reverse Doe v. Bolton sub salentio, or without saying it, because it was based on the right to abortion, and they said there is no right to abortion. So I think it’s gone, but the case and the idea of a health exception is very dangerous because it sounds so appealing, but it allows women to be deeply injured. First of all, I cite Sandra Kano’s testimony. She gave this testimony in sworn writing to the Supreme Court in her efforts to have her own case reversed. She said to me, she said to me, Mr. Parker, that case is a doom upon my shoulders when she first called me and told me the story of fraud and deception on the court.
She said, I never wanted an abortion. She was very low income. She had a hard life. Two of her children had been taken away by Child Protective Services. Her mother thought she needed to, she was pregnant again, and some people would think I can’t take care of a child, but she never wanted to kill a child. She fled to Oklahoma to avoid being forced to have an abortion during the pendency of the case, and they said if you don’t say anything, we won’t make you have an abortion. So because she was called Mary Doe, no one knew who she was.
In the oral argument, the judges said, oh, what does it, well, what the state was saying of Georgia trying to defend their law said, we don’t even know who she is. We haven’t done discovery. We haven’t asked her any questions. And the Supreme Court said, well, what does it matter if she’s real or not? We’ll assume these facts are true. And Sandra always used to say, it does matter. I was, I’m a real person is what she’d say.
Well, she’s alive. She’s deceased now.
And it does matter. My life does matter. And that’s another example why Roe and Doe were bad attempts by the judiciary to make a national policy on medicine on two witnesses. Who never even were cross-examined. There was no trial. There was a legal summary judgment. And it’s a terrible way for the courts to make law.
First of all, they shouldn’t be making up law at all. If they’re going to, they ought to do it by the way the legislature does. And have hearings. And talk to lots of witnesses. And let the people decide what the law to be. Instead, the court hears small amounts of evidence. In the Doe and Roe cases, when we asked the Supreme Court to reverse them, we put in over 1,000 testimonies of women hurt by abortion.
So in Roe and Doe cases, there was only one affidavit from each of the women. When we went back asking the court to reverse it at first, we had 1,000 evidence, 1,000 sworn witness statements of women hurt by abortion. And the court decided at the time, this was in 2005 for Norma, not to hear the case. They did not rule against Norma. They said, we don’t want to hear your case. In 2006, they said, we don’t want to take Sandra’s case to reverse their own cases. The court wasn’t ready to do it then.
In the Dobbs case, that reversed Roe and Doe, I believe, without speaking about it, we did put 4,728 legally admissible testimonies into our brief in a drop box. Sandra, who was married Doe of Doe v. Bolton, always used to say to me, it does matter. I’m a real person, and my life should matter. Another case that’s very important that we need to remember is Gonzalez v. Carhart. Now this was a decision of the Supreme Court which upheld the federal law banning partial birth abortion.
There is right now a federal law banning the gruesome procedure where three-quarters of the baby is pulled out of the womb, and the head is left inside, and then a device that sucks out the brain pierces the skull and sucks out the child’s brain. So that the baby technically is dead in the womb instead of being murdered right outside the womb. That was banned. And I believe it was because of the women’s testimony. In the year 2000, when we began to look at abortion, In the year 2000, when we began collecting women’s testimonies of what horrible abortion was for women, the Supreme Court had just struck down 38 state laws banning this partial birth abortion procedure under the Constitution. Well, in 2007, they upheld, forget that, I’m not sure if I got the right word, in the Gonzalez v. Carhartt case, the Supreme Court upheld a federal ban on partial birth abortion.
And in that case, they said, for the first time in history, some women come to regret aborting the infant life they once created and sustained. See brief of Kano et al. Kano is Mary Doe of Dovey Bolton. And et al.
was 180 women hurt by abortion. So what it was, they’re saying, some women come to regret aborting the infant life they once created and sustained before they’d always called it fetus or potential life. And they said, page 22 to 23 of the brief.
And what was on that page? The testimonies of women hurt by abortion. Suicide attempts. Drug abuse. Allowing men to abuse them because they felt worthless as child murderers. These are the women’s own testimonies. Dreams of bloody babies at the foot of their bed.
This is what convinced the court that it was an infant life. And then the court said, severe depression and loss of esteem can follow. And they cited the same pages. So an important case to remember is Gonzalez v. Carhartt, which told women, some women come to regret aborting it. The child, excuse me. Some women come to regret aborting the infant life they once created and sustained.
Severe depression and loss of esteem can follow. And do you know what else Justice Ginsburg said in that case? She wrote a dissent. She would have allowed partial birth abortion to continue. But she did say in that, quote, the majority who upheld, who struck down the law, the majority is surely right that abortion is a difficult and painful decision for most women. So the Supreme Court unanimously said in that case that abortion is a difficult and painful decision. The majority said it was a difficult and painful moral decision.
The amoral Ruth Bader Ginsburg writing for the four justices who dissented said it was difficult and painful. She left out the word moral. She didn’t think it was immoral to kill the baby almost at the moment of birth. But all nine justices said that. So we need to remember that case and tell women that the United States Supreme Court, all nine members of the court, when they looked at the evidence of abortion and how it affected women said it’s a difficult and painful moral decision or a difficult and painful decision if you don’t want to look at morality. And then the other court case on that topic is Planned Parenthood v. Casey. The Supreme Court did not reverse Roe in that case in 1992, but they reduced it from a fundamental right, which requires strict scrutiny and meaning almost no restrictions allowed, to a mid-level right where the states were allowed to restrict abortion somewhat to protect women or to protect life, but you couldn’t have an undue burden.
And here’s what they said in that case. In Planned Parenthood v. Casey, the Supreme Court said we have to uphold informed consent, otherwise women could suffer devastating psychological consequences. So the Supreme Court has said abortion can have devastating psychological consequences to women and it’s a difficult and painful moral or difficult and painful decision. Does the abortion industry tell women that when they get them to sign up the form? Absolutely not. The abortion industry is one of the most deceptive and evil industries in America today. And this, as I speak today, shortly after, about a year after Dobbs, there are billions of dollars worth of damaged lawsuits that need to be brought against the abortion industry.
And yet we’re in the early days of this litigation, but it’s like the early days of tobacco litigation. Some people sued for the damages to their lungs and the cancer that was caused, and they lost. There’ll be lawsuits that lose, but eventually the truth came out. At the time, most doctors smoked. Most doctors believe in abortion now. At the time, the scientific evidence was being suppressed. It’s being suppressed right now by the media and the abortion industry.
I call it an industry because it’s for profit. And they make huge profits and they lie to women. I’ll just give you one example. They say, 10 minutes, you’ll never have to think about it again. This is one of my ladies, my witnesses from Georgia, my clients. She said, they told me, 10 minutes, you’ll never have to think about it again. That lady lied to me, she said, because there’s not a day go by I haven’t thought about the death of my child, what that child would be like now, and what am I like if that’s what I would do to my own child.
Okay, so whenever you’re ready, go ahead and continue on. Oh, that was the door closing itself. There can never be a health exception allowed as just a broad health exception. But today, if you poll people, most people think there ought to be rape, incest, and health of the mother exceptions. Incest is the easiest to explain why we don’t need that. That means someone in the family is abusing the young woman. And you’re simply empowering the abuser to continue the incest when you don’t have the girl get pregnant and then go to a doctor for care.
Because if a 14-year-old girl is pregnant, some man ought to go to jail. But if you take her to an abortionist, and the baby and the evidence is destroyed, and she’s just told to say, my boyfriend did it or something, the abuse continues. The health of the mother, in a broad sense, can never be a true exception because abortion always hurts even the mother. And the Supreme Court of the United States has said abortion can cause devastating psychological consequences to women. They said that in Planned Parenthood v. Casey, even before they reversed Roe v. Wade. They also said that abortion causes severe depression and loss of a seam because some women come to regret aborting the infant life they once created and sustained.
They said that in Gonzales v. Carhartt. And Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg said, abortion is a difficult and painful decision for most women. That was Ruth Bader Ginsburg, a strong advocate for abortion. Why is it difficult and painful? It’s because it’s not just a mass of tissue. No woman has a difficult and painful decision if she’s going to remove a wart, or remove an appendix, or her tonsils, or an eye tag on her skin, or wrinkles or something that truly just does remove some tissue from the body.
It’s painful and difficult, and that can produce deep psychological damage to many, most women. It’s hard to know everyone, but most women know that this is a child or a potential life. But there’s guilt and shame and depression that comes to the woman. And of course, in a successful abortion, every child dies. That was really good. Thank you for sharing that. Question number six.
Some say that abortion was legal in the U.S. until religious activists started getting involved through the American Medical Association around 1892. Let’s not get into that. I don’t know much about the history.
No, that’s fine. We’ll skip that one. I have not done a study of that. Number seven is… Well, if you want a short answer to me, let me think it through. I’ll give you a short answer to that one, because I don’t know much. My problem on the other is I could talk forever about Norma and Sondra and the case.
I know a lot. I just wrote a book on it. Here’s a question if you’d like to.
Number six there. If you want to answer it, that’s good, but if not, we can… Yeah, no pressure. All right. I think I have something I can contribute on that. All right. Yes, whenever you’re ready. All right.
Some people think that it was recent history that made abortion illegal in America, but abortion has been illegal in the common law of the founding of America. The Fifth Amendment, which was part of the Bill of Rights, protects the right to life. No person shall be deprived of life without due process of law. Why did they put that in the Bill of Rights? Because the Constitution did not have, as it was drafted at the Convention, an express protection for life. Probably because most of the founders didn’t think it was necessary. Of course government was supposed to protect life.
The Declaration of Independence said we had these certain inalienable rights from our Creator that government couldn’t take away. Among these was the right to life. So the first reason we were fighting the war for independence was because we had the right to life and government is supposed to protect life. So there were certain things, though, that were so important, after the Constitutional Convention, people said, we’ve got to put more protection for these things into the Constitution, and it became the first ten, the Bill of Rights. And that’s why they put in, no person shall be deprived of life. Now let’s just look at the word life. What did it mean to the people who wrote and the people who ratified the Constitution?
And said, this is the law we are going to be under. What does life mean? Well, if you’d asked anybody at that time, look at a pregnant woman walking down the street, and there were lots of pregnant women then. Being pregnant is a natural condition. Most women will be pregnant at some phase of their life. It’s not a sickness, it’s not a disease. It’s a natural condition.
And unless you interrupt the natural function, the child will be born a lot. The child will be born alive. So going back to the time period, if you’d said, hey, is that a human? Well, of course. Is there a human life inside her? And they’d have said, of course. In fact, their phrase for being pregnant was, with child.
We have dehumanized it to talk about pregnancy. They talked about, I’m with child. And a child is someone worthy of legal protection. So the laws that were back there did criminalize it. It’s been criminalized. Dobbs particularly went through the history, an excellent legal analysis, saying that everybody understood that the child in the womb was protected by law, and that it was a crime to kill a child before birth. There is a right to life in the Constitution, and that must protect all human life.
Wow, that was good. Thank you. All right, would you check the door to see if John’s out there? Oh, yeah. If he’s not, we’ll just go ahead and do the next one. If he is, we’ll let him in. Okay, so while we’re waiting for that, the next question we’ll be doing is, well, I’ll let you read it.
I’ll let you read it. It’s number 7, so it might be easier. Okay. All right. I’m going to swap out my headset. Okay. Oh, do you need my headset, or no?
I found my headset. I thought I’d bring it, but I didn’t. And that doesn’t show up over there, if I leave those there. So this is the personhood movement. All right, good, good, good. Okay, so this is question 7. Yeah, in the 70s and 80s, legislators tried and failed to pass a personhood amendment.
Would you explain that strategy, what came of it, and whether it’s still an option? Oh, and, um… Did you hear that, hmm? I was wondering if John was out there or not, but I think we’re good. Yeah, so it’s audio and video writing? Yes. Give me one sec.
I’m just going to sort this out. Oh, okay. We’ll do it fast. You don’t have to clap. It’s been recording. Oh, it’s the recording. You’re plugging your headphones in. Okay. So yes, personhood amendment.
Would you explain the strategy, what came of it, and whether it’s still an option, whenever you’re ready? Yeah, that’s good. And it’s good for you to read them to me. So, in the 70s and 80s, and even more recently than that, there’s been an attempt to get personhood amendments added to state constitutions. And that’s based on the language in the Constitution that says no person shall be deprived of life without due process of law. Excuse me. Why have personhood amendments generally failed?
I believe because they’re only focusing on one aspect of the problem. And that’s the problem for the child in the womb who is killed. But there are more people involved in the situation than just the child. There is the mother as well. And we have to address the mother and her needs and concerns. But I will talk about life first, and then I want to talk about the mother. I want to talk about the mother first.
So, we have to address the mother’s concern. That’s why it’s absolutely important to point out that abortion damages mothers. And since 1999, there is a new legal phenomenon throughout the United States called the Safe Haven Movement, which is a movement that was not available in the 70s and 80s. It wasn’t available to Roe, but it is something that I think will end the abortion wars in America. Under the Safe Haven Law in all 50 states, every state has one, no woman has to parent a child if she does not want to parent a child or she feels she cannot parent a child for whatever reason. So that if you do ban abortion today, you can still say to the woman, don’t kill your baby, don’t hurt yourself, give us the child through the Safe Haven Law and we’ll eliminate all burden of 18 years of parenting obligation for you. Under Safe Haven, a woman can safely relinquish her child at a designated place, usually a hospital or fire station, within a certain period of time after birth, usually 30, 60, or 90 days.
And she is free of all parental obligation. So what is the Safe Haven like for the woman? Number one, it’s free unlike abortion. So instead of trying to find $800 and going and buying the two abortion pills in another state, she can simply wait. In every state, what are her expenses? What is the burden? Mostly the expense is medical care. And if you’re a low-income woman, in every single state in America, Medicaid will pay all of your prenatal care, all of your delivery care, and postpartum care.
So you are covered through the expenses of pregnancy. In addition, there are many social service agencies, public and private, that will help you with food and clothing and things like that. But you have a place to stay as a woman when you’re pregnant. Wherever you’re staying, the baby’s staying. Whatever you’re eating, the baby’s eating. So the baby and you are taking care. But the medical care is large.
Now, in exchange for some months of pregnancy, which is serious to the woman, we are giving her, as a society, relief from 18 years of obligation for parenting and expense and time and obligation. So this is the social compact that will end the abortion wares.
Don’t kill a baby. Don’t hurt yourself. Please. We want to have compassion for you because the Supreme Court has said it’s devastating psychological consequences. Women can suffer for decades from the trauma of abortion. Don’t let that happen to you. Give us the baby through a government safety net called the Safe Haven Law and no cost to you.
You can walk out of the hospital the day the baby’s born and say, I want to safe haven my baby. They’ll take care of the baby. So what will happen to those children? Will they be in foster care?
Neglected and perhaps? No. There are 1 to 2 million families every year in America waiting to adopt newborn children. This is a scientific fact and the homes will be carefully vetted and the state will simply then take the safe haven baby to the next family waiting in line and say, we have a safe haven baby for you. And it will be taken to the carefully vetted loving homes. So it’s the love, love, love solution. Don’t hurt the baby.
Don’t hurt the mother. Give the baby to the state and we’ll give them the loving homes waiting to adopt a newborn baby. Thank you. You don’t want to listen to my lectures either. That’s alright. We’ll rebuke them in a minute.
I like your lectures. Thank you. Oh, are we recording still? We’re good. Then what do we got on time on the video? Okay, perfect. Let’s see, this is question number 8.
Democrats seem to be united in the pro-choice camp and Republicans in the pro-life camp. Is that correct? And how have the parties views on abortion evolved over the years, say from 1972 forward? Political views on abortion have shifted over time. Bill Clinton campaigned on making abortion safe, legal and rare. Today the Democratic Party is abortion forever, abortion forever. It’s a sacred right of a woman.
The Republican Party has changed also. It’s been more pro-life. And I believe that in 1994 one of the reasons the Republicans took control of Congress for the first time in 40 years was because they had become the party of pro-life, whereas the Democratic Party used to be the party of the working man and anti-communism and pro-God. The Democratic Party has shifted to being pro-death, pro- communism or pro-socialism, pro-government control of property, whatever you want to call that, that’s socialism or communism depending on what you want to call it. And pro- sort of anti-God. They boo God at one of their conventions. And so I believe the Republican Party has become the majority party and particularly in 1994 after Clinton got elected because they were more private property free market.
oriented, which is part of the Judeo-Christian view of the law. Two of the Ten Commandments deal with private property. Thou shalt not steal and thou shalt not covet your neighbor’s goods. When you look at people who have more money than you and you want to take their property and distribute it to everybody else, that’s envy, that’s greed, that’s a sin under the Judeo-Christian view of the law. And killing a human being is a sin as well as everybody just says, well, it ought to be against the law to kill somebody. Most people would agree with that. And the question is the Democratic Party now believes abortion is a fundamental right.
The Republican Party is now moving towards believing that it is a crime against humanity. And a crime against humanity occurs when the government withdraws legal protection from a class of human beings resulting in severe deprivation of rights including death. So now one is the party of life, one is the party of death. Now I say that in the generality as to both parties. There can be people in both sides who have different views. But if you view just the history of America, that’s where we are today. I want to say one more thing.
On the political scene too, I’ve said that the segregationists opposed the Brown v. Board of Education. And I don’t usually say this but since I’m responding to a political question, it was the Democrats who were the most vocal in protecting segregation. They were the most resistant of the Brown v. Board of Education. Democrat George Wallace stood in the courthouse door and said no one’s coming in here and these little black children can’t come in. And today it’s the Democrats who are most vociferous in protecting abortion, this crime against humanity, and continuing to flout their desire not to follow a Supreme Court decision just like the Democrats did not follow Brown v.
Board of Education. And it was the Republican Party who helped lead the way, first of all, to entering slavery through the Civil War. Lincoln was a Republican. The Republican Party were called radical Republicans because they were willing to upend the status quo of slavery. Today it’s the Democratic Party who are upholding the status quo of the crime against humanity, against abortion. And it was the Democrats who fought against segregation in the South. And the Republicans, I’m personally from Texas and you go into the Texas capitol, the first African Americans in the Texas legislature were Republican African Americans after the Civil War.
And sadly then, when the Republicans stopped military reconstruction of the South, then the Democrats got control of the political South again and instituted Jim Crow and segregationism. And it wasn’t until the Supreme Court in 1954 said we’re going to stop that that we eventually ended it. And I think Dobbs’ case will eventually end abortion in America. Just as they said about slavery, you can’t have a country that’s half slave and half free. You can’t have a country that’s half for killing human beings and half that says it’s okay to kill this type of human being. So this is question number nine. How has the wider abortion debate in America evolved or changed in the last 50 years or so?
And also in the last 5 to 10 years? One of the ways I think the abortion discussion in America has changed is moving from just an emphasis on the child to an emphasis on the child and abortion’s effect on women. It ought to be enough to stop abortion that it is the killing of a human being. And the pro-life movement really focused on that a lot in the early phases because the Supreme Court was saying, well it’s not a human, or actually what the Supreme Court said in 1973 was, at this state in the development of man’s knowledge, we do not know when life begins. Which was kind of untrue at the time, but today of course we absolutely know that life begins at conception when the sperm and the egg come together. There is a human life. And it’s alive.
Even the abortionists will admit something is alive in the child. After the abortion, there’s nothing alive. Something has been deprived of life. And the 14th Amendment says no person shall be deprived of life. So life has been dead. But the big evolution was the introduction and the realization that abortion also hurts women. I’ve often said the Supreme Court possibly could not know that abortion would be so damaging to women.
We think of it as freedom. That’s the lie. Well how can freedom be bad? But when you participate in the death of another human being, which most people haven’t done, so most people don’t know what it’s like to kill another human being. And let me say that I represent thousands of women injured by abortion who’ve given us their legally admissible written testimony. Everything I know about what abortion does to women comes from women who’ve had abortions. Wouldn’t they be the best witnesses as to what abortion does to women?
We need to listen to those women in America. And what the women tell us is that abortion can cause a variety of decades-long trauma. And the trauma starts at different times for women. Some, they know as soon as it happens, oh my God, what have I done?
I’ve killed my child. And they begin to sense it right away and feel grief. And that can produce sexual abuse, meaning they allow men to abuse them because they feel worthless, like a murderer. These are the women’s own words. They begin to feel that they can’t make good decisions. Some of them drop out of college. And the things that they were going to try to do so that they needed an abortion to stay in college, they end up dropping out of college because of the pain and the trauma and the spiral downward, which can eventually lead to suicide and suicidal thoughts.
The Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals has upheld a law in South Dakota that required the abortionist to tell women that you can have an increased risk of depression and suicide and suicidal thoughts if you have an abortion. The abortionist didn’t want to tell them that. This is part of the information that the abortion industry hides from women and doesn’t tell them, that their risk of depression and suicide will go up. Planned Parenthood brought the lawsuit. And the Eighth Circuit looked at the scientific evidence and said, there’s plenty of scientific evidence to prove this. Therefore, it’s appropriate for the state, even under Roe v. Wade, the woman can still have the abortion, but it’s certainly proper for a state to tell her what the risks are.
But the abortion industry doesn’t want to tell her. It’s safe. No legal procedure is safer, they say, but it’s not true. So that’s how the debate has changed. I believe that Norma and Sondra, Roe and Doe, had a part in playing in that in the year 2000 when we began to collect testimonies of women hurt by abortion. It was to help Sondra and Norma, Roe and Doe, or Doe and Roe actually, help them reverse their own cases. They want to go back to the Supreme Court.
And I was their lawyer at the time and I knew that the pro-life movement had been showing it’s a life, but that wasn’t enough. And I just felt that if you went and looked for the evidence, the evidence would be there that abortion hurts women. Because that law that thou shalt not murder is actually written on people’s hearts. Thank God for society that it’s there or there would be more killing and robbing and stealing and raping. But there is a conscience. There’s a law written on people’s hearts. When you transgress that law, you know it.
You either have to defend and rationalize it or you have to eventually, I believe, repent and turn to God and ask him to forgive you of your sins. So we began to collect the testimonies of women hurt by abortion. I actually at the time didn’t know any women who had abortions or so I thought. In fact, when I talked to my own Sunday school class and told them I was going to start on this project and I needed testimonies of women hurt by abortion, three women in my own class of 21 people came up afterwards and told me that they’d had abortions. It was devastating for them and they would be happy to give me their testimonies. So the first three testimonies came from inside the church. Abortion is a common elective procedure and women in both churches and outside churches have had abortions.
And the trauma is there whether you’re a religious or non-religious person. And so that’s one way I think the language has changed quite a bit. Now we talk about helping the child and the woman. And then another major change occurred in 1999 when the first safe haven law in America was passed in Texas under George W. Bush. And he called it the Baby Moses Law.
Think about Baby Moses. He was a victim of a genocide. They wanted to kill all the baby males because they didn’t want the baby males. They were willing to keep Jewish women babies but they didn’t want any male babies. So they deprived legal protection from a class of human beings which is a crime against humanity. And yet the first safe haven law in Texas said a woman can release her child at a hospital or fire station within 60 days of birth in Texas at no cost, totally free, no legal procedure, no adoption, no termination of parental rights.
We’ll just help you. Give us your baby.
And that was the first one. By 2016 all 50 states have them including New York, California, Hawaii, whatever pro-abortion state you can think of. They also say there are no legally unwanted babies in America anymore. Abortion was to handle the problem what do I do with an unwanted baby? What do I do with an unwanted baby? It’s not a medical decision. You’re not sick if you’re pregnant.
In most of the normal circumstances obviously there can be complications but we’re talking about the normal most situations. And why we had abortion wasn’t to handle medical problems. It was to handle this problem. How do I take care of the baby? I don’t have the strength to take care of a baby. Or in some cases I don’t want to take a baby at this stage in my life. Well the safe haven law didn’t exist and it’s now the third major argument that the pro-life movement is making.
Don’t kill the baby. Don’t hurt yourself. Give us the baby as a society and what will happen to those children? They’ll be given to the loving homes that have been carefully vetted by the state for adoption. And adoption is a far better alternative for everyone in a society than killing the child, letting the woman suffer for decades. That’s cruel compassion. That’s not helping women.
That’s cruel compassion to say okay it’s a problem for all of us. You take care of the problem. It might be a problem for the man. He doesn’t want to be a father. It might be a problem for the parents in a situation they don’t want their daughter to be pregnant. Sometimes it’s the woman herself saying I don’t want to be pregnant but the industry doesn’t tell her about the damage that can last for decades. So let’s stop the cruel compassion and move to what we call the moral outcry petition movement.
How’s the moral way to have compassion and help? Justice for the child. Don’t kill a human being just because they’re inconvenient or even if it’s a serious reason. Don’t hurt yourself. Mercy for the mother and then what will happen to the children? Give them to the loving homes waiting to adopt a child. That I think is what’s going to make abortion as illegal and unthinkable today as slavery and segregation.
We don’t have exceptions for slavery even though you might make an excuse somewhere where somebody might need a slave. Maybe they’re severely handicapped and they ought to have a slave.
That’s crazy talk isn’t it? No exceptions for slavery. No exceptions for segregation. No exceptions for abortion when we’re now as a society willing to take the child. There are no unwanted children legally left in America. The law says we will take them in all 50 states. Good. Thank you so much for sharing on that.
Isaac is the typing picking up or no? Okay good. I heard a door open. Oh that was the door. Okay. When you looked I was like. It’s fine though.
It’s not even audible. I just I caught it because I’m paying attention to that. Yeah. I think we’re in good shape. I think the distraction noises are really good right now. Very low distraction noise. Absolutely. Okay. All right.
Well that was really good. Thank you. Thank you. Your tie looks good. All right. Actually if you could redo your jacket. Thank you.
Do you need some water? No I’ve got a little cough drop in. I guess it makes it good. Okay. Okay so next question is number. Oh we just started so we’re good on battery or time. There’s no doubt that in terms of money resources the pro-death side or pro-abortion side vastly outweighs and outnumbers and outspends the pro-life side.
And part of that is because they’re making a profit on every abortion that they do. Planned Parenthood has billions of dollars in the bank and receives billions of dollars from state and federal governments and donations from people who think they’re doing a good job. So we’re vastly outnumbered but I want to just say for the record that in my opinion Planned Parenthood is the most effective racist organization in American history. Far more effective at killing African-Americans than the Klan was ever hoped to be. Far more than any lynchings in America. The Planned Parenthood has effectively killed and reduced the African-American population by killing black children in the womb through abortion. Now why do I say they’re racist and what evidence do I have for that?
Three lines of evidence. First of all their founding history.
Margaret Sanger was a racist. There’s a movie called Mafa 21 that very well documents her racist eugenics past. She considered African-Americans an inferior race and wanted to contracept them so that they wouldn’t breed. In fact now they’ve admitted that and they’ve taken the name Margaret Sanger off the street in front of their national headquarters. So this is admitted racism in their past. Number two is the disproportionate impact of their actions. They may claim to be neutral but actually in the current age they’re actually saying that abortion disproportionately helps black women by killing their children.
The way to eliminate poverty is not to eliminate poor people. It’s to help them come to a better way of society. But African-Americans make up about 10% of the population and they make up 30% of the abortions. So they’re no longer the largest minority population in America partly because they abort their own children more than Hispanics who have risen as the major minority population. So number one is history. Number two is disproportionate impact. And the third is current evidence of racism.
They’ve been sued by their own employees for being a racist organization in the last couple of years. So their own employees are willing to go to court to say that this is a racist organization today. And the president of Planned Parenthood wrote an op-ed for the New York Times in which she admitted their racist past. And she also admitted that they had taken advantage of Puerto Rican women in developing the pill, the contraceptive pill, by not fully telling them about the risk of the procedure and the risk of the thing and experimenting on them. They didn’t know what the right dose was so they gave some women a super high dose. Others might be a low dose. Sometimes they just experimented on them because they needed human subjects and they felt that stopping pregnancy was so important it was worth killing some people or severely injuring them.
That kind of utilitarian philosophy needs to be rejected by every person of goodwill and good moral character. That’s a good answer. Thank you for sharing that. Thank you. This is question number eleven. What are some of the most effective legal arguments for abortion? And then also the same question for against abortion.
I can’t think of any really good effective legal arguments for abortion. But I guess the one that was effective in creating Roe v. Wade in a sense was first an abandonment of the proper role of judges to interpret the constitution as it is written rather than making it a living constitution according to the will of the judges. What effectively created Roe was the judges saying the constitution means what we say it means not what the people of the United States meant when they wrote and ratified their constitution. They went away from the consent of the governed and you had a small group of people with the power to do it. And that is still very effective around the world today. Internationally many state courts are finding a right to abortion in documents that never intended for there to be abortion.
So a small minority of lawyers controls the population who then follow what they think of as the law. To a faithful judge the law is what the people said it is. To an illicit oligarch judge it’s what I say it means. And the Democratic Party basically adopted the law is what the judges say and we control who the judges are. That’s why after Dobbs they’re talking about packing the court because we want judges who will say what we want the law to be because we can never get some of this stuff passed through the majority of the people. So that’s number one effective. Then the number two effective probably is autonomy.
You can do anything you want to do. And on the front of the Supreme Court it says equal justice under law and that should protect the children in the womb. That’s pretty noisy even I can hear that. It’s really noisy. Hey John do you think you can talk to them please? Yeah it’s bleeding through. We’ll start with that number two again.
I was hoping that I could not hear it but as soon as he gave like a second break it was like. That goes really well in that hallway. The same one from yesterday. Alright let’s pick it back up on number two and we’re still recording we’re good right Mario? Rolling? Oh yeah we got time let’s do it. Okay so yeah we’ll go ahead and pick it back up at number two the autonomy. Alright. So the second most effective argument that they had is I should be able to do what I want with my own body, my body, my choice.
But the clear defect on that argument in the simple way is it’s not your body alone inside your body is another person. The easiest way to show that is the mother is always a woman but half of the children in the room are men or males. And so it’s not your body you’re a female there’s a male body inside of you. Clearly not the same thing. And DNA testing will show if you take a sample from the woman’s arm or cheek and you take a sample from the child in the womb. You send these samples to a DNA lab and say what are these? They’ll both come back human.
One will be female, one will be male and even if it’s two females because you have a girl child in you. They’ll say this is two different human beings. That’s not a frog in the woman, it’s not a lizard in the woman, it’s not some pre-human creature. Two human beings. DNA testing shows that. And so justice in the front of the court above the door post it says equal justice under law. Equal justice should protect all humans.
We all believe in human rights now. And when does life begin? In the beginning. When does life begin? When the sperm and the egg come together. That’s a scientific fact shown in many embryology textbooks and everything else. That sounded like rolling a cart maybe.
It might be above us or next to us. Yeah, I’ll just go back to human life. We all believe in human rights. I think I knew where I was. We all believe in human rights. Well, when does human rights begin? They begin when life begins.
When does human life begin? At the beginning. If you ask any scientist, embryologist, geneticist, when life begins? When human life begins, it’s when the sperm and the egg come together and there’s a single cell. But that single cell has everything in it to go all the way to death at 98 or 102 years old. It’s the same human from beginning to end. And human rights begin when human life begins. Perfect. Oh, but you wanted the most effective arguments for us.
And then what are some of the most effective legal arguments that are against abortion? Okay. Well, let’s wait until they stop talking.
Okay, I guess we’re good. There’s someone right out the door.
Is that the clinic crew? They’re right over here. I just thought, like, they’re right in front of our door, whoever’s out there.
Okay, maybe we’re okay. Okay, let’s go ahead and go for it. I think there’s four of the most effective legal arguments for making abortion illegal in all 50 states. The first one is that there is a right to life in the Constitution. We do not need an amendment to the Constitution because there is a right to life. In fact, I think it’s the only right that’s in there twice. The Fifth Amendment, which was passed in about 1780s as an amendment to the Constitution, the Fifth Amendment says no person shall be deprived of life without due process of law.
And the Fourteenth Amendment, passed after the Civil War, says no person shall be deprived of life. We’ve had a focus on person, but I think the more effective argument is to focus on life. When does human life begin? And is a human alive? Is there a human organism alive in the woman or even outside the woman? Because in the Dobbs case, I represented the first formerly frozen human embryo to ever file a brief in the Supreme Court.
Her name was Hannah S. I represented her mother and her, and S was just the initial of her last name. But Hannah was conceived in vitro fertilization. The sperm and the egg came together outside a mother’s womb in a Petri dish. And she was frozen for two years before being adopted by another woman who placed her in her womb, and then she was born alive. But she was alive while she was frozen. She didn’t die and come back to life when she was adopted.
And in Roe v. Wade, the court said after viability, which is the ability to live outside the womb, albeit with artificial aid, the states could ban abortion. And so she was alive outside the mother’s womb at the one-cell phase, at the two-cell phase, at the three-cell phase. And in the Dobbs brief, we put a picture of her three-cell stage development. The other that’s an amazing thing about that is with in vitro fertilization, they can tell the sex of the baby at about six or seven cells. It is not a social construct. You are male or female from the moment of conception.
And so that’s just another little scientific fact on one of the controversies of the day. But in my briefs, I put that in there, and the doctors have labeled them as male and female, not genetically assigned at birth, but assigned by science and by God’s design, in my opinion. Or if you believe it’s evolution, it’s the design designed to make us humans. But it doesn’t start when people start discussing what your sex is. It starts at the moment of human life. So the first effective argument is there’s a right to life in the Constitution, and I believe with historical analysis, that’ll be proven to be true. The second most effective argument is that abortion hurts women.
There is legal evidence, massive amounts of it, and massive admissions by the Supreme Court that abortion hurts women. The third, I think, is that abortion is a crime against humanity. A crime against humanity is when the government withdraws legal protection from a class of human beings, resulting in severe deprivation, including death. So if you think about it, what are some examples in history that you can think of where a group of people have been denied legal protection because of their status? Most people think of the Holocaust, for example. We did not use the Holocaust in our example to the Supreme Court initially because that really is not something the Supreme Court did. We used the argument that abortion is like slavery, which was attempted to be abolished in the U.S. Constitution. Our framers didn’t want slavery.
It was already existing. For example, the Constitution says that the slave trade would be abolished in 1807. They wanted to gradually phase it out, but they wanted to abolish it. Unfortunately, they thought if the slave trade was abolished, there would be no more slaves. But unfortunately, the slave population grew. Cotton gin was invented. It became very profitable to use human beings as slaves, and it took a civil war.
But before the civil war, the U.S. Supreme Court had the Dred Scott decision, which said, and I’m quoting the Supreme Court. I even hate to say this, but this is history. I don’t like the words coming out of my mouth. African Americans are an inferior race, and they are not entitled to any legal protection. And everyone knew that at the time. It’s a paraphrase of what the Supreme Court said in the horrible decision.
Many people think that that horrible decision led to the civil war because it said it’s the Constitution and it can’t be changed. It took a civil war, and then after the civil war, the 13th Amendment eliminated slavery, and the 14th Amendment eliminated or gave due process and equal protection rights to all humans. So we had that, and then the Supreme Court in 1896 said, oh, you’re supposed to get equal protection, but you know those African Americans, we’re just going to give them separate but equal rights. And again, that was a crime against humanity.
That was segregation. And in the Dobbs case, that was one of the arguments made against abortion and against Roe. Justice Alito asked the Solicitor General of the United States, Elizabeth Prolegar, was Plessy v. Ferguson wrong from the day? Justice Alito asked the Solicitor General of the United States, Elizabeth Prolegar, was Plessy v. Ferguson wrong when it was decided? Now Plessy had said separate but equal was okay for African Americans.
So today, of course, Amy had to say, yes, Your Honor, Plessy was wrong the day it was decided. So she was saying segregation was wrong the day it was decided. Then he asked her, well, if someone had come along eight years later and asked us to reverse Plessy, should we have reversed it? And then she started hemming and hawing and say, well, no, not necessarily, Your Honor, and everything, because they were trying to make the argument that Roe was super-settled law, such a magnificent, long-lasting precedent of the Supreme Court that no court could overturn it. But, of course, we know that’s wrong.
And in 1954, the Supreme Court reversed Plessy v. Ferguson. So the fact that abortion is a crime against humanity, like slavery, like segregation, like the Holocaust, is an important argument. And, in fact, for the record of the history, I just want to say this, that I was also blessed to be able to represent the Jewish Pro-Life Federation and several other rabbis in the Dobbs case in a brief by the Jewish Pro-Life Federation which said that abortion was a crime against humanity and that as Jews, they knew what a Holocaust or a genocide looked like and that Judaism protected life from the moment of conception. Judaism, their brief said, was the first religion to outlaw child sacrifice. And as odd and strange and evil as this sounds, the Satanists in America are now filing legal documents saying that they have a right to child sacrifice and that abortion is a ritual for them. And this is just blatant right out in the open in the legal documents.
It was a little bit more hidden in the Louisiana Hospital admitting privileges case called June Medical, which was the high-water mark of abortion in America when, in 2020, the Supreme Court struck down a Louisiana law which just required hospital admitting privileges. One of the risks to women of abortion is that uterus will be punctured or the uterus or the colon, some part of the body will be punctured by the scalpel. And so Louisiana said, if you’re going to cause bleeding and hemorrhaging and your patient has to go to the hospital, you, if you’re a doctor, ought to have hospital admitting privileges so you can take care of your client. But the abortion industry said, no, that slows down the production line too much. We can’t have that at all. It would decrease our profits and it’s unnecessary. Just let the ER doctor handle the woman.
We don’t need to talk with her. We don’t need to help her. And that law was upheld by the Supreme Court. And in that brief, for the first time, I saw witches and druids and pagan priestesses of ISIS, the goddess ISIS, filing briefs arguing for abortion. They were on a brief of so-called bioethicists, and some of them were normal professors and things, but some of them were pagan priestesses, priestesses of ISIS, not the criminal terrorists killing people in Syria, but ISIS, the goddess of some kind in their religion who wanted child sacrifice. So abortion is a crime against humanity. It is child sacrifice, according to many people’s religions, and that also should be outlawed in America because we don’t allow one religion to kill other people for the benefit of that religion.
That’s why Christianity is a life-affirming decision, and the Judeo-Christian tradition is that all life is sacred, all life is worthy of protection, regardless of your creed, regardless of your ethnicity, your background, African-Americans, Anglo-Americans, Asian-Americans, we’re all equal before the law, and that’s based on our Judeo-Christian tradition. A pagan tradition is if you’re weak and powerless, you can be sacrificed for either the good of the person who has power over you, like a slave owner or a dictator or a king, or for the good of the state, as you might be in a communist dictatorship. China committed one of the worst genocides or crimes in the world by limiting birth to one per family, which required forced abortions and sterilization of women because, again, birth is a natural thing. If you want to have a natural, environmental-friendly solution to life, when men and women have sex, babies are born. It’s the natural, and again, either you believe in creation, as I do, it’s the design of creation. If you believe in evolution, then it’s designed to make us prosper as a species, and so it’s a crime against humanity. So in summary, I think the best arguments are that there’s a right to life in the Constitution, abortion hurts women, it’s a crime against humanity, and the fourth legal argument is legally now there are no unwanted children in America because as a matter of law, every state has a legal statute called the Safe Haven Law that says don’t kill your child, don’t criminally abandon your child.
If you can’t take care of a child, if your life is in a desperate situation, we want to help you. If you just don’t want a child, you want to go to college, you want to dance and be in the ballet, whatever you want to do, you can define the meaning of existence for yourself. That is freedom in America without killing a human being. Surrender your child to us, either at the moment of birth when you walk out of the hospital or within a certain period of time after birth. Bring the child back to a hospital or fire station, usually, and we will take the baby for free. You don’t have to pay anything, unlike abortion. It’s not disproportionate impact, killing one minority group over another.
It’s the woman’s choice completely. She’s free to make it. No adoption process, no termination of parental rights, just surrender the baby. So those are the four legal arguments that I think change the whole debate and will lead to making abortion illegal and unthinkable in America at some point. Perfect. Thank you so much for answering that. That was really good.
Would you like any water? Are you okay? I will take a drink, thank you. Thank you. Okay, the next question is number 12. Explain the abortion choice argument, my body, my choice. Is this bodily autonomy, bodily sovereignty, and is it a sound argument?
All right, I’ll do this quickly. So bodily autonomy or bodily sovereignty. And the distinction I make, this is how it translates in legal terms. I know in philosophy and ethics, that’s a distinction similar to, if you have bodily sovereignty, you can do whatever you want with your body, even kill someone. You can just kill people if you have sovereignty. Bodily autonomy is usually you have legal rights over your body, it’s only your body that you have rights over, over anybody else’s body. So sovereignty would be like if you think of a monarchy, sovereign.
They can do what they want. That’s not quite how we use the word autonomy in that sense. So there’s a critical distinction there. Now, I don’t know if that’s how the terms translate in legal terminology, but this isn’t like Potter, Bethesda, where the father can do whatever he wants with his kids, sell them off to slavery and abuse them if he wants. That’s a sovereignty status. But autonomy is the status that we normally grant. Thank you.
I’ll read it to you one more time. Explain the abortion choice argument.
My body, my choice. Is this bodily autonomy, bodily sovereignty, and is it a sound argument? All right. My body, my choice. That’s the chant I’ve heard at many pro-life or pro-abortion demonstrations. When the two are together, particularly, you’ll hear the other side chanting, my body, my choice, or get your hands off my body. In fact, in the Dobbs case on the day of oral argument, they were chanting in one sense the real embodiment of this, abortion pill forever, abortion pill forever.
And I think four women were saying, we’re going to take the pill now. So would they be changing their body? Is it alone their body? No, the first abortion pill kills the child in the womb. They were literally doing child sacrifice on the steps of the Supreme Court on the day of oral argument in Dobbs. I was there. I saw it.
There’s video of them holding big signs doing it and saying, this is what we’re going to do. And so it wasn’t their body that they were killing. There was a life inside them. That life was going to be born if nothing stopped it, if nothing killed that life. When they took the pill, they deprived another human being of that person’s life. And therefore, a death occurred that day on the steps of the Supreme Court. Do we give the right to one person to kill another? No. Another way of saying that wasn’t their body, there were four of them.
Two of those kids could have been boys in their womb. And if you had taken DNA tests from the mother and the child, you would send it to a DNA lab. And the DNA lab would come back and say, there are two human beings involved. They would tell you whether it was male or female also. It’s a separate living, unique human being. And in fact, in the law, one of the states, South Dakota, passed a law requiring the abortion industry to tell women one of the many truths that the abortion industry does not tell women when they take their money to kill their child. This lie is, they say, and this is a question every woman asks, is it a baby doctor?
Women don’t use the word, is it a fetus? And when a woman gets a test back saying she’s pregnant, she doesn’t go around telling her friends, I have a fetus, there’s a fetus growing in me. I’m pregnant, I’m having a baby, if it’s wanted. Science does not change with wantedness. It is a human being in both instances. So, where was I going with all that? That was a good answer. All right.
Do you have any final thoughts or do you feel like… On autonomy? All right, yeah, it’s autonomy we’re discussing, okay. We normally don’t let one human being kill another human being. In fact, on the back of the U.S. Supreme Court, there’s a slogan that’s less well known than equal justice under law on the front. On the back of the court, it says, justice is the guardian of liberty.
What does that mean? I think it means that you have the freedom to do what you want until you hurt somebody else. Justice is the guardian or the stop of liberty. I can’t kill you because you’re inconvenience to me. I can’t kill you because I want your property. I can’t kill you because I enjoy killing. We don’t allow any reason to kill another person generally unless somehow the person has done something terribly wrong and after a trial where that guilt of a terrible wrong is proven beyond a reasonable doubt, then the government has the power to kill someone.
That’s vastly different. That’s one reason why even the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments don’t allow the child in the womb to be killed because even when they said no person shall be deprived of life without due process of law, that presumes that the government can deprive some people of life as long as they use due process of law. They said there can be, but the only people that could ever be deprived of life at that time and even today are people who’ve committed a very serious crime and it’s been proven beyond a reasonable doubt. The child has committed no crime whatsoever. The adults have engaged in behavior that leads to the natural conception of a child. The child is just part of nature or part of God’s plan for life depending on your viewpoint. But the reality is the child is innocent and therefore unworthy of death even under some due process of law, but letting a single individual decide that is not due process of law. Good. Thank you.
So this is going to be question number 13. Some argue that pro-choice policy is an extension of the First Amendment, separating church and state. In other words, they say churches and their religious laws have no business telling women what they can or can’t do with their bodies. Is this a correct application of the First Amendment? I don’t want to address that one. Well, I just don’t have an answer for that. Okay. Can you pause for a second?
Are you hearing that high-pitched noise out there? Yeah. I’m not really hearing it. It started picking up at the end of his answer on the last one. I don’t think it’s going to affect it all that much. Okay. It’s louder to me than anything else in here. I saw. Yeah. It might be one of those things that’s kind of outside the hearing range. Yeah. If you’ve been in a band or you’re like over 40, you’re not supposed to hear that, but I like guard my hearing because I don’t want people to hear it. Okay. So question number 14.
Some argue that abortion choice policy has parallels to slavery, dehumanizing, oppressed people group, legalized evil, et cetera. Is there a valid analogy between abortion and slavery? What guidance or caution would you recommend for anyone using this analogy? Abortion is absolutely analogous to slavery and segregation in this sense that a class of human beings has been denied legal protection, which results in severe deprivation of rights. Now, the rights were different for slavery or segregation or abortion, but a crime against humanity has occurred in all three cases. A crime against humanity is when the government withdraws legal protection from a class of human beings resulting in deprivation of rights up to and including death. So abortion results in death of the child.
And it’s interesting that some of the proponents of abortion are saying that a law banning abortion forces a woman to have a forced pregnancy or forced birth. But birth is a natural process. It is abortion which interrupts the natural process of the woman’s life. It is medical abortion. I mean, pregnancy is not a disease. Millions of women in the world are very happy when they become pregnant. They want a child.
They’ve longed for a child. They don’t feel, I’m sick. My God, I’ve got to go to a doctor.
No, no, no. That’s not the normal human reaction to pregnancy. There are circumstances where a woman says, I’m not happy.
What do I do with the child? And I want to quote Amy Hagstrom Miller here. She’s the abortion owner of Whole Women’s Health Clinic, one of the most famous abortion industry facilities. She’s not a doctor. She just makes money off of it. And she thinks she’s helping women, I believe. I have to give her that.
But she does make a lot of money off of it also. And she said in trial, in a witness stand on a trial I was observing, no woman gets pregnant to get an abortion. Abortion is not a positive good like going to college or having equal pay. Many of the women’s rights things are good things that women want to have. But abortion is not a good thing. Even Justice Ginsburg said it was difficult and painful for most women. And Hegstrom Miller says they don’t get pregnant to get an abortion.
So the problem is a psychosocial decision. What do I do with this child? What can I do? And again today we’re not going to allow slavery and segregation anymore. We should say don’t kill the baby.
We’ll help you. You can use the safe haven law. We’ll pay for your medical bills if you’re low income. We’ll pay all your expenses. And then as soon as the baby’s born you can walk out of the hospital, leave the baby behind, and you’re free. You don’t have to parent any child. It used to be a legal obligation for every human in America to raise the children that were conceived either in their marriage or their sexual relationship.
Man and woman had a responsibility to do it. And we have changed that law. In one sense a woman has two rights in some states. Now some states abortion is not legal, but if you’re in a state where you have the right to kill your child or the right to transfer your child to the state, which would have been neglect or abandonment of child. Now we say we will help you as a society, so it’s time to say help the woman, help the baby, stop the killing, and allow the families that are desperately waiting to adopt children to adopt these newborn children that one woman doesn’t want, but other women would be thrilled to love that baby and hold them in their arms. Let’s see.
Pivot, this is question number 15. Pivoting to another legally relevant issue in the abortion debate, what is the Equal Rights Amendment? How close was it to passing? Why hasn’t it been passed yet? And in your view, does equality between men and women mean identical treatment in every sphere of society, including the freedom to walk away from an unwanted pregnancy? The Equal Rights Amendment was popular in the 70s and 80s. I’m not sure the exact range, but it was stopped by a woman, Phyllis Shafley, and by women saying this isn’t what women want and need.
Women are a diverse group. They’re not all the same, and to trap them into stereotype of I want a career, I want to kill all the children I need to kill, I don’t want to be a mother, that’s a false stereotype, and we should get away from all stereotypes. There’s some argument that men should have this, that having to have children puts women at a biological disadvantage, and therefore the state should give them equality, and in one sense, the safe haven laws in all 50 states fulfill part of that responsibility or that desire of feminists. So I’m not saying the safe haven law is good law or bad law, but it is the law, and under that law, any woman can safely surrender her child to the state and be free of all parental obligation for 18 years. If she wants the feminist dream of I don’t like children and I don’t want to have children.
Oh, the Equal Rights Amendment, sorry, Equal Rights Amendment. Okay. So pivoting to another legally relevant issue in the abortion debate, what is the Equal Rights Amendment?
How close was it to passing? Why hasn’t it been passed yet? And in your view, does equality between men and women mean identical treatment in the sphere of society, including the freedom to walk away from an unwanted pregnancy? The Equal Rights Amendment was an attempt in a way to provide equality, which is something everyone would want, between the sexes. It was defeated by a woman named Phyllis Shafley because it would sort of mandate particular roles and stereotypes for women. Sort of the feminist ideal would be mandated by law instead of allowing women to choose somewhat for themselves what type of lifestyle they would like to have. One of the things that is argued by radical feminists is that women should have the right to not have to parent a child because it is unequal.
They have to care for children and men don’t. And it is interesting that the safe haven law in all 50 states does give that right to women already. In one sense, the feminist dream of not having to bear any responsibility for children, which they achieved through the death of the child in abortion, can be achieved through safe haven laws. Because under the safe haven law, no woman in America has to parent a child. Just as Amy Coney Barrett brought this up in the oral argument in the Dobbs case, and it’s written about in the Dobbs case, it’s not the basis of the opinion in Dobbs, which simply said there never was a right to abortion and there never should have been and abortion is not in the Constitution. But Amy Barrett asked the Solicitor General of the United States, Elizabeth Preligar, doesn’t the safe haven law eliminate the burden of parenting that was of such concern to the court in Roe v. Wade? And again, it was.
That is the problem for a woman that doesn’t want to be a mother at that stage in her life. It’s not, I’m not sick. A child is not a disease. Maternity is not a disease. But if you don’t want the child, then you have a psychosocial problem in a way. And the feminists want to be free of the child. We could say, don’t kill the child anymore.
It’s not the child’s fault. The child is innocent. But you have the feminist dream through the safe haven law. In exchange for some months of pregnancy, which keeps another human being alive who’s innocent, then you can be free. Under the safe haven law, you simply drop the child off at a hospital or fire station within a certain period of time designated by the state. You have a little time to make the decision. And you have no more obligation to care for the child.
You can become a rocket scientist or go to college or be a ballet or an artist or you can do have sex with 50 or 100 people a week and not have to worry about the consequences of a child in your life. Now, I’m not saying this is my dream by any means, but this is like the feminist dream or a dream of autonomy. But you can walk out of the hospital and leave the baby behind and say, I’ll safe haven the baby. And every state says, we will then take the first responsibility for protecting that child at no cost to you. Imagine this. Is it better for a woman than abortion? It’s free.
So economically, it’s much better. You don’t have to pay for it. Number two, there’s no abortion-related decades of trauma from killing your own child. And number three, you can then be free if you want to. And so you’re free to do what you want and define the meaning of your own existence any way you want to, as the words of Cayce, which did not reverse role but restricted it. So if you look at the long history of abortion, we have a long history of America of making abortion a crime. We protected life because we knew life is worthy of protection.
Then we went through the radical kind of sexual revolution of the 60s. And we wanted to increase autonomy and the feminist movement grew, so we allowed abortion for a while. And then in 1999, the states began to pass safe haven laws. And now a woman can be free of the child without killing the baby and injuring herself through the safe haven laws in all 50 states. Awesome. Thank you for sharing on that. So number 16, there are laws on the books against death profiteering.
I don’t know what that means. Yes. So profiteering is a broader category that we have laws on the books. I looked it up. There were like 65 different pieces of legislation in this current administrative year that addressed profiteering. No selling of organs, no… Profiteering broadly is a parent category.
So profiteering as a category isn’t that mysterious. We’re talking about some kind of undue profit off of things. Crisis situations especially. There’s a legit case regarding it with that category regarding say medicine. Like what’s a fair price to pay? Can you charge $1,000 per pill for a cancer bed or something? So there’s a real debate about that.
There are some checks and balances against it. But a legal category that I have yet to see established, which I think is entirely valid, would be abortion by its very nature would qualify as death profiteering. And yet we have everywhere that there are some services which regrettably involve killing other people like some police encounters, military. We have tons of checks and balances to prevent a dollar per head type of scenario so we’re not incentivizing killing. Because monetary incentives for killing would be profoundly anti-humanitarian and would go against the grain of what our civilization is meant to be. And yet that is inherent within the abortion industry. And so we have laws on the books that prevent death profiteering and we have laws on the books that legalize abortion.
But to my knowledge no one has overlapped those and said do we need to punch Planned Parenthood in the pocketbook and say that if they’re going to keep offering abortion services it needs to be for charity. And they shouldn’t ever be paid for abortion services. They should have to do their fundraising outside of that so they can offer free abortion services. Which I know they’d hate that. They wouldn’t do that because it’s not really a charity. But they promote themselves like they’re all humanitarian and women’s interest. But it’s really a for-profit.
Technically it’s a non-profit but they make an income. So do you feel like you want to answer that one or maybe you lean on skipping it? I’m fine either way. I’m very happy to have heard the question and to begin to think about it. I think it’s great. But I think they’ll just skip it for me. Okay. Next question.
Yeah this is one you’ll like. It makes me think of the one example that I sometimes use. But it’s not death profiteering so it doesn’t fit this.
But just my body, my choice. Even on that for example breast augmentation is something that would just affect a woman’s body. But when certain breast augmentation techniques were found to injure many women the government banned silicone bags for example. But I don’t even want to get into that. But just an example for the protection of women we don’t let them do anything to bodies. But that’s just another argument. Let’s not get into that.
Okay so number 17. Does abortion qualify as a crime against humanity? Alright you can tell I want to do this one. I haven’t had one since I’ve already done it. But I want to ask more on that. Talk about international law. And I might give some of my qualifications here.
You can put them in or not. Are we ready? Sure whenever you’re ready. Abortion is a crime against humanity. I am a former professor of law as well as a trial lawyer. And I have taught international human rights both in America and I’ve studied it overseas at some institutions in France. And the generally understood simple definition of a crime against humanity is when the government withdraws legal protection from a class of human beings resulting in loss of rights or deprivation.
I need to start over again. I messed that up. Abortion is a crime against humanity. What is a crime against humanity? I am a former professor of law and I’ve taught international human rights and I’ve studied overseas international human rights. And a crime against humanity is when the government withdraws legal protection from a class of human beings or a class of humans. See I don’t want to say that.
I don’t want to say human beings. I want to say a class of humans. Excuse me. No worries. You got this.
Take your time. Thank you. Abortion is a crime against humanity. A crime against humanity occurs when the government withdraws legal protection from a class of humans resulting in severe deprivation of rights up to and including death. I’m a former professor of law and I’ve taught international human rights and I’ve studied here and overseas. And this is a fairly common easy to understand definition. So who has to do the crime against humanity?
It has to be the government. If the government begins murdering people, some of its citizens. If we passed a law that said you can murder African Americans that would be a crime against humanity because the government is doing it. If I kill someone that’s just an individual crime.
That’s a murder. That should be punished in the law also. Most humane societies, most civilizations have laws against murder another human. So how do we know this also that it is a crime against humanity? Some people say well you need to look to the international rights documents. There are documents that specifically define the right to life as beginning at conception. Such as the international, inter-American organizational documents.
But you also can just look at the definition and ask yourself when do you know of times in history when a government has withdrawn legal protection from a class or a group of humans. Most people think of the Nazis. Some people think of the way that aboriginal or American Indian tribes or aboriginal tribes in other countries were treated where the government says these people are not going to get rights. Others think of slavery and segregation. And both slavery and segregation were created by the United States Supreme Court. Let’s say they were upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court.
Not necessarily created in the beginning. But the Dred Scott decision before the Civil War which many historians feel led to the Civil War because no compromise could be possible after the Supreme Court constitutionalized slavery. And the court said that African Americans were an inferior race not entitled to any rights from the white man whatsoever. And that was wrong and it took a Civil War to overcome that crime against humanity. There are international law experts such as the Dean of Liberty University School of Law Morse Tan who was formerly the United States global ambassador for criminal justice which deals with crimes against humanity. Who has stated publicly that abortion is a crime against humanity. It’s not just my opinion.
And so it should be treated as a crime against humanity. So what does that mean? It is a law above a national law. It’s a law above your state law. If a state says it’s okay to kill humans in the womb that is a crime against humanity. And every person has a duty to do everything in their power to reverse that law and save those humans. So it produces a very high moral duty.
And how do you remedy it? You have to provide legal protection to that class of human beings. If you can get a 15 week ban passed that’s a step in the right direction. If you can get a heartbeat bill passed that’s a step in the right direction. But ultimately you must protect the life and the law of all humans. That is a just humane civilized society. Very good.
Okay question number 18. Is abortion law and policy for sale to the highest bidder irrespective of what’s right, good or true? The law should never be for sale to the highest bidder. It is true that power and money can influence the law. But in America the law is embodied in the people. We derive our justice for our form of government from the consent of the governed. It is not a dictator.
It’s not the rich, the oligarchs who should control what the law is. It shouldn’t be a body of lawyers or the lawyer class that determines what the law is. Lawyers can be helpful in applying the law, interpreting the law. They can give suggestions to the law about the law to people and say well we ought to have this law but it should be up to the people through their elected representatives to pass laws and to amend the constitution and change that. Everyone in America is involved. Even the legislature cannot change the constitution on their own. They can propose a constitutional amendment but then it goes to every state for a vote.
So that’s how it should be done. Not money. And fortunately money doesn’t always win in America. There have been a lot of rich people who run for office who get defeated because everybody has a vote. There’s been a lot of ideas with a lot of money behind them. You can have success for a while but I believe ultimately truth prevails. Evil and darkness and lies can prevail for a while but I believe in the long run humans have an innate desire for truth.
And they know there is a truth and they can be convinced to follow the truth. And then is it helpful? Are there contexts where you would use this language and others where you would not use it? In a sense and I’m now just saying what the Nazis said that the Jews were subhuman. Untermenschen. They were not men. They were less than human.
They had to be dehumanized. They were portrayed as being a sickness that infected the body of the German nation and it needed to be eliminated like you would surgically eliminate. Now again those are not my words. Those are the words of the Nazis that led people to kill six million Jews. Alright. So do we compare abortion to that? In political terms if you use that that is a difficult argument to make and many Jewish people are in favor of abortion.
But we represented the first pro-life group that we know of that was a Jewish pro-life voice filing a brief on behalf of the Jewish pro-life federation in the Dobbs case. And they made the argument that Judaism did not allow abortion because Judaism based on the Torah gave every individual a right to life. Psalm 149 says before I knew you in the womb I formed you and God created every life and child sacrifice was forbidden in the Jewish law. And they made the argument that abortion is like a genocidal holocaust and particularly in America today you could make the argument that it’s genocidal because the genocide statute says that controlling the means of reproduction in order to eliminate a race or ethnic group is genocide. That’s one of the definitions in the genocide treaty which the United States is a party to and has made a federal law. So is there a group in America that has been targeted through the means of their reproduction for elimination or reduction? And the answer is statistically yes.
The African-American population is only 10% of the population but they’re 30% of the abortions. If that continued for a long period of time eventually there would be no African-Americans. And abortion is a means of controlling reproduction. It stops reproduction. It interferes with the natural reproduction of the body. It is an unnatural stoppage of the natural process once a sperm and an egg come together. There’s a whole process for that human to grow from there to the end of their natural life.
And Planned Parenthood disproportionately kills African-American children under the law of disparate impact analysis by which we prove racial discrimination. They are guilty because they disproportionately kill black children. And there is a footnote about that in the Dobbs decision. The court is actually recognizing that abortion kills black people.
So who are the racists? Are there people who want to disproportionately kill black people? There is a group called Planned Parenthood that states that they want to do that. They put it in their legal documents now and they say that they are helping African Americans, but the result is death for many African Americans. A just society would say that that is not helping, that is killing African Americans. Question 20. Oh, how are we doing on time?
Are we at 25? Also, it is noon and we have 30 minutes left for lunch. We have three questions left. I think we will be okay. I think we are okay, too, if you are okay. There is a debate in the anti-abortion or pro-life camp between abolitionism and incrementalism. Could you explain these two positions and what difference it makes?
The Moral Outcry petition unites the pro-life movement quite a bit. Originally, there were over 70 national pro-life leaders who endorsed the Moral Outcry petition asking the Supreme Court to reverse Roe v. Wade. And it is a strategy which is abolitionist in its intent and movement, but it also explains legally to America much better than I think the current abolition movement does why we should eliminate it. And the only reason I say that, the abolitionists tend to focus on the life of the child and that that should be enough. And just politically and emotionally, psychologically, that life of the child should convince everybody, but it only convinces about 30-40% of the population. We need more arguments, which are also legal and factual and true, to convince a vast majority to move.
So the Moral Outcry petition arguments are that abortion is a crime against humanity. It is killing a child. It should be totally abolished. It also hurts women. You are not helping a woman to say, you killed a child and you suffer the consequences. Number three, abortion today is totally unnecessary to give women freedom from childcare, which is what they want when they say, I can’t take care of a baby, of parenting. And so under the safe haven law, she can surrender the child and be free of the burden of parenting.
And then the fourth argument is, where will those children end up? They’re going to be adopted by the millions of women and men and families who are waiting to adopt newborn children. There are about 2 million women every year who want to adopt a newborn baby. It’s not like a backup and then that first year they’re all done. No. Between the ages of 15 and 44, the childbearing ages, about 10% of American women are infertile, which means they are unable to bring a child to live birth after a year of trying. It may be that their husband is infertile.
So there’s different medical reasons, but that’s what the definition is. That’s 6 million women every year. And after some years of trying to fix it, 1 to 2 million of them say, I’d like to adopt a newborn baby.
I can take care of a baby. I could be a good mother or a good dad and mom if they’re in an intact family.
And that’s what we want to do. So as you move people towards the goal that they all think abortion is a crime against humanity, how do you fix that? You have to provide legal protection to that class of humans. So eventually it will be outlawed. And I think this is the best way forward that balances it and it brings a lot of unity to the movement. Though if you’re in a state where the best you can get done is something that saves half the children, you should save half the children in the meantime. But I believe abolition should be our ultimate goal of abortion. And I support that goal and the passion, but not the anger towards those who are trying to get something passed that abolitionists may view as incremental.
But I don’t support a ban on 15 weeks at the federal level because that could tend to make the debate just stay there and we need to be continuously saying it must be abolished. Yeah, I’m not sure I want to say that either though. So maybe the Lord’s helping me out. Yeah, I’ll just start the ending. So the moral outcry petition movement sort of can bring both sides together because every signature on it says it’s a crime against humanity. If we get 20, 30, 40 million Americans saying abortion is a crime against humanity, it’ll be abolished. So it’s a petition movement that organizes towards that ultimate goal.
And that’s why I think everyone can support the petition movement. In the Dobbs case, we had half a million people who had signed the moral outcry petition and we put those in a brief. Many people said it could never be done. My client Melinda Tebow called me and said, Hey, has anybody ever given a petition to the Supreme Court to reverse row? And I said, I don’t think so. I think I know. That’s my area.
I study them. I’ve never heard of it. She said, Could it be done? And I said, Well, there’s no rule against it. So yes, I think it could be done because we have the right to petition the government for redress of grievances. It’s the government who commits it. So this petition can record everybody’s opposition.
Even if you think all you can get is a 15-week ban in your state, you can sign the petition that says it ought to be abolished. And that builds the movement. So in the Dobbs case, we had half a million signatures. We put them in a drop-off in the brief. Somebody said it could never be done, but it was done. First time that that had been done. And it would have been 11,000 pages long if we’d printed out the brief.
And they wouldn’t have let us do that. No way they’d have accepted an 11,000-page brief. But with technology and change, we have to move with the times. And everyone can participate in the moral outcry petition movement by signing the petition at themoraloutcry.com. Themoraloutcry.com. And then all together, this also brings the whole pro-life movement together. Right now, we’re in the de-abortification of America phase.
Some states make it illegal. Some make it completely legal. But if you sign the petition in one state, you can help the people in another state get their state to make it illegal. It nationalizes the abortion arguments, and it amplifies the message. The big three of the moral outcry, it’s a crime against humanity, it hurts women, and we have a perfectly safe, free legal alternative for a woman who’s not ready to parent or can’t for some reason. And if you just can’t but you want to, we always say there are pregnancy centers all across the country and government safety mechanisms like food stamps, low-income housing, and all medical expenses of pregnancy, delivery, and aftercare are paid for by the state in all 50 states. No woman has to bear this alone.
No woman has to cry tears or have nightmares of a bloody baby at the end of her bed. We will give them a humane way through the safe haven law to be helped rather than, say, you kill the child and suffer the consequences. Okay, so we have two more questions we could ask. You mentioned at one point you wanted to answer the question of, when does life begin? So that’s our number one question in the medical set. So this is question number one on the medical, but it might be good, since you’re not a medical doctor, to keep it shorter than normal. Yes, yes, I would.
I could do that. Yeah, so this is question number one on the medical set. Last question. The last one is, what would you like to say that you didn’t get to say yet? All right. But I want to save that one for the last.
All right, I agree. It’s really a naturally last question. All right, all right. So please tell us, when it comes to the medical question, you just get the right wording. It’s very short, but here we go. So when does new human life begin? Please explain. All right.
We all believe in human rights, so the question is, when do human rights begin? Shouldn’t they begin at the beginning of human life? When does human life begin? And scientifically, that is when the sperm from a male joins with the ovum or egg of a woman, and those are just half human beings. They don’t have all the chromosomes of a human. The two come together. There’s a little bit of a spark of life, which you can watch on video, YouTubes, where there’s kind of a little spark when they join together, and then that is a new living human organism.
That has been proved in a court of law by the Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals in America when they upheld a statute that required their abortionists to tell women that abortion is the taking of a life of a separate living member of the species Homo sapiens. We are all Homo sapiens. That’s the name of our species scientifically. That means you’re human. You get human rights. The woman wants to know, doctor, is it a baby? They’re lied to by the abortion industry, and the Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals upheld a statute requiring them to give this scientific statement.
And you know what Planned Parenthood argued? They argued that telling them this is the termination of the life of a separate living unique member of the species Homo sapiens, Planned Parenthood didn’t want to tell women that. They said that’s a philosophical statement. That’s a metaphysical statement. They want to consider when life begins as a religious or metaphysical statement, and the government can’t force you to say that. And the Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals in Rounds v. Planned Parenthood said no, that is a scientific medical statement, and there is adequate proof of that statement to require them by law to tell women the truth.
And yet they probably do it in South Dakota because they’re required by law. They don’t tell women that from the beginning of abortion. There’s massive lawsuits waiting to be made against Planned Parenthood. Wow, that was really good. All right, thank you. And the final question, what would you like to say about the legal world of abortion, of surrounding abortion that you were not asked about or didn’t get a chance to say? Is there anything that you have left that you would like to say that you didn’t get to touch on yet?
I hope that everybody will join in the moral outcry petition movement. Anyone can sign the petition, and that will help establish in the minds of courts and legislatures that abortion is a crime against humanity. It’s killing a human being. It severely hurts women with devastating psychological and sometimes physical injuries. And today abortion is unnecessary to give women freedom from parenting. They can relinquish their child in a hospital or a fire station at no cost, with no legal procedure, no termination of parental rights, just walk out of the hospital or bring the baby back to a hospital within a certain number of days after she thinks about it. It’s her choice.
It’s purely voluntary. But we say we will help you. We’ll take the child from you, and you’re free from 18 years of parenting obligation. And we’ll give those babies to the living, loving families who have been carefully vetted by the adoption system and agencies to take a living baby. That’s where we need to move to as a society. That’s justice and compassion, which we all want to have. We want to be just and humane.
We want to help both the woman and the child. And I believe now we can do that. I think we’ll see the end of the abortion controversy, the abortion wars, I call them sometimes, because it’s just this one or the other, one or the other. Now we can help both the mother and the child and help the families which are waiting to adopt newborn children. So I think we’re going to see a bright future in this movement, just as it was good to end slavery, but it took a while to end segregation. We’ve ended Roe v. Wade, and I think soon, within five to seven years, we’ll have ended legal abortion in America.
Might I say something else about Operation Outcry? One other thing. I’d also say that one of our arguments is that abortion hurts women. Most of the truth about the pain of women’s abortion trauma is locked up in the secret places of women’s heart. Operation Outcry is a ministry of the Justice Foundation by which women who’ve had abortions can tell us the truth at OperationOutcry.org or the Justice Foundation’s website about how their abortion affected them. And then they can let the courts and legislatures know how much abortion hurts women. Right now they know something most people don’t know.
Most people have not had an abortion. Most people have never participated in the killing of another human being. We are still collecting testimonies of women hurt by abortion at our website. We can protect your identity. You tell us whether to use your first name, initials only, or full name, and we recommend just say first name if you haven’t told everybody in your family, in your life, that you’ve had an abortion. But your truth can be given to the courts. The Supreme Court needs to know because they still need to protect the right to life.
There’s a chemical abortion pill coming up that we need the testimonies of women who’ve had abortions through the chemical abortion pill. Let me say a little bit about that. The first woman that ever called me up about an abortion pill, she said, my God, my God, they lied to me. They lied to me. They told me it was just a mass of tissue. They told me it wasn’t a baby. I can see the arms.
I can see the legs. She said this through sobbing.
Can I bury my baby in my backyard? That’s why she was calling the lawyer. And she wanted to know, can I make a complaint against the abortionist? He treated me like dirt. This is very common. It’s a dehumanizing procedure to kill children in the womb, and the abortionists become very dehumanized and their consciences have been seared. So we often get complaints about them.
Not everyone, but often. And I told her it’s illegal to bury human remains in the backyard because it can cover up a crime and because we treat human remains even. Even the remains of humans we treat with respect and dignity because we are not just a mass of tissue we are humans, according to the Declaration of Independence, created in the image of God and endowed by our Creator with inalienable rights. And even when the soul passes and the body dies we treat the bodies with respect. So if you’ve had an abortion we would love to represent you at OperationOutcry.org at no charge, we’re a non-profit. We simply collect the testimonies and give them to courts or legislatures that are considering banning or restricting abortion. And there is still a need for women to speak out, to be courageous witnesses, to tell people the truth.
It’s not the unforgivable sin. It can be forgiven. And all women all over the world, regardless of your religion, feel guilt. I remember when we filed Norma McCorvey’s motion to reverse Roe v. Wade in the Dallas courthouse in the year 2003. We filed a motion by Roe of Roe v. Wade. Norma McCorvey was her real name.
She asked the court, please reverse my own cases. She actually worked in abortion clinics and that’s partly what changed her mind. She saw the callous disregard. Well anyway, there were 800 news articles about that around the world. One of them, some of them were in Japan. Japanese reporters called me or came to my office and interviewed me and said in person, you know, you’re right. These women are hurt by abortion.
And the reporter said, I feel so mad at the temples. They make them pay something to get forgiveness. And that just showed me that women all over the world feel this guilt. The women of China feel guilt over their abortions. There’s deep sadness there. It’s a terrible trauma. And we need to end the trauma for women and the decades of hurt.
We now have a better legal solution called the safe haven law than killing a child. Thank you. That was good. Awesome.