Another one bites the dust
Lawrence Lader, one of the chief architects of the abortion legalization effort died on May 7, 2006. He was 86. He was one of those elitists who thought he knew how and when people should live and die. He was one of the founders of NARAL. His animus against the Catholic Church led him to sue the Church and the IRS in an attempt to remove the Church’s tax-exempt status. He was a well-published writer for Look, Reader's Digest and The New Republic, among others.Why do I mention his passing?
When history is written on the subject, he will be listed as one of the major players responsible for the deaths of 47 million babies in this country. His convoluted lies and misrepresentations in his landmark book “Abortion” in 1966 were used by the U.S. Supreme Court in it disastrous Roe v. Wade decision in 1973. He was one of those who, along with Bernard Nathanson, made up the lie that 10,000 women dies each year from illegal abortions. With his connections in the media, he was able to manipulate public opinion by feeding the newspapers and network media so-called horror stories where the poor woman died because she could not get a legal abortion.
The New York Times did a story on his death. To the Times he was a hero. But his legacy was not about life. It was about death. He takes his place with the great propagandists of the 20th century, a firm believer in the Big Lie.
posted by Jakubczyk on Life @ 12:57 AM
2 Comments:
Lader and Nathanson didn't invent the claims of 5,000 to 10,000 abortion deaths. They were just passing on bogus numbers generated by Frederick Taussig in 1936. Taussig repudiated his own numbers, admitted that they were flights of fancy, but Lader and Nathanson used them anyway, establishing the, "Lie. It works." strategy that has served the abortion advocacy movement so well.
Although certainly it is historically true (as Dr. Nathanson himself detailed in THE ABORTION PAPERS) that Lader and the other early pro-abortion advocates deliberately lied in citing absurd “statistics” (such as Taussig’s) to advance their heinous cause, just as Norma McCorvey’s and Sandra Bensing’s lawyers willingly violated their legal oaths by knowingly misrepresenting their respective client’s cases in order to achieve by judicial fiat what they could not obtain through the democratic process – unrestricted abortion-on-demand throughout the entire gestational period, everywhere in America – it does not seem reasonable to me to attribute much of the blame to directly to these militant extremists. (How many people ever even read Lader’s ABORTION tome, or any of the “intellectual” eugenic essays written up to the 1970’s?) The America Law Institute’s “abortion reform” initiative of the 1960’s, though ostensibly only covering the “hard cases,” clearly had a greater impact on pro-abortion state legislation prior to Roe v. Wade, given the organization’s political connections and patina of “authority.” And, of course, the legislatures and Governors that liberalized abortion from 1967 through 1970 (the grisly movement’s momentum had actually stalled out then, which was why they resorted to going through the courts) will always have to accept moral responsibility for their actions, just as all subsequent pro-abortion politicians must. But the responsibility for the strictly constitutional outrages of Roe and Casey lay with those “justices” (especially Douglas, and Brennan, Blackmun’s svengalis) who decided that they were super-wise beings with the brief (and, tragically, the power) to remake society as they saw fit, thousands of years of civilizing human social and political advancement, including scientific and medical progress, be damned….
But even conceding all of this, the real problem was, and still is, the indifference of most people toward any reality that they perceive (though wrongly, in the case of legal abortion) not to directly hurt their narrow self-interests. (The so-called “Greatest Generation” is particularly disgusting in this regard.) When Dr. Willke’s “garbage can” pictures were widely distributed (I saw them in 1972, when I was twelve), this in itself should have elicited exactly the same level of revulsion as was expressed to the mounds of corpses revealed in Nazi death camps after World War II, since their respective natures and even visual qualities are identical. This certainly did not occur, nor did Nathanson’s graphic “Silent Scream” video alter very many people’s positions, as he himself subsequently admitted.
It has always amazed me how blithely willing abortion advocates, including of course abortion providers themselves, but even more so mature women with unwanted pregnancies, have been to assume the maximally grave moral responsibility for ending what they know perfectly well is a human life, even if, as they inaccurately believe, these were only “potential persons.” Even if nothing were still known about DNA or fetal development – as in the era when “quickening” was the only sure way to even ascertain pregnancy – at least those on the pro-life side would never have to bear children’s deaths on their consciences. The counter “coat hangar” argument has always been as farcically specious as holding a homeowner liable for a burglar’s having slipped and killed himself on the residence’s kitchen floor.
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