MATTHEWS v TRUMP

One of the most significant debates of the 2016 Presidential election took place on March 30, 2016 on the Green Bay campus of the University of Wisconsin. The occasion was the MSNBC broadcast of ‘HARDBALL, with Chris Matthews’ at which Republican candidate Donald Trump was the guest. The issue was abortion, triggered by a question posed by a student.

Here is a link to the video:

http://www.msnbc.com/hardball/watch/trump-s-hazy-stance-on-abortion-punishment-655457859717

Neither Mr. Matthews nor Mr. Trump are educated in the law. Both of them, rather obviously, simply assumed that laws prohibiting abortion somehow punished pregnant women.

They don’t and they never did. Abortion statutes in the United States were essentially extensions of the Hippocratic Oath, written by Hippocrates of Kos, known as the father of modern medicine, who died in the year 370 BC.

The Texas statute, ruled unconstitutional by the Supreme Court in Roe v Wade, provided in Article 1191, for a punishment of two to five years' imprisonment for "any person" who would "procure an abortion" for a pregnant woman by:

1  "designedly administer[ing] ... any drug or medicine"

2  "knowingly procuring] to be administered ... any drug or medicine"

3  using "towards her any violence or means whatever externally or internally applied"

The penalty would double "if it be done without her consent".

Article 1192 set forth accomplice liability for any person who "furnishes the means for procuring an abortion knowing the purpose intended" and Section 1193 provided a fine of $100-$1,000 for a person who engages in means "calculated to produce" an abortion but that fail to do so.

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Article 1194 set forth that, "if the death of the mother is occasioned" by an abortion or attempted abortion, "it is murder" and Article 1196 carved out an exception for an abortion "procured or attempted by medical advice for the purpose of saving the life of the mother."

The Texas statute was typical of State laws. Here is the text of

Michigan Compiled Laws Section 750.14:

Administering drugs, etc., with intent to procure miscarriage—Any person who shall wilfully administer to any pregnant woman any medicine, drug, substance or thing whatever, or shall employ any instrument or other means whatever, with intent thereby to procure the miscarriage of any such woman, unless the same shall have been necessary to preserve the life of such woman, shall be guilty of a felony, and in case the death of such pregnant woman be thereby produced, the offense shall be deemed manslaughter.

If a woman gives birth to an infant and then kills her infant, she commits murder. But there never were criminal laws prohibiting a woman from killing a fetus in her womb, for the simple reason that she could not do so without endangering her own life.

Nature has decreed that a pregnant woman should protect the life of her unborn child by the simple fact that the fetus is a living part of her own body.

Pregnancy is not an illness and a fetus is not a tumor. State laws governing the medical profession require that surgery must be performed for some legitimate therapeutic purpose.

A young man seeking to avoid military conscription could cut off his toes. I don't know that he would be committing a crime. They're his toes, after all. Maybe he just wants to look different at the beach. Like green hair, or a full body tatoo. It would not be a crime.

But a surgeon would endanger his medical license if he cut off a patient’s healthy toes to make him ineligible for the draft or for any silly personal reason, unrelated to therapeutic necessity.

In short, Roe v Wade had nothing to do with a woman’s right to control her own body. It had to do with a doctor’s right to make money by killing babies.

Which is why Mr. Matthews’ church wants to see it overturned.