Pro-Lifers Will Battle Over Supreme Court

By Evelyn Reilly
May 2001

Pro-lifers should prepare for a huge battle over Supreme Court nominations, advised author, columnist and attorney Ann Coulter at a Harvard Symposium on Saturday, April 7.

She told Massachusetts News, “The most important thing that will happen in our lifetime is the next two or three appointments to the Supreme Court.”

Coulter was the keynote speaker at “New Realities and the Future of the Pro-Life Movement” sponsored by the Harvard Law School Society for Law, Life and Religion, a student organization.

She said that President Bush needs to be especially careful in his selection of justices because, “Our judges go bad and theirs don’t.” She was referring to the fact that Republicans appointed seven of the current nine Supreme Court judges, but some have been a great disappointment, especially Stevens and Souter. The very liberal John Paul Stevens was appointed by Gerald Ford in 1975. The liberal David Souter was appointed by the senior George Bush in 1990. Sandra Day O’Connor was appointed by Ronald Reagan in 1981 and is a swing vote.

Coulter expressed confidence in President George W. Bush’s intention to appoint only “strict constructionists” to the court, but she said that due to the fact that “our judges go bad and theirs don’t,” he has about a 50% chance of getting it right.

Hippocratic Oath Is Abandoned

Dr. Ralph Miech, a physician and pharmacologist, told the audience that physician-assisted suicide violates the moral law and is an intrinsic evil: “Erosion of the ancient Hippocratic oath has contributed to the evolution of our culture into a culture of death, which utilizes death as an intellectually correct solution to difficult personal, social or financial problems.

“Secular hedonism and utilitarianism attempt to replace the Judeo-Christian doctrine of the sanctity of all human life with the doctrine that the quality of human life is of prime importance.

“This rejection of the sanctity of all human life began with the revision of the Hippocratic Oath for medical students. An erroneous impression that is almost universal is that all physicians take the Hippocratic Oath. I would estimate that less than 1% of the currently practicing physicians in the United States have taken the original Hippocratic Oath. The other 99% of physicians have taken what is termed the ‘physician’s oath.’ The physician’s oath does not contain prohibitions against abortion and physician-assisted suicide. In my state of Rhode Island, I am the last physician who took the original Hippocratic Oath.

“In this post-Hippocratic era, proponents of physician-assisted suicide are attempting to utilize the historic prestige and dignity of the profession to camouflage the intrinsic evil of suicide.”

FDA Charged with Betrayal on RU-486

Attorney Teresa Wagner, a policy analyst for the Family Research Council, told the symposium that the FDA approved the abortion drug RU-486 “in an extremely suspicious fashion, if not in a way that appears to be illegal, or at least raises that as a real possibility.”

The FDA approved RU486 under recently enacted regulations known as “Subpart H” entitled “Accelerated Approval of New Drugs for Serious or Life-Threatening Illnesses.”

The process was meant to provide the possibility of new treatments for AIDS and cancer patients that were untreatable by other means and were dying.

Expedited approval under Subpart H bypasses traditional strict drug testing requirements, limiting researchers’ ability to discover serious side effects or conditions incompatible with the drug’s use such as allergic reactions or previous medical conditions.

Under pressure from the abortion industry, the FDA “determined that the termination of unwanted pregnancy is a serious condition within the scope of Subpart H.” Atty. Wagner said, “Simply asserting that pregnancy is a life-threatening illness under Subpart H does not make it so.”

President George Bush has pledged to review the drug’s hasty approval.