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The two John Pauls were born, worlds apart, within a month of each other in 1920.
Retired U.S. Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens, now 94 and a seminal figure in the federal judiciary’s role of protecting abortion rights during his 35 years on the bench, was born in Chicago on April 20, 1920. He came from big money. In 1927, his father built the 3,000-room Stevens Hotel, now the Hilton Chicago, for the princely, pre-Depression sum of $30 million, which calculates to more than $400 million today.
Twenty-eight days later – on May 18 – the future Pope John Paul II was born in Wadowice, Poland, after his mother had been advised to have an abortion because she had no chance to deliver a live baby. She refused. When the future pope was 8 years old, his mother died in childbirth. Four years later, his older brother, a doctor, died of scarlet fever tending to patients in a public hospital. His father died when he was 20. The man with no parents or siblings spent WWII splitting rocks in a limestone quarry in Poland before secretly entering the seminary to study for the
priesthood.
This odd confluence of John Pauls – of two men and their missions – created a moment of sober reflection last week. John Paul II, who poured out his own life to protect human life in all stages, was canonized. John Paul Stevens, whose jurisprudence would protect the life of death-row prisoners but strangely deny, Pilate-like, the existence of any moral culpability in the legalized sacrifice of unborn innocents, was lionized.
Stevens has written a new book – “Six Amendments: How and Why We Should Change the Constitution” – in which he argues for the passage of amendments that would outlaw the death penalty – St. John Paul II would agree! – reduce gun violence, restrict political campaign spending and soften the combative nature of Congress.
Nowhere to be found – with good reason, because ideology trumps natural law and science – was even one syllable about the human rights issue of the last 40 years, legalized abortion.
Appointed to the bench in 1975 by Republican President Gerald Ford, Stevens worked consistently for decades to ward off any dilution of Roe v. Wade’s abortion license. He went so far in 2007 as to call the federal ban on partial-birth abortion – where a child is delivered partially from the womb and then aborted – “a silly statute.”
“It’s just a distressing exhibition by Congress, but what we decided isn’t all that important (because other abortion alternatives were kept in place),” Stevens said.
While abortion never has caused him to lose sleep, it took Stevens awhile to fully express his opposition to the death penalty.
In an interview with the PBS NewsHour last week, Stevens told correspondent Judy Woodruff that his thinking evolved over the years because the Supreme Court had adopted rules – involving the ways in which juries were selected and how evidence from victims’ families was allowed at the penalty phase of the trial – that made a death-penalty conviction “more likely than it should be.”
“Those rules have slanted the opportunity for justice in favor of the prosecutor,” Stevens said. “And I think it’s particularly incorrect to do it in the capital context, because the cost is so high. If you make a mistake in a capital case, there is no way to take care of it later on.”
Really? St. John Paul II would agree.
Let’s use Stevens’ moral calculus – the high cost of making a mistake – to evaluate the death sentence imposed by legalized abortion. What if the fetus were actually, say, a human being? What if a unique and complete set of human chromosomes actually existed at the moment of conception? What if a human being’s worth and existence depended solely on the value judgment of another?
The Silver Rule – “First, do no harm” – is the foundation of law and ethics. It must be followed because it is the minimum of civility on which society can rest. Simply put, don’t do a harm to others that you don’t want done to yourself.
Absent the Silver Rule, anything is possible, and “anything” has happened – legally – more than 50 million times since 1973.
Yes, the cost is pretty high.
When John Paul Stevens was nominated for the Supreme Court in 1975 – the first justice to be confirmed since Roe v. Wade – the Senate Judiciary Committee did not ask him a single question about abortion. Nearly 40 years later, neither did Judy Woodruff nor USA Today.
Everything must be settled then. Life goes on, unamended.
Peter Finney Jr. can be reached at [email protected].
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