Another notorious abortionist has entered into eternity. Susan Hill, owner of a chain of abortuaries that has killed over 400,000 babies has died of lung cancer. She died a week short of the 37th anniversary of her opening of the first of several ‘clinics’ that would bring her fame and fortune.
A social worker by trade, Ms. Hill opened her first clinic a mere two weeks after the passage of Roe v. Wade and immediately set her sights on establishing a foundation that would pay for minority women’s abortions. What can one say about such noblesse oblige? From a social worker, no less. Was that in her textbooks as a proposed solution to class and poverty?
While the overwhelming majority of social workers are saints on earth, Ms. Hill wouldn’t be the first to feel a certain superiority to and disdain for her clientele. Having come of age in the civil rights era (she was a 1970 graduate of Meredith College, a small baptist women’s college), why the drive to kill as many minority babies as she could? Where was she when Bull Conner was setting his dogs loose on Blacks? When King was marching and gunned down? When churches were being burned and little girls perished? She was in social work classes, and a mere three years later she got in on the ground floor of the most gruesome enterprise in American history since the slave trade.
This was a woman with no soul and a black heart. A proud recipient of the North Carolina Planned Parenthood Margaret Sanger Award in 1999.
“Of the dead say only good,” is the admonishment of my Irish friends. It’s great advice and the height of civility. But for tyrants who leave us no record of a conversion we are obliged to speak their atrocities to our posterity, lest we be complicit in our silence.
Susan Hill was a murderer who lived well on the money procured from the death of children. What a record of misery:
400,000 murdered children.
800,000 parents.
1,600,000 grandparents .
Countless siblings, cousins, aunts and uncles.
All the most immediately affected members in the ripples of disintegration that go out from her death chambers.
God be merciful to her.
The question that I find inescapable is what these 50 million aborted babies, or their never-to-be offspring would have contributed to science, medicine, agriculture, education, jurisprudence, mechanics, government…
What have we done to ourselves? When we meet God and ask why we never found cures for dread diseases, will He say “I sent them to you but you weren’t open to the gift”? From all of the good that has come into the world, of all the famous inventors, leaders, academics, etc… there were parents who lived their lives in sacrifice and humble obscurity. But for their openness and sacrifices, where would we be?
And then I come back to this hauntingly beautiful refrain from a song by Mary Fahl, Going Home, from the epic Civil War movie Gods and Generals. Perhaps it’s because I see so many parallels between the two struggles:
Love waits for me ’round the bend
Leads me endlessly on
Surely sorrows shall find their end
and all our troubles will be gone
And we’ll know what we’ve lost
and all that we’ve won
when the road finally takes me home
Coming Home 
“The question that I find inescapable is what these 50 million aborted babies, or their never-to-be offspring would have contributed to science, medicine, agriculture, education, jurisprudence, mechanics, government…?
There is an inescapable flip side to that argument. About ten years ago, there was a study which suggested a statistical correlation between the increased access to abortion after 1973 and declining crime rates. Of course crime rates didn’t decline in 1974, those of us who were adults at the time know that, but they did decline during years when people born between 1973 and 1983 would have been in their late teens and early adulthood.
At the time, I was in my second stint at a hospitality house, and another full time volunteer, a member of a Protestant community which was categorically opposed to abortion, was incensed by the study. There was no definite proof, there seldom is in statistical correlation, but my question was. “What if it is true?” The truth or falsehood of the correlation does not rest on whether I, or he, or anyone else, WANTS it to be true, or not, or finds it convenient to be true, or not.
I find it plausible, because those parents who love and want babies the most certainly won’t have abortions, while those who would consider abortion include a fair number who are callous to the whole idea of motherhood, who would be quite abusive as parents — not to mention the absentee fathers. In between are some who will be great parents once they get their lives together, but might indeed be neglectful if they had a baby right then. I definitely lean toward life experience, not genetic predisposition, as a cause of propensity to commit crime. Abortion availability could be a genuine factor in lowered crime rates.
Now, if there were an alternative process by which each and every one of these mothers would give up their babies to loving adoptive families, that would also produce the same lowered crime rates — but really, have there been 50 million adoptive families available in the past forty years?
If we simplify the worldview in our own minds, it is easy to simplify the answers, but real life is very, very complex. The best argument I know for a free market — and I’m generally not an admirer of unfettered capitalism — is that there are too many variables for any administrator to administrate them all effectively. There has to be some free play and water seeking its own level. Of course that sounds harsh to anyone who believes that abortion is homicide, but I think up to a point it is better to let each family make its own decision.
Susan Hill offered a service, for which there was a demand. There are, in fact, impoverished women who definitely want an abortion, who are anxious about where to get the money to pay for it. Its not clear what her “fortune” amounted to, but I favor limiting the amount ANYONE can make on ANY business merely for owning it. Give the patients a rebate or give the doctors and nurses and receptionists a raise.
SJ,
That issue of declining crime rates is a red herring. Crime rates soared nationwide until the 1990’s when Rudy Giuliani became Mayor of NY (which was pronounced ungovernable) and developed a model that was emulated nationwide. This coincided with the passage of three strike laws.
Red Herring.
Even were one to stipulate to your entire argument, the one has nothing to do with the other. Higher crime rates would not prevent inspiration and innovation in others. As for unwanted, unloved children, many of our greats come from homes that were icy and forbidding. Many harness the hunger for love and do great things. The greatest American stories are those where people overcame mind-boggling adversity.
As for Hill offering a legitimate service, so was slave trading. Do you propose that slave trading is immoral simply because it is illegal? Were we to legalize it again, would it be immoral?
Some things are intrinsically evil, though perfectly legal. Slave trading was one. Depriving Jews of life and property were another. Stealing Native American lands and slaughtering the Buffalo herds they depended on were others. Eugenic sterilizations were still others.
Abortion is just one more.
To be logical or legal is not the same as being right or moral, and nothing on earth can make it so.
Let’s legalize the sale of morphine, cocaine, and any ole pain killer.anti-depresssant/anti-anxiety drug that floats anyone’s boat. There’s certainly a market for them!
The woman’s evil didn’t die with her. Here are some studies from the Reduce Fetal Preterm Risk Coaltion:
Three heavyweight premature birth experts in a Jan. 2008 LABCET article, fingered prior abortions as boosting women’s later risk of delivering preterm babies. Premature newborns have raised autism, Cerebral Palsy, mental retardation etc., risk. No credible medical authority denies that Drs. Robert Romero, Robert Goldenberg, and Jay Iams are elite preterm birth experts. In 2008, citing 2004 “Ancel-Papiernik” European study and the 2005 “Morian” French study, thesethree medical doctors identified (page 163) prior surgical abortions as elevating preterm birth risk. Also in 2008, Dr. Eveline Himpers and colleagues reported that newborns under 32 weeks gestation have 55 TIMES the Cerebral Palsy risk as full-term newborns.
2009: Dr.Hanes Swingle (University of South Alabama), using data from previously published studies reported in the Journal of Reproductive Medicine that women with prior IAs (induced abortins) have 64% higher relative odds of a very preterm birth (under 32 weeks gestation) than women with zero prior IAs.
In 2007 Dr. Calhoun, Dr. Shadigan, and Brent Roooney (MSc) (Journal of Reproductive Medicine) established that prior abortions caused 1,096 US cases of Cerebral Palsy in newborns under 3 pounds 5 oz. in 2002. That 2007 claim hasn’t been disputed in 18 months. (article published in March 2009)
What loving woman woulld EVER abort and incur the substantial risks to her future offspring? 55% increase risk of having a baby with Cerebral Palsy? 64% increase in prematurity? Let’s not even find out how many of those preemies DIED.
Every woman who contemplates an elective abortion needs to know what she could bre doing to a baby she does want in the future.
Your response is a bit too conveniently facile. You want to have your cake and eat it too. You want to speculate about all the good that people who were never born might, or might not, have done, but not even consider the evil that those same people might, or might not, have done if they had ever been born. Oh yes, hail the great Rudy Giuliani, Our Savior. It is plausible that he did all you say, it is likely his work had some role in producing a positive outcome, but once again, statistical correlation doesn’t prove anything but a possibility. At least I acknowledged that, and you don’t even consider it — that is, for your argument, you assume it is a certainty for mine.
Ah, the analogy to slave trading. That is a bit like advocates of gay marriage wrapping themselves in the mantle of the civil rights movement, just because both are about asserted “rights.” Also, PETA compares its goals to the abolition of slavery, and I’ve had some caustic things to say about how it will play out in African American cultural milieus to compare treatment of circus animals or dogs to the way certain laws and customs used to treat people of dark complexions. But, I will pursue your analogy a bit.
It is a historical fact that so long as there was no majority sentiment to ban slavery nationally, it did in fact remain legal. If you study Abraham Lincoln’s Second Inaugural Address, you will see that he seriously considered that God had brought about, and prolonged, the Civil War, until both south AND north had paid the price for that evil. In any case, only four long years of war made the northern population mad enough that for a brief window of time, the 13th, 14th and 15th amendments could be passed. Then it took another 100 years to come up with the moral courage and intestinal fortitude to make good on them.
For those who were morally outraged, their was the Underground Railroad, which entailed certain risks. I guess the analagous option would be for you to steal embryos and 12-week fetuses out of the womb while the pregnant woman wasn’t looking, and spirit them away to a ward full of incubators, code-named Canada. Do you have adoptive families ready for them all when they emerge from the incubators? If you don’t, then there would be a certain degree of hypocrisy in telling all those pregnant women that THEY should carry the pregnancy to term when YOU aren’t willing to meet the ultimate test of your convictions.
I could say that there is a difference: those artificially designated as “Negroes” are human beings, whereas not all of us are convinced that an embryo is. You could answer, but at the time, southerners asserted that Negroes were not, in fact, human beings, but an inferior “race,” almost a separate species. I could point out that those same southerners gave the lie to their own position by having children by those same allegedly sub-human beings.
You may be vindicated in the end. You have every right to try to convince your fellow citizens of the justice of your cause. I for one am not fully convinced. Every cause must make its own case on its own merits, not by analogy to distinct issues that almost everyone now agrees on. Carrie Nation was right about the evils of alcohol, but she was wrong about Prohibition making things better.
Incidentally, I am in favor of legalizing most recreational drug use, but we need to do a better job than we did with abortion at teaching, just because its legal doesn’t make it right. Heroin could be bought over the counter in any drug store in America one hundred years ago, and those, morally speaking, were “the good old days.” If the stuff were legal, it would be dirt cheap, and criminal gangs couldn’t afford arsenals of automatic weapons from selling the stuff. Also, any crime you commit under the influence, you are responsible for. No free rides on that. So find yourself a nice basement where you won’t bother anyone.
“About ten years ago, there was a study which suggested a statistical correlation between the increased access to abortion after 1973 and declining crime rates.”
Please, that argument is completely fallacious and you KNOW it.
As a matter of fact Mary Catherine, I have heard personal friends and co-workers, yourself, and the very competent microbiologist Gerard Nadal, state baldly that that correlation has been disproved or is fallacious, BUT, I have never heard anyone offer a shred of evidence to prove it. You just find it inconvenient to consider the possibility, therefore you deny it without even thinking about it. You are emotionally and constitutionally incapable of considering that it might be true, even long enough to take a serious look at it. I haven’t said that it IS proven. I have said there is some correlation and it is worth considering.
I have recently been informed of another study — I’ll provide a complete citation as soon as my mother finds her copy, and until then I wont’ expect you to accept it, just to know that its a plausible possibility on the table. This one was done in one or more Scandinavian countries, at a time when abortion was legal, but a woman had to seek permission from a court or a board or a government office. This study tracked women whose requests were denied. Overwhelmingly, their children had very troubled lives, many of them involving considerable criminal involvement with the law. One plausible conclusion is, when a woman seeks an abortion, of her own free will, she has a very good sense of both her own qualities and the circumstances in which she finds herself, and whether she could do justice by a child. Perhaps we should let her choose, just as you are free to choose to have a large number of children, confident you can do right by all of them.