A pro-life congressman protested Tuesday against Democrat leaders’ plans to replace statues of Confederate officials in the U.S. Capitol with one honoring former U.S. Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall, a pro-abortion advocate who ruled in Roe v. Wade.
The U.S. House legislation aims to combat racism by removing statues that honor Confederate leaders and others who advocated against basic human rights for all.
But U.S. Rep. Glenn Grothman, R-Wisconsin, said he could not support the bill because it honors Marshall, an individual who supported another human rights abuse: abortion, CBS News reports.
“I will always look at him as … the guy who kind of put the foot on the gas and legalized late-term abortion,” Grothman said before the vote on the House floor.
Marshall was the first African American to serve on the U.S. Supreme Court, but he also was a key advocate for abortion on demand. It was, in part, because of his lobbying that Roe v. Wade was as expansive as it was.
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Some of the justices wanted Roe to limit abortions to the first trimester, but Marshall and a few other justices urged the court to allow “abortions until ‘viability’ – when a fetus has developed enough to live outside the womb – at six months” because it “made more sense,” according to research by Los Angeles Times reporter David G. Savage.
In Clarke Forsythe’s book “Abuse of Discretion,” he described:
the determination of just four justices—William O. Douglas, William Brennan, Potter Stewart, and Thurgood Marshall—to utilize the nascent law of “reproductive freedom” to vault over the rest of the court and announce a virtually illimitable right to abortion. The right they declared in Roe was so untrammeled that the court had to backpedal for the next decade just to affirm that Roe permitted the states to regulate abortion as the serious medical procedure it is.
In 1973, Roe v. Wade forced states to legalize abortion on demand. Today, because of the ruling, the United States is one of only seven countries in the world that allows elective abortions after 20 weeks of pregnancy. Six states allow abortions for any reason up to birth, and the remaining states are prohibited from protecting unborn babies before viability because of Roe.
The infamous ruling resulted in the deaths of nearly 63 million unborn babies by abortion and hundreds, perhaps thousands, of their mothers.
In a later ruling, Marshall advocated for taxpayer-funded abortions, arguing that measures like the Hyde Amendment violate equal protection under the Fourteenth Amendment, according to Americans United for Life.
“Justice Marshall not only believed that legalized abortion was constitutionally required, but also that the Fourteenth Amendment mandated that states pay for abortions,” AUL explained.
Marshall also argued against state laws that require an underage girl to notify a parent or seek their consent before having an abortion, according to AUL.
On Tuesday, however, the U.S. House voted 285 to 120 to remove the Confederate statues and honor Marshall, with all Democrats and 67 Republicans voting in favor of the legislation, according to CBS.
Prior to the vote, Republican Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy also criticized Democrats for “replacing the racism of the past with the racism of ‘critical race theory,’” and noted that all the statues that they want to replace are of Democrats, according to the report.
