Thursday, June 01, 2006

The Not-So-Sweet Mystery of Activist Scholarship

I've referred before to the creative histories written in the service of manufacturing new constitutional law. By way of Mere Comments, I've found a detailed academic paper covering the wishful thinking and outright distortion covering the anti-abortion laws of the nineteenth century.

This piece covers in significant detail not only the pro-life feminist activists of yore. The writer discusses the first professional women doctors who were also unanimously opposed to abortion. The piece is interwoven with sound evidence of bad scholarship from modern day abortion rights activists. Many of these academics influenced the decision in PP v. Casey by means of a tendentious amicus curiae brief whose text was sometimes contradicted by the research of its own signatories.

Bibliographic description as follows, linking to the paper's abstract:

Joseph W. Dellapenna, DISPELLING THE MYTHS OF ABORTION HISTORY, Chapter 8, Carolina Academic Press, 2006.

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