As always, you can find the Dobbs v. Jackson decision here.

Paragraph 7 of 11

Sentence 2 of 2

This sentence makes it easier to do the work of the last sentence*. I’ll have to remember that when I come back through. I guess that’s a hazard of working a sentence at a time.

“According to this account, which is based almost entirely on statements made by one prominent proponent of the statutes, important motives for the laws were the fear that Catholic immigrants were having more babies than Protestants and that the availability of abortion was leading White Protestant women to ‘shir[k their] maternal duties.’ Brief for American Historical Association et al. as Amici Curiae 20.”

I get two distinct claims from this sentence:

• “[T]his account [. . .] is based almost entirely on statements made by one prominent proponent of the statutes.”
• “According to this account [. . .] important motives for the laws were the fear that Catholic immigrants were having more babies than Protestants and that the availability of abortion was leading White Protestant women to ‘shir[k their] maternal duties.’”

The second claim is true. The cited document relates the views of Dr. Horatio Storer, and the relevant passage appears on page 21 of the brief (page 34 of the PDF here):

“Storer believed that abortions were endangering what he saw as the ideal America: a society of white Protestants in which women adhered strictly to their proper “duties”—marriage and childbearing. While Storer believed that abortion was always morally wrong, two other concerns were inextricable from his condemnation of abortion on that ground: his ethnocentric concerns about rising immigrant birthrates and his blame of married Protestant women for abandoning their primary responsibility of motherhood, thus becoming especially culpable for the falling birth rate.”

So the second claim is true. The first one, though? It seems unlikely, but it will take some actual reading to determine one way or the other. As I mentioned in my citation above, the Storer material comes on page 21 of the amicus brief. Were the amici doing “almost entirely” nothing else in the previous twenty pages? And for the ten pages that follow? Actually, those questions are unfair, but the point remains that it will take more than just a passing glance to confirm or refute the Dobbs claim.

So there’s one undetermined claim:

• “[T]his account [. . .] is based almost entirely on statements made by one prominent proponent of the statutes.”

And one true claim:

• “According to this account [. . .] important motives for the laws were the fear that Catholic immigrants were having more babies than Protestants and that the availability of abortion was leading White Protestant women to ‘shir[k their] maternal duties.’”

*Also, I was being kind of a dum-dum with that citation. It wasn’t for an amicus brief—it was for the respondents, and that is pretty easy to find. And that’s why this is all just preparation.