‘Roe vs. Wade’ Plaintiff Was Paid to Switch Sides in Abortion Fight, Doc Reveals (opens in new tab)

This is a good reminder that sometimes the plaintiff in a major decision like this often doesn’t have the strongest ideological link to the issue at hand, but the facts of their specific case made it the best exemplar to bring before the Supreme Court.

If you read about the plaintiffs in famous cases like this and others, the defendant is much different than the picture we imagine.

For example, In Plessy vs Ferguson, the railroad company opposed the idea of racial segregation of rail cars, because it meant they had to spend more money on cars for their train, and they (along with others) recruited Plessy and staged the arrest of Plessy in hopes of getting the law overturned. They even went so far as to inform the arresting party of the specific charges to bring so they’d have the best case to challenge it.

I wonder if there is a name for this sort of behavior, which seems common to evangelical Christians, where older folks are coerced to question their earlier works in life in order to try to effect some appearance of "deathbed conversion" or similar. Famously, a similar happening occurred to Charles Darwin while he was in decline [0].

There may be no good antidote for this. If Roe could not be unwavering in her convictions, or could not maintain the optics of being unwavering, then who possibly can? How could we better prevent evangelical Christians from lying about these false recantations?

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elizabeth,_Lady_Hope

The more I learn about what goes on in the world, the more and more I find out how staged everything is.