Daily Inspiration Quote by Frederick Pollock

Pollock’s line lands with the clipped detachment of a jurist who knows exactly how much moral panic can be smuggled into a bland sentence. “I have not heard” is the tell: a courtroom-safe hedge that performs neutrality while quietly licensing skepticism. He isn’t arguing from evidence so much as from the authority of not being persuaded, an elegant way to dismiss reform without engaging its strongest case.

The phrase “even the New York abortion” does double work. “New York” functions as a synecdoche for modernity and permissiveness, the place conservative imaginations treat as the proving ground for social experiments. The “even” suggests a buried expectation that legalized abortion would produce some dramatic, legible effect - demographic collapse, moral unraveling, a wave of scandal - and Pollock implies it hasn’t. That can read as faint praise (the feared consequences didn’t materialize) or, more likely given his position and era, as an insinuation that the policy is either ineffective at whatever public purpose its advocates claim or too marginal to justify the fuss.

Context matters: Pollock lived through the late Victorian and early 20th-century period when law was tightening around reproduction, obscenity, and “social hygiene,” while medical and feminist movements pushed in the opposite direction. The sentence is calibrated for an elite audience that wants to talk about abortion as governance and social order, not as bodily autonomy. Its intent is less to describe reality than to set the terms of debate: abortion as a legislative experiment whose worth must be measured in state-level outcomes, not individual lives. That narrowing is the real power move.