January 22, 2010, Matthew Cochrane, Roe v. Wade: The 37th Anniversary of Legalized Abortion
This week marks the 37th anniversary of Roe v. Wade, the landmark Supreme Court decision which legalized abortion. The ruling overturned laws restricting and prohibiting abortions in all fifty states. Since the decision was made in 1973, more than forty million unborn babies have been legally aborted in the United States.
While there are many arguments used to advance the cause of legalized abortion, what cannot be debated is this: Life begins at conception, not birth. The scientific consensus on this issue is simply overwhelming. In an article this week on Conservative 21, I tackled this very subject:
A few years ago, while on another blog, I debated abortion with someone who was fiercely pro-choice. We finally got to the heart of the argument when we started discussing the viability of the baby in the womb. I asked her when the magical moment was that a fetus turned into a baby. The moment, in her mind, it would change from being the lawful abortion of a fetus to the murder of an infant child. She answered, “A fetus becomes a baby when it's born. That shouldn't be so hard to figure out.” That sentiment, though all too common amongst abortion advocates, reflects a severe ignorance of the debate at hand and completely ignores the advances science has made in the last thirty years. Indeed, the scientific consensus, as we shall see, is clear: life begins at conception, not birth.
If this debate is to be won in the public square, it is important this scientific truth is asserted with clarity and confidence. Please be sure to read the article in its entirety.
Here are a few other links to reflect on the anniversary of this tragic day:
No endorsement of any single issue qualifies a person to hold public office. Being pro-life does not make a person a good governor, mayor, or president. But there are numerous single issues that disqualify a person from public office. For example, any candidate who endorsed bribery as a form of government efficiency would be disqualified, no matter what his party or platform was. Or a person who endorsed corporate fraud (say under $50 million) would be disqualified no matter what else he endorsed. Or a person who said that no black people could hold office—on that single issue alone he would be unfit for office. Or a person who said that rape is only a misdemeanor—that single issue would end his political career. These examples could go on and on. Everybody knows a single issue that for them would disqualify a candidate for office…
You have to decide what those issues are for you. What do you think disqualifies a person from holding public office? I believe that the endorsement of the right to kill unborn children disqualifies a person from any position of public office. It's simply the same as saying that the endorsement of racism, fraud, or bribery would disqualify him—except that child-killing is more serious than those.
I still love this video released after last year’s election of Barack Obama:
The legal problem with Roe v. Wade is simple: The Supreme Court's decision to invalidate state laws prohibiting or restricting abortion lacks any basis in the text, logic, structure, or original understanding of the Constitution of the United States. The late John Hart Ely, a famous legal scholar who himself supported legal abortion as a matter of public policy, said that Roe v. Wade "is not constitutional law and gives almost no sense of an obligation to try to be." The justices who manufactured a right to abortion in Roe violated and dishonored the very Constitution they purported to interpret by substituting their own moral and political judgments for those of the elected representatives of the people. Their ruling was a gross usurpation by the judiciary of the authority vested by the Constitution in the people themselves, acting through the constitutionally prescribed institutions of republican democracy. As dissenting Justice Byron White put it, Roe was nothing more than an exercise of "raw judicial power." It was not merely an incorrect decision, but an anti-constitutional one.
I would venture to say that most constitutional scholars who support legal abortion basically (if all-too-quietly) agree with Professor Ely. Roe is an embarrassingly poorly reasoned opinion. Of course, some pro-abortion scholars believe that the result in Roe could be justified by a different form of constitutional argument, and there is something of an industry among them in "re-writing Roe." Justice Harry Blackmun, in his opinion for the Court in Roe itself, claimed that restrictions on abortion for the sake of protecting fetal life violate the provision of the 14th Amendment forbidding any state from depriving any person of "life, liberty, or property without due process of law." Frankly, that's ridiculous, and almost all legal scholars know that (even if some won't say it publicly). The most notable effort to place the holding in Roe on a more plausible constitutional footing involves the claim that abortion restrictions deprive women of "the equal protection of the laws" (another 14th Amendment guarantee). There are various reasons why that approach fails, too, but many of Roe's supporters at least find it less embarrassing.
Also be sure to see my review of George’s book,
Embryo (co-authored with Christopher Tollefsen), on the scientific and philosophic defense of pro-life reasoning.
