Judge Bork has an excellent essay on the judicial usurpation of politics in the June issue of The American Spectator. Referring to how activist judges have enshrined in constitutional law their particular policy preferences, he argues that “the aristocracy that the anti-Federalists feared has been created and empowered in large part by the very Bill of Rights they demanded as a bulwark against aristocracy.” The article is available on the Federalist Society’s website, along with an online forum about the article, featuring Roger Pilon, Steven Calabresi, Barry Friedman, and Jeremy Rabkin.

Incidentally, Judge Bork’s article also includes a long quotation from FT contributor Maureen Mullarkey. It’s pretty good when, if you’re writing about art as Maureen does, Robert Bork quotes your throw-away lines on constitutional law. Maureen’s piece from which Judge Bork is quoting is in the Weekly Standard.

Readers of First Things will be interested in this book by FT-contributor Frank Beckwith:

Today in the Wall Street Journal William McGurn writes on the growing number of African-American pro-lifers, many of whom are alarmed at the disproportionate number of abortions in the black community:

A fact sheet from the Guttmacher Institute puts it this way: “Black women are 4.8 times as likely as non-Hispanic white women to have an abortion.” The Centers for Disease Control further report what this means: While about one out of every five white pregnancies ends in abortion, it’s nearly one out of every two for African-Americans.

The debate can get uncomfortable. Pro-lifers point to Planned Parenthood’s origins in the eugenics movement. Indeed, these unpleasant associations recently resurfaced after pro-life students at UCLA hired actors to call up Planned Parenthood clinics posing as donors. In one call, the actor expressed his dislike of affirmative action, and said that he just felt that “the less black kids out there, the better.” The woman responded, “understandable, understandable” and went on to say she was “excited” about the donation. Other calls yielded similar embarrassing results.

On the other side, of course, are the maternity homes and Crisis Pregnancy Centers. Planned Parenthood and their allies accuse these centers of posing as medical clinics, offering religion instead of science, and of “traumatizing” pregnant women by showing them things like sonograms. It’s an odd complaint from a group that runs a Web site called Teenwire – which offers adolescents tips on everything from anal sex to a crude, animated condom game. Given that the overwhelming majority of women who have abortions are over age 20, showing one a sonogram or telling her “Jesus loves you” seems pretty tame stuff.

The maternity home McGurn chooses to highlight in his article is Good Counsel Homes, an organization dedicated to helping homeless pregnant women. It’s a great example of how to help alleviate the pressures that expectant mothers face.