Forty years ago, on Jan. 22, 1973, the U.S. Supreme Court handed down Roe v. Wade, one of the two worst decisions in its history. The court’s first mega-error, the 1857 decision in Dred Scott v. Sandford, declared an entire class of human beings beyond the protection of the laws; Roe v. Wade declared another class of human beings, the unborn, beyond legal protection. Dred Scott helped precipitate the Civil War; Roe v. Wade led to a vast expansion of the pro-life movement, the largest movement of social reform in America since the civil rights movement and the natural successor to that effort to repair the lingering damage done by Dred Scott.
The battle to build an America in which every child is protected in law and welcomed in life continues. Forty years after Roe, the pro-life movement can cite at least ten reasons why it may, in time, carry the day.
(1) Abortion has never been accepted as part of mainstream medical practice. Abortion is regarded as tawdry and abortionists are stigmatized by much of the medical establishment.
(2) The science of human reproduction and gestation has confirmed the pro-life position and rendered the “science” of Roe risible.
(3) The sonogram, which permits us to see the results of human conception, has been a cultural game-changer.
(4) The people of the United States have decisively rejected the Supreme Court’s 1992 diktat in Casey v. Planned Parenthood, wherein the court instructed the people to end the abortion debate. With leadership from, among many others, the Catholic bishops of the United States, the people decided that they would not be silenced, and the pro-life movement has grown ever since.
(5) The pro-choice world has always been rigid; it now displays an increasing desperation. Pro-life organizations have worked incrementally to regulate abortion clinics and protect women from butchers like Philadelphia abortionist Kermit Gosnell; to mandate informed consent in abortion-decisions and parental consent in the case of minors seeking abortions; and to legislate waiting periods so that women in crisis pregnancies can consider their situation with as much calm as circumstances allow. The pro-choice world has resisted every one of these efforts to create situations of informed choice; it also resisted both a ban on the abortion of late-term fetuses partially born and legal requirements to try to save the lives of children who survive late-term abortions. Indeed, in certain political circles, abortion seems to be regarded as a kind of secular sacrament. This brutality has not gone unnoticed. Neither has the hysteria with which Planned Parenthood attacked the foundation Susan G. Komen for the Cure.
(6) The pro-life movement is getting younger while the pro-“choice” opposition is graying. What really alarms the pro-Roe forces in American politics about the annual March for Life in Washington, D.C., is not just the impressive numbers: it’s that the marchers get younger, every year. And that youthful vitality is not limited to one cold January day in the nation’s capital; there are new pro-life organizations among younger physicians and attorneys. All of which suggests that the pro-life movement is American civil society at its robust and self-revitalizing best.
(7) Pro-lifers have had increasing success at the state legislative level in recent years and can anticipate more success in this phase of the battle in the immediate future.
(8) The sheer implausibility of the legal argument in Roe v. Wade has become clearer over time. Few serious legal scholars defend the legal reasoning in Roe, and even honest liberal scholars agree with one of Roe’s dissenters, Justice Byron White, who labeled the decision an exercise in “raw judicial power.”
(9) The humane service rendered to hundreds of thousands of women in thousands of crisis pregnancy centers across the country has demonstrated, time and again, that the pro-life movement is the party of compassion in this debate.
(10) A 2012 Gallup poll found that 50 percent of the American people self-define as “pro-life.”
So there is reason for a measure of satisfaction, if not exultation, on Roe’s fortieth anniversary.
George Weigel is Distinguished Senior Fellow of the Ethics and Public Policy Center in Washington, D.C. His previous “On the Square” articles can be found here.
RESOURCES
“Fewer Physicians Performing Abortions,” Michael New, National Review
“‘Pro-Choice’ Americans at Record-Low 41%,” Gallup
“Young activists adding fuel to antiabortion side,” Robert McCartney, Washington Post
Doe v. Bolton dissent, Byron White
“Abortion’s Dark Satanic Mills,” Matthew Schmitz
Become a fan of First Things on Facebook, subscribe to First Things via RSS, and follow First Things on Twitter.
Comments:
In the near future at least, these conflicts are only going to become more pitched and perhaps (more) violent as time goes on. It will be interesting, to say the least, to see how this progresses.
Hope many parents of the unborn, esp. those are afraid , would repeat that often enough, on behalf of the baby and themselves , to drive away the powers that want to come in , to make their claim , through all that is against The Lord !
It is offensive to call people pro abortion. There are very few of those. But where abortion falls in the moral spectrum in each of millions of human situations, is open for judgment. And recently, since this writer cites a poll, nearly eighty percent of Americans favor some level of abortion rights. And this writer's views result in the tragedy we recently witnessed in Galway. "Right to life" indeed. Allow me to quote from a writer in Salon.com, a fairly liberal publication:
"A fetus can be a human life without having the same rights as the woman in whose body it resides. She's the boss. Her life and what is right for her circumstances and her health should automatically trump the rights of the non-autonomous entity inside of her..."
So if the fanatics really feel strongly about their convictions, which of course they do, then maybe America is not the place for them. Maybe Somalia......
"It is offensive to call people pro abortion."
Says the commenter (Richard) who goes on to call pro-lifers "fanatics."
And then quotes from Salon:
"Her life and what is right for her circumstances and her health should automatically trump the rights of the non-autonomous entity inside of her..."
What if she has a two year old non-autonomous child? Do her life and circumstances and health trump his/her rights?
And so women are going to have unplanned pregnancies.
A small reason why it is merely less likely that Roe will be overturned: Justice White is now Justice Ginsburg.
Support for legalized killing of innocents is pro abortion, regardless of denials.
"A fetus can be a human life without having the same rights as the woman in whose body it resides. She's the boss. Her life and what is right for her circumstances and her health should automatically trump the rights of the non-autonomous entity inside of her..."
I concur that a fetus can be a human life without having THE SAME rights as the woman in whose body it resides. However, it does not follow from that reasonable premise that therefore, her decisions should automatically trump the rights of the child within her.
The child, like the mother, is also autonomous. It is less independent than she is, but it is autonomous. And she is also dependent upon many things for her life. If you don't think so then see what happens when she doesn't have access to a bathroom for 3 hours.
Autonomy does not only refer to a certain level of material independence. It also refers to the specific qualities unique in human beings: the existence of our own minds, thoughts, feelings, bodies, desires.
The unborn early in the process of development is autonomous in these senses, just as its mother. Thus it deserves both the respect due to its dignity and legal protection from injustice.
However, autonomy is not the only basis upon which we may predicate human dignity. Thus a human being that is not yet autonomous deserves to have its dignity and respect recognized simply by virtue of the fact that it is a live human being. This applies not only to the very young but to the very old, the incapacitated, etc.
Some say personhood under the 14th amendment is the answer. I disagree. The excessively individualistic doctrine of rights conferred by the 14th amendment would pit the absolute best interest of the child against the absolute best interest of the mother. This situation would not reflect the intention of nature.
We should not legally fight fire with fire in the womb.
If there are any bible believing Christians here, why haven't you referenced Jeremiah.
Jeremiah 1:4-5
The word of the Lord came to me, saying,
“Before I formed you in the womb I knew you,
before you were born I set you apart;
I appointed you as a prophet to the nations.”
This passage is as relevant today as it was when it was written.
There are those among you that can deny that there is a living God that watches everything you do and say? Remember this, someday when you die, you will stand before Him and try to explain your position on the murder of the unborn. It will not stand! Be advised, there is a Heaven and there is a hell. Choose wisely......
The law cannot lose sight of the child's dependence on its mother, nor of the mother's duties to the human life within her. Each is linked to the other, and each must to some extent share the suffering experienced by, or even inflicted by, the other. The child's destiny is often and in many ways bound, and must be bound, to her being, and yes, even sometimes to her autonomous choices.
But personhood under the 14th amendment would lead to unnatural disruptions in this relationship in ways yet to be imagined.
But personhood under the 14th amendment would lead to unnatural disruptions in this relationship in ways yet to be imagined.
Under the 14th, a child in utero would be entitled to legal representation in matters affecting the full panoply of its various legal interests and rights under the Constitution. It would be entitled, in a word, to due process of law.
Thus, if a doctor were to determine that a particular womb in which an unborn child was implanted was dangerous, the child's guardian at litem, paid for and instigated by a worried [or bitter] mother-in-law [or even the state!], might bring a motion before federal court to have the child removed from the mother, against her will.
A pregnant mother might be haled into court because her neighbor thinks she drinks just a bit too much. Or smokes. Or uses hair dye or an herbal tea which her sister thinks causes birth defects.
These things, and others deleted so that this post would not be rejected for being too lengthy, and others yet unimagined, are likely what personhood sans nuance under the 14th amendment would mean.
http://www.cnn.com/2003/LAW/01/21/mccorvey.interview/index.html
http://www.leaderu.com/norma/
The 'tragedy in Galway' was the first maternal death in that hospital for 27 years, and had nothing to do with abortion, but was due to a failure to implement standard medical procedure, as I expect the numerous inquiries to demonstrate in the fulness of time. However, our prime minister, recently and appropriately described as Herod, and his blood-thirsty allies are fully intent on introducing legislation before the inquiries report their findings, with rumours that even suicide will be a 'reason' for abortion, although not even the shrillest propagandists of the seminal abortion industry could attempt to prove it relevant in any way to the aforementioned case. Mr Weigel demonstrates no air of superiority in this article, as far as I am concerned, but it would take a rather low being to not have a justification to feel superior in relation to those who offer sacrifice to Moloch. As regards an 'air of infallibility', Weigel's opinions are founded on a Truth that you will have an opportunity to argue against, to a Higher Authority, in due course, if you so wish.
What if she has a two year old non-autonomous child? Do her life and circumstances and health trump his/her rights?
What if she's simply a social drinker? Who is to say that having the odd glass of wine every weekend with her girlfriends while pregnant isn't "right for her circumstances", and a valid exercise of her autonomy and right to make moral choices.
Restrict all abortion centers to a 2 mile radius of an animal slaughterhouse. Since a zygote/fetus is "only a mass of cells, not a human," it stands to reason to put the 2 killing houses next to each other. Watching the animals go to their deaths might put ideas into the heads of the women planning to do the same thing to the product of conception in their uteri.
Where can I find more information on point number eight? I am very intrigued, because I have not really heard that said before.
Irenaeus