The Death of Roe v. Wade

I have to admit, I didn’t think I would see it in my lifetime. I had hoped, and hopefully done my part. I sued an abortionist who perforated my client’s uterus while in the act of killing her unborn baby. I represented a pro-life protestor wrongfully arrested for protesting outside an abortion mill. I have functioned as legal monitor for pro-life protestors who were working the sidewalks outside abortion clinics, and I have voted pro-life for forty years.

From the first time I read Roe v. Wade in law school in 1986, I thought it was a tortured, result-oriented opinion. If a first year law student could see that, why did it take 50 years for six Supreme Court justices to see it?

The truth is that many more have seen it than have admitted it, but as C.S. Lewis described it, we have been creating men without chests, i.e. men without the virtue to guide their intellect or emotions. That is not to say those on the Supreme Court now are any more virtuous than those in the past. More likely, Evangelicals have simply been successful in making the fight against abortion a key component of the Republican platform, and the party has finally thrown Evangelicals a bone, and it is a very big bone.

Of course, the decision overturning Roe does not outlaw abortion. Instead, it merely affirms what even the intellectually honest on the left already knew: there is no Constitutional right to kill one’s unborn baby. That charade is over. Now it will be left to the states to determine whether women may legally kill their offspring. That means that instead of fighting a battle for one Supreme Court, pro-lifers will now have to fight 50.

Many states, including my own, previously passed trigger laws that made abortion illegal in the event Roe was overturned. Those laws will now be taking effect. Other states will now pass laws securing the right to an abortion within their borders. One thing is clear: the death of Roe will not be the death of abortion in America. What is less clear is whether it will effectively reduce the number of abortions in America. I suspect it will, but to what extent is a purely a guess.

But even if it does not, the fight over the last fifty years was still the right thing to do. Wisdom may be justified by her children, but virtue needs no such justification, only the affirmation of her Author. This one Evangelicals got right. GS

Leave a Reply