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The New York Times got the story wrong from
the very beginning. “The Supreme Court overruled today all state laws that
prohibit or restrict a woman’s right to obtain an abortion during her first
three months of pregnancy,” its front page reported on January 23, 1973. “The
vote was 7–2,” the Times continued.
In a historic resolution of a fiercely controversial issue, the Court
drafted a new set of national guidelines that will result in broadly
liberalized abortion laws in 46 states but will not abolish restrictions
altogether.
What
the Supreme Court had actually done, through the combined effect of Roe v. Wade and
its companion case, Doe v. Bolton, was make abortion legal at
any stage of pregnancy for any reason,
which is a considerably more liberal policy than that encoded in the law of any
state or supported by public opinion then or now. The next day the Times
ran an editorial that repeated both the three-months spin and the news story’s
implicit prediction: “The Court’s verdict on abortion provides a sound
foundation for a final and reasonable resolution of a debate that has divided
America too long.”
Nineteen years
after Roe, the Court confronted its frustrating failure to resolve
the issue in Casey v. Planned Parenthood. The Court explained
that when it makes a ruling like Roe, it “calls the contending
sides of a national controversy to end their national division.”
Yet still the
controversy endures. No matter how many times pro-lifers have been
authoritatively invited to put down their placards and accept the slaughter of
innocent unborn children as one of our founding ideals, they have refused —
sometimes patiently and politely, sometimes angrily, always firmly.
Now 40 years have
passed since Roe, and nobody pretends that our division is
ending. Time just ran a cover story declaring that “abortion-rights
activists” have “been losing ever since” 1973. Nearly half of Americans think
of themselves as pro-life, often a larger percentage than considers itself
“pro-choice.” State governments are passing what protections for unborn
children they can, given the Court’s hostility. The number of abortions has
been dropping, if slowly, for years.
Pro-lifers are
not winning: The suggestion is obscene. Nearly 56 million human beings have
been killed in the womb since Roe, a toll that rises another
million each year. The pro-life movement’s achievement is a witness, not a
victory. We have maintained resistance to an injustice rather than vanquished
it.
But neither have
we suffered a final defeat, nor will we so long as Americans remain who are
willing to stand for the country’s true founding principle: that all men are
created equal by their Creator; that all of them have the right to life,
liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, whatever their creed or station, their
race or their place, their might or their weakness. The Supreme Court has been
a formidable enemy of this principle for much of our history. It struck down
laws against slavery in an attempt to settle that issue and call the contending
sides to end a national division. It blocked congressional attempts to protect
civil rights following the Civil War. Pro-lifers who are tempted to despair
should remember that Plessy v. Ferguson was on the
books for even longer than Roe has been.
Roe
has always been bad constitutional law, something that even honest supporters
of the abortion license admitted they could not plausibly find in the
Constitution. The Casey Court that portentously
affirmed Roe studiously avoided saying that it follows from the
Constitution. Abortion itself seems to inspire the same kind of bobbing and
weaving. (Imagine an NRA that committed itself to the absolute defense of “the
right to own” but could not bear to give its verb an object.)
Over on the other
side of the debate, we labor under no such handicaps. We know that whether we
will live to see victory over abortion is not in our hands. We also know that
standing for truth, for mercy, and for justice is always within our power, and
so we will keep doing it for as long as the evil endures.
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