The Wave of the Future -- Part One

You don't have to have a degree in psychology to conclude that our benighted opposition is in a deep funk. The symptoms include all the classic indices of depression, from anger and denial to lashing out irrationally in displaced anger.

If you were to attempt to chart their behavior, near the top of possible explanations would be what appears to be the imminent confirmation of Judge Samuel Alito, Jr. to replace Justice Sandra Day O'Connor on the Supreme Court. The Abortion Establishment and their friends in the United States Senate are alarmed that Judge Alito is a mainstream conservative, who is content to interpret the Constitution as it is written, not engage in a stream of judicial consciousness to reach conclusions that agree with his private policy preferences.

But as Senator Lindsay Graham (R-SC) has pointed out repeatedly in recent confirmation hearings, when you win the Presidency, you get to nominate the kind of justices you want to the Supreme Court. And no president or presidential candidate has more clearly signaled in advance precisely the kind of jurists he'd appoint than George W. Bush.

Part of the pro-abortion ambush strategy against Judge Alito was to strongly intimate that the future of Roe is in imminent peril. Were that only true.

Once O'Connor's departs, if Chief Justice Roberts and Samuel Alito vote to reverse Roe, there remain five Justices who have made clear their support for the core "right" to abortion first manufactured in Roe. They are Breyer, Ginsburg, Kennedy, Souter and Stevens.

This issue of what would happen were Roe overturned was discussed in depth yesterday on the Diane Rehm Show. Rehm is a Washington area institution, a veteran talk show host on a public radio station. If you didn't know she was pro-abortion to the hilt, you'd only need listen for about three and half-seconds.

Dorothy Timbs was on Rehm's show Wednesday, representing the pro-life side, paired up against Marcia Greenberger, a veteran pro-abortion proponent. Ms. Timbs is legislative counsel for state legislation for the National Right to Life Committee. Ms. Greenberger is founder and co-president of the National Women's Law Center.

Greenberger has been around for a long, long time. Timbs graduated from law school a few years ago. Her abilities were so obvious NRLC immediately snatched her up.

This background is necessary to understand the flavor of the debate. Timbs was able to talk about and, in a sense talk for, the younger generation. (See Part Two.)

Interestingly, Rehm did not challenge Timbs' observation that younger people--"my generation"-- are increasingly pro-life. Rehm even murmured a sound of affirmation to Timbs' point that how you measure overall public opinion on abortion depends on how the question is asked.

Timbs also made the astute observation that the slight majority support in favor of maintaining (or not overturning) Roe is based on a misunderstanding of Roe which essentially legalized abortion on demand throughout pregnancy. Her implication, clearly, was that if the public did grasp how wide-open is the "right" to abortion created by Roe, there would be considerably less support.

I couldn't help but laugh out loud a few minutes later when Rehm richly confirmed Timbs' analysis. Just after talking about the Senate Judiciary Committee's party-line vote in support of Judge Alito and how another conservative on the Court might affect a number of issues, including abortion, Rehm made the following startling observation:

"And of course the Roe v. Wade decision was made in terms of the right to privacy, It actually said absolutely nothing about abortion per se, but talked about the right to privacy." [Rehm's emphasis]

Earth to Diane, come in, please. It is one thing to go on an excavation hunting through (and around) the Constitution, in search of provisions that might be creatively expanded and enlarged to sustain the argument that abortion is a constitutionally protected right, and convince yourself that you have discovered it in the right to privacy.

But it is quite another for Rehm to go on some kind of magical mystery tour and state categorically that Justice Harry Blackmun and his six colleagues "said absolutely nothing about abortion per se" in Roe. If I had time, I'd count the number of times "abortion" appears in his 11,792-word-long opinion. Suffice it to say the word abortion appears three times in the first two paragraphs.

In Part Two we'll talk about a very in-depth poll of high school seniors that reveals just how pro-life they are. But those are just numbers.

The face of pro-life young America was on the Mall Monday and marching up Constitution Avenue toward the Supreme Court. In a supremely fitting gesture, the march began eight blocks closer to the Court than in previous years.

I think everyone in attendance understood what that symbolized.

If you have any comments, please send them to Dave Andrusko at dandrusko@nrlc.org.

Part 2