FROM THE PRESIDENT'S DESK
Wanda Franz, Ph.D.
ROE v. WADE AFTER 30 YEARS
On January 22, the infamous Roe v. Wade and Doe v. Bolton decisions of the U.S. Supreme Court will have been in force for thirty years.
This is not just thirty years of legal history--this is thirty years of legalized slaughter of innocent children in the womb.
Thirty years of women not being told the truth about abortion.
Thirty years of women being pressured into an abortion that would "solve the problem" of a crisis pregnancy, when of course it was intended to solve somebody else's problem.
Thirty years of emotional suffering by women who, after the abortion, felt betrayed and abandoned when their partners and relatives and the so-called "counselors" had offered them nothing but abortion as the way out.
Thirty years of women at first denying the horror of their abortion and then rediscovering it--sometimes many years later--in their dreams, seeing their lives fall apart, and then struggling through the guilt for forgiveness and redemption.
Thirty years of disappearing generations. After three decades of so-called "choice," the body count today stands at over 43 million dead unborn children--none of whom had a choice.
And thirty years of judicial sleight of hand and arrogance.
In Roe v. Wade, the Court ruled that the Texas abortion statute (prohibiting most abortions) violated the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. In the majority opinion, Justice Harry Blackmun conceded that the "privacy right involved cannot be said to be absolute," but concluded that "the right to personal privacy includes the abortion decision, but this right is not unqualified, and must be considered against important state interests in regulation."
In reality, of course, the Court does consider the right as "unqualified," and the states have been pretty much powerless in asserting any substantive "interests" in the matter. Reviewing the situation, the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee observed on June 8, 1982: "No significant barriers of any kind whatsoever exist today in the United States for a woman to obtain an abortion for any reason during any stage of her pregnancy."
The key to the situation lies in the companion decision to Roe, Doe v. Bolton, which makes clear that "state interests" become irrelevant when "health" is invoked to justify the abortion: "[T]he medical judgment may be exercised in the light of all factors--physical, emotional, psychological, familial, and the woman's age--relevant to the wellbeing of the patient. All these factors may relate to health. This allows the attending physician the room he needs to make his best medical judgment."
And how much "room" does the abortionist get? Enough room for near-infanticide, in a most brutal manner, up to the point just before complete birth. This we know because on June 28, 2000, the Supreme Court ruled in Stenberg v. Carhart that Nebraska's law outlawing partial-birth abortions is unconstitutional. Under Roe, anything goes.
One of the two dissenters in Roe, Justice Byron White, revisited--in another dissent (Thornburgh v. ACOG, 1986)--the question of the "privacy right," supposedly protected as a "fundamental liberty" under the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. According to legal precedent, to be a "fundamental liberty" the specific right must either (1) be "implicit in the concept of ordered liberty,'' without which ''neither liberty nor justice would exist," or (2) be "deeply rooted in this Nation's history and tradition." Justice White concluded that under either definition Roe v. Wade is illegitimate.
The pro-abortion majority on the Court is, of course, aware of this fundamental flaw. In Planned Parenthood of Southeastern Pennsylvania v. Robert Casey (1992), the Court's majority opinion--authored by Justices Sandra Day O'Connor, Anthony Kennedy, and David Souter--made a desperate attempt at salvaging the "liberty" problem. The result is the notorious "mystery passage" about the meaning of the personal "liberty" protected under the Fourteenth Amendment:
"These matters, involving the most intimate and personal choices a person may make in a lifetime, choices central to personal dignity and autonomy, are central to the liberty protected by the Fourteenth Amendment. At the heart of the liberty is the right to define one's own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life."
This is, at best, "new age"-type drivel and not
legal reasoning. As Justice Antonin Scalia observed in his dissent, under this
standard, bigamy, for example, would be a constitutional right.
I shall spare you the other convoluted arguments the majority opinion makes for
its defense of Roe v. Wade and get right to the Court's finger-wagging at
pro-lifers. Wanting an end to pro-life activism, the Casey majority
demands obedience with breathtaking conceit:
"Where in the performance of its judicial duties, the Court decides a case in such a way as to resolve the sort of intensely divisive controversy reflected in Roe , its decision has a dimension that the resolution of the normal case does not carry. It is the dimension present whenever the Court's interpretation of the Constitution calls the contending sides of a national controversy to end their national division by accepting a common mandate rooted in the Constitution."
The Court has it backwards: pro-lifers didn't start the controversy, the Court did--with Roe v. Wade. The Court "resolved" nothing. The Court created this enormous social problem in the first place. Asking us to be quiet is the height of judicial arrogance.
Justice Scalia makes the point by quoting from Justice Benjamin Curtis's dissent in the Dred Scott case of 1857:
"When a strict interpretation of the Constitution, according to fixed rules which govern the interpretation of laws, is abandoned, and the theoretical opinions of individuals are allowed to control its meaning, we have no longer a Constitution; we are under a government of individual men."
And in the words of Abraham Lincoln, "the people will have ceased to be their own rulers, having, to that extent practically resigned their Government into the hands of that eminent tribunal."
No, we pro-lifers shall not go away. We shall only get stronger, because in the end the truth prevails.