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NRL News
35 YEARS OF
ROE v. WADE In the two foundational documents of our republic two fundamental questions were addressed: Who are we? and How shall we govern ourselves? The Declaration of Independence gave us an answer to the first question: We are all created equal, “endowed by the Creator with certain unalienable Rights” and “among these are Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness.” And the Constitution answered the second questions: Ours is a government “ordained” and “established” by the “people,” delegating the power to govern to three separate branches: legislative, executive, and judicial. We need to remind ourselves of these fundamental facts as we assess what has happened since the U.S. Supreme Court imposed Roe v. Wade and Doe v. Bolton 35 years ago on this republic. By inventing a constitutional right to an abortion in the Roe v. Wade decision and by extending that “right” over all nine months of pregnancy with the extremely broad “health exception” in the Doe v. Bolton decision, the U.S. Supreme Court arrogantly put itself in opposition to the foundations established by the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution: The right to life is no longer “unalienable” because an innocent unborn child can now be put to death for the convenience of the mother. An oligarchy of unelected Supreme Court justices ignored the constitutional separation of powers and appointed itself as a “super legislature” in order to decide the abortion issue in defiance of the constitutional rights of the legislative branch. Worse, by “constitutionalizing” the abortion right the Supreme Court precluded corrective legislative action. Only two avenues are left now. Either the Court reverses itself or an extremely difficult process of constitutional amendment corrects the Court’s error. Every pro-lifer must understand now the urgent need to change the composition of the Supreme Court if a judicial reversal is to occur. Of course, the damage to our self-understanding and to constitutional rule inflicted by Roe and Doe concerns primarily us, the living. What about the innocent victims of the abortion slaughter? The gruesome story of their sacrifice is shown in the graph on this page. (The numbers are taken from U.S. government statistics and the compilations by the Alan Guttmacher Institute.) Since abortion was made a constitutional right in 1973, the cumulative toll has risen relentlessly: a total of 44.6 million babies dead from abortion by 2004. And when Roe v. Wade will have been in force for 35 years on January 22, 2008, the cumulative number will be approximately 50 million dead babies—compare that with the 302 million living in the United Sates. The yearly number of abortions rose rapidly during the seventies, reached a plateau during the eighties, peaked in 1990 at 1.6 million, and declined since then to just under 1.3 million a year in the most recently available numbers. Disturbingly, the number of repeat abortions (i.e. the mother has had at least one abortion before the current one) has steadily risen over the years and, after a peak in the early nineties, has settled in at nearly 600,000 a year (approaching half the total). Not all is bleak, however. The abortion rate, i.e. the number of abortions per 1,000 women of childbearing age (age 15-44), peaked in 1980 at 29.3. It has declined since then by 30% to 20.4, while at the same time the numbers of women of childbearing age and births rose 17% and 14%, respectively. The abortion rate would have declined even further had it not been for women choosing repeat abortion. What accounts for the declines? First, we should note that when the abortion rate hit its peak in 1980, the pro-life movement had organized itself and was getting its message out. The development of ultrasound imaging of the unborn child, massive educational campaigns (such as NRLC’s campaigns to stop the Freedom of Choice Act and outlaw partial-birth abortions), and the increasing political effectiveness of the pro-life movement on the state and federal levels are advancing the pro-life cause further. The message is clear: NRLC’s approach works. Stick with NRLC. |