On January 22, 1973, with one swing of the gavel, the U.S. Supreme Court gave women the right to snuff out the life of their unborn children. The Court’s Roe v. Wade decision ignored the will of the American people and catapulted our nation into an era of bitter political division and moral decline.
In Roe, seven justices, with no experience in science or medicine, determined that unborn children were not entitled to any protection under the law. After citing examples from ancient pagan cultures, the Court asserted that “the unborn have never been recognized in the law as persons.” However, in a private letter, Justice Harry Blackmun, author of the Roe decision, explained, “If this suggestion of personhood is established, the appellant’s [pro-abortion] case, of course, collapses, for the fetus’ right to life is then guaranteed…Harry Blackmun (Newscom)
“Decades later, medical science has conclusively established the humanity and personhood of the unborn, but the U.S. Supreme Court has refused to reverse its ruling.
In 2004, Judge Edith Jones, of the Fifth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, sharply criticized the Roe decision. In her conclusion, Jones wrote,
It takes no expert prognosticator to know that research on women’s mental and physical health following abortion will yield an eventual medical consensus, and neonatal science will push the frontiers of fetal “viability” ever closer to the date of conception. One may fervently hope that the Court will someday acknowledge such developments and re-evaluate Roe and Casey accordingly.
Several Supreme Court Justices have opposed the Roe decision. “The Constitution contains no right to abortion,” Justice Antonin Scalia argued. “It is not to be found in the longstanding traditions of our society, nor can it be logically deduced from the text of the Constitution.”
Right to Life in Declaration, Constitution
Indeed, both the Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution place tremendous emphasis on our God-given right to life. Most Americans are familiar with the Declaration’s assertion: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” In addition, the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments to the U.S. Constitution promise that no person shall be deprived of life without due process of law. Indeed, many legal scholars believe that Roe was wrongly decided—including some of the most ardent advocates for legal abortion. Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg described Roe as “heavy-handed judicial intervention” that remains “difficult to justify.” Alan Dershowitz, a well-known pro-abortion Harvard law professor, labeled Roe an example of “judicial activism.” Laurence Tribe, professor of constitutional law at Harvard, stated, “Behind its own verbal smokescreen, the substantive judgment on which [Roe] rests is nowhere to be found.”
Edward Lazarus, who clerked for Justice Blackmun, admitted that “Roe borders on the indefensible” and called his mentor’s decision a “jurisprudential nightmare” that “required an analytical leap with little support in history or precedent.”
While the right to abortion is nowhere to be found in the U.S. Constitution, the landmark case of Roe v. Wade has certainly scarred our national character. Mother Teresa once said reprovingly, “America needs no words from me to see how your decision in Roe v. Wade has deformed a great nation. The so-called right to abortion has pitted mothers against their children and women against men. It has portrayed the greatest of gifts—a child—as a competitor, an intrusion, and an inconvenience.” Mother Teresa (Newscom)
In 1983, President Ronald Reagan penned an essay titled “Abortion and the Conscience of a Nation.” In that pro-life tract, he wrote:
Our nationwide policy of abortion-on-demand through all nine months of pregnancy was neither voted for by our people nor enacted by our legislators—not a single state had such unrestricted abortion before the Supreme Court decreed it to be national policy in 1973…
Make no mistake, abortion-on-demand is not a right granted by the Constitution. No serious scholar, including one disposed to agree with the Court’s result, has argued that the framers of the Constitution intended to create such a right. … Nowhere do the plain words of the Constitution even hint at a “right” so sweeping as to permit abortion up to the time the child is ready to be born. Yet that is what the Court ruled. Ronald Reagan
The High Court’s ruling in Roe, Reagan wrote, in words that echoed former Supreme Court Justice Byron White, is nothing less than “an act of raw judicial power.”
No comments:
Post a Comment