The Death of Roe Means Life for Many Unborn Children
The United States Supreme Court has reversed Roe vs. Wade, the Supreme Court decision that made abortion a Constitutional right which made abortion on demand legal across the country. As of 10:45 a.m. June 29, 2022, 63,898,372 human beings have been purposely killed through abortion since that infamous day in 1973. The count continues but the numbers will recede as states begin to take their positions on the abortion question.
Despite what is being reported in many news outlets, shouted into the air during abortion rights protests, and touted by pro-abortion politicians, abortion has not been abolished in America. The issue of abortion is returned where it should have been placed since 1973 — to the states and their elected representatives and to the people in those states.
The conservative-leaning Supreme Court took the position of examining our founding document, the Constitution of the United States, to see what it reveals about abortion. They relied heavily on the Tenth Amendment which reads as follows:
The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the states, are reserved to the states respectively, or to the people.
So, the justices began their search of the Constitution and despite the errant findings of the Court in Roe v. Wade, could find no mention of abortion in the document. The powers of decision making in America not specifically spelled out in the Constitution or prohibited by it are given to the states where the legislative bodies have been elected by the people. Order was restored in that it found that the Roe decision was not based on the explicit reading of the Constitution and should have relegated the decision about abortion to the states from the beginning.
In Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, the court decided that Roe was in error in holding that the right to abortion is a right to privacy that issues from the First, Fourth, Fifth, Ninth and Fourteenth Amendments. In my words, they concluded that the Supreme Court in 1973 had gone on a fishing expedition to find a right to abortion in the Constitution. If such a right could be found there, then it could be applied across the country as a Constitutional right for all citizens. Of course, that is exactly what happened. Roe vs. Wade has been considered a rogue decision since its inception even by some liberal scholars and was doomed to eventually be overturned.
The consenting justices carefully summarized and refuted the arguments for concluding that there is a right to privacy in the Constitution. Read the First, Fourth, Fifth, Ninth and Fourteenth Amendments for yourself and see it you can identify one. You can’t. That’s because it was truly a fishing expedition by the 1973 Supreme Court who entered the realm of legislation when their job is to judge the law on the basis of the wording of the Constitution.
In reading the arguments of the dissenting justices one can find few arguments originating in the Constitution. The dissent has much to say about the problems faced by poor women, the effects of pregnancy on women, and the burdens of motherhood but found it hard to refer to the document itself for the basis of their conclusions. They use expressions like it “undermines the Court’s legitimacy” or we have “lost a fundamental constitutional protection” without referring to evidence in the document itself to support their arguments.
In giving their opinions the dissenting justices failed to show any regard for the State’s interest in protecting unborn life. That should tell us where they are positioned politically, ethically or morally. It’s amazing that in a major court process about the death of the unborn that little was said by the dissenters about the death of the unborn.
We see this attitude in the comments of abortion proponents as well. Gloria Allred, a well-known women’s rights activist tells her story of being raped and having to go to a “back alley” doctor to have her child aborted. She calls this decision part of “a war on women” and refers to herself as a “womb” and to men as “womb-less humans.” She characterized abortion as a “womb-less” human with a clothes hanger and her devastating experience as a result of abortion being illegal.
Others speak of the hardship of raising a child in today’s heartless society or the heartbreak of being poor and not able to afford another mouth to feed. Much is said about “bodily integrity” or the rights of the “womb” people. Others present the socioeconomic implications of unwanted pregnancies especially among inner city Black women in poor families. Some mention that lack of legal abortion leads to unsafe procedures by unqualified providers.
The tragic thing about all of these arguments presented by abortion advocates is that they are devoid of references to the Constitution. Even among the Supreme Court dissenters there was virtually no attempt to appeal to the Constitution as the foundational law of our society. It is quite apparent that proponents of abortion inherently know that there is no constitutional right to abortion despite what Gloria Allred and many others espouse.
We have come to a point in our country where the chasm that exists between the two basic political sides is based on how we view the Constitution. We either see it as the basis of our law in America or as a mere listing of general ideas that are open to flexibility based on society’s needs at the time. One side sees the founding document as the way we maintain our stability as a free nation and the other dismisses it as a living document open to change according to how the political winds are blowing. Conservative thinkers look to its wording for guidance and liberal thinkers believe the wording should not interfere with our social norms. The framers made it possible to amend the Constitution if a matter was serious enough to get the support of most of the people of the country. Abortion is not such an issue and could not survive the stringent amending process.
There is another characteristic of this great split in our society. It is the place that God fills in America. We are being told that we are living in post-Christianity America. I fear this may be true. The Constitution was founded mostly by men who believed in God and knew that a free republic cannot exist in a void without God. The great chasm in our society is between those who still believe that God is supreme and those who say He does not exist. One side believes in a living God who handed down principles and inspired the founders to establish a Constitution that espouses those principles in peoples’ lives. The other side believes that man came into existence through evolution and that he is merely a higher form of animal life.
People who don’t believe in the Creator can dismiss Bible passages like this one in Psalm 139:
For You formed my inward parts; You wove me in my mother’s womb. I will give thanks to You, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made; Wonderful are Your works, and my soul knows it very well. My frame was not hidden from You, when I was made in secret, and skillfully wrought in the depths of the earth; Your eyes have seen my unformed substance; And in Your book were all written the days that were ordained for me, when as yet there was not one of them. (Ps. 139:13–16).
Those of us who know God cannot dismiss such words knowing that they share how God felt about us even when we were in our mother’s womb. Neither can we dismiss the wording of our Constitution.
From this point forward we will either be ruled by laws established through due process or we will be ruled by dictators who take the law into their own hands and administer it as they please. We may be seeing the foretaste of the latter in our present government.
Through due process guided by the Constitution the court decided against Roe vs. Wade and summarized their findings as follows:
The Court’s decision today properly returns the Court to a position of judicial neutrality on the issue of abortion, and properly restores the people’s authority to resolve the issue of abortion through the processes of democratic self- government established by the Constitution.
So, for the time being the rule of law and the Constitution have won the day. How we respond to our God who is being rejected by so many may be the real issue before us in the coming days.
