He didn’t know when it would be overturned, and neither do we. But the day will come. This year, God willing.
He didn’t know when it would be overturned, and neither do we. But the day will come. This year, God willing.
O n this 49th anniversary — though to call it that sounds just wrong, since “anniversary” has a sense of celebration — of the Roe v. Wade decision, that thing which dissenting Justice Byron White scorned as “an exercise of raw judicial power . . . an improvident and extravagant exercise of the power of judicial review that the Constitution extends to this Court,” it’s worth remembering, and maybe even reveling in, a 1985 essay, a clarion of hope and foresight, that the great James Lane Buckley wrote for the Human Life Review.
Adapted from a speech he gave earlier that year to the Delaware Pro-Life Coalition, the Buckley essay, “Sound Doctrine Revisited,” has kindly been released by the Human Life Review. (If you are not a subscriber, you should be: Sign up here.) It’s available here.
The Supreme Court justices are now engaged in crafting opinions on Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, the recently heard Mississippi case that is being handicapped to overturn Roe, as well as its Doe v. Bolton sidekick, and the High Court’s 1992 Planned Parenthood v. Casey ruling. Given this long judicial trail, it remains a wonder to some veterans of the abortion wars: Come 2022, will we, really and truly, have finally arrived at this seemingly unreachable point?
This January 2022, we have a sense of being on a cusp, of seeing a promised land. In 1985, though, the only thing that most pro-lifers could see were the high walls of the deep and dark shaft, the moral abyss of permitting the right and practice of ending the lives of the innocent unborn, year in and out, and by the millions.
No, those were not merry salad days. When Mr. Buckley (a former U.S. senator who was then running Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, and who would soon be nominated and confirmed to the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia) gave his talk in Wilmington on March 8, 1985, the country was the scene of a ghastly 1.6 million abortions every year. Roe and Doe were still twelve years young and cocky, their shock waves continuing to reverberate and rattle, their cultural immensity seeming to settle in and harden, their champions gleeful and crude (“Get your rosaries out of my ovaries!”). Victory of any kind was rare for abortion foes. Plentiful and regular were disappointment and defeat in the legislative and judicial arenas, never mind the political one. In particular, many a pro-life Democrat legislator (and yes, there were many) began the cowardly practice of embracing rhetoric touting their “personal opposition” to abortion while they fell in line with the national party’s aggressive platform language, which defended abortion on demand.
And yet all did not despair. There was this message of hope coming from a man who had experienced political defeat but who retained an observant sense of optimism, informed by hints and signs that this moral calamity was triumphant, but only temporarily, that it was being fought, that the fight would be long, true, but that one day, maybe sooner and more dramatically than any could expect, the right to slaughter for convenience’s sake would come crashing down.
Recalling the achievement of a dozen years since Roe was sprung upon the nation, Buckley, in his essay, noted the generating forces that would push back against the High Court’s diktat:
Twelve years ago, I was under no illusions about the task we were undertaking in attempting to undo the court’s incredible decision. We did not fool ourselves. We knew it would not be easily or quickly accomplished. What we did not know — what we have discovered since then — is that the pro-life enterprise, launched in shock and outrage against the greatest odds, would have so large an impact on the American political system.
We did not anticipate how opponents of abortion — defenders of children, really — would create one of the most amazing grass roots movements since abolitionism. We did not anticipate how this issue would shatter long-established patterns of political allegiance, how it would wrench millions from their partisan moorings, how it would encourage millions more to participate in our electoral system.
At the outset of his article, Buckley made a geological comparison about how this looming day of reckoning would present itself to America:
As in the case of volcanic regions, the surface may appear calm and unchangeable for decades on end while subterranean pressures build up that ultimately erupt with a force that transforms the social landscape for all time.
When, though? “In God’s good time we too shall overcome,” he added, hearkening to the obvious comparison — despised by many an abortion advocate — between the right-to-life cause and America’s most recent and bloody social battle:
So it was over the long years in which the great civil rights crusade against racial discrimination gathered strength. The American people came to understand the inherently intolerable nature of the “separate but equal” standard sanctioned by the Supreme Court to justify segregated education. And when the court finally reversed itself, the seismic shocks spread across the continent and brought the remaining barriers tumbling down.
So will it ultimately be with our crusade as more and more Americans come to understand the realities of abortion; as more and more of them are forced to acknowledge what they already intuitively know: that such antiseptic phrases as “terminate a pregnancy” and “freedom of choice” are nothing more than euphemisms for the deliberate destruction not of potential life, but of a living and biologically unique human being that is capable of pain before it leaves the sanctuary of the womb.
In these times of snark, we are well aware of the easily (and often idiotically) hurled comeback, “Science!” Touted and tweeted often for leftist political reasons, it is a term that, as Buckley recognized 37 years ago, proved central to what would, in plain sight, wear away the abortion right:
When sufficient numbers of Americans are no longer able to hide from the biological facts of human development, there will arise an irresistible demand to reverse the carnage unleashed by Roe v. Wade; and one way or another, whether by judicial action, or constitutional amendment, or legislative restraints, it too will be reversed.
Viva la sonogram!
Back to 1985, another sign of hope had occurred, a few weeks prior to his talk, that was . . . pregnant with consequence. A brutal cold snap had forced the cancellation of the Capitol-steps presidential-inauguration ceremony as well as the traditional ensuing parade down the main boulevards of the District, at the beginning of Ronald Reagan’s second term as president. By coincidence, it was a day before the annual March for Life. Surely the old ladies and Knights of Columbus and the evangelical pastors would save their toes and fingers from frostbite, forgo their overnight bus rides, and call off the annual witness.
Nope. Per Buckley:
One day after America’s most important procession down Pennsylvania Avenue had to be cancelled because of the most bitter cold in Washington’s memory, some 70,000 pro-lifers trekked down the same street, as they have done every year since Roe v. Wade.
What did the temerity of these shivering rabbis and priests, students and handicapped, and moms and dads and deplorables of all parties and persuasions and faiths, even the faithless — people whose consciences who would not let the slaughter of innocents pass without some protest, some prayer, some fight — mean to James Buckley, who as a senator addressed these same people from the same Capitol steps that were too inhospitable for the prior day’s inauguration?
I purport to speak for none of them, though I used to speak to them, from the steps of the Capitol, when I was a member of the Senate. And yet, I venture to say that most of the marchers this year feel as I do: that their goal, so distant for so long, as impossible a dream as Don Quixote ever envisioned, is now quite possible and perhaps nearer than we dare to think.
I do not know whether it will be achieved by legislation or a transformed federal judiciary. One way or another, as we have said all along, we will win the fight we began twelve years ago.
Few did dare to think that way. But Jim Buckley, ever a man of inspiration, did. And maybe for good reason. Today a youthful near-99 (he has the distinction of being the oldest living former U.S. senator) and a World War II veteran, he knew that terrible things, seemingly triumphant, could in fact be defeated. Recalling a famous scene marking one of fascism’s final chapters, he concluded his piece with this very upbeat prediction:
Many of you are too young to remember how, after the liberation of Paris from the Nazis, Charles de Gaulle led, it seemed, virtually everyone in Paris down the Champs Elysees. They marched to celebrate the rebirth of the City of Light after years of savage brutality. They marched to let the world know that Western civilization had endured and was resurgent.
And so do I look confidently ahead to the day when we will have one last march down Pennsylvania Avenue, celebrating the liberation of our country, not from an alien army, but from alien ideas, ideas foreign to our Judeo-Christian culture and hostile to the ethical underpinnings of Western civilization. Those ideas have already claimed victims by the millions, sacrificed to the notion that life is not sacred, that the quality of life determines the right to it.
And just as liberated Paris became a symbol and an incitement to those who still fought on, in other lands, against the old barbarism, so will the liberation of our country from the barbarity of abortion inspire women and men around the world in their crusade for life.
It would make a wonderful 100th birthday present for this champion of innocent human life.
Do read Jim Buckley’s prescient essay in its entirety. If you missed it above, you’ll find it here. It offers an excellent history lesson: There is much in the piece detailing his efforts — while serving as President Reagan’s envoy to head the U.S. delegation to the United Nations’ “Mexico City” conference on population in 1984 — to push back against efforts to promote abortion and the Malthusian mindset that so prevails in elite foreign-policy circles.
And again, please, do consider subscribing to that essential journal that published the Buckley essay, the Human Life Review. That’s done easily, right here.