We Lived to See It

W e lived to see it. Many of us never thought we would. This day should be celebrated for generations to come.

The overturning of Roe v. Wade is a momentous milestone in American history. It is the largest single step forward for human rights in America in well over half a century. It is the largest stroke against the arbitrary taking of human life in America since the abolition of slavery in 1865.

True, by overruling Roe, the Supreme Court did not ban abortion; it only restored power to the elected governments to do so. State governments will have to take the next step. So will the federal government, to the extent permitted within its enumerated powers. But they have been denied that power for 49 years.

This morning’s decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization swept away those restrictions just as abruptly as Roe erected them. But whereas the seven men behind Roe assaulted our system of democracy and the rule of law, wiping out long-standing laws in nearly every state without a shred of legitimate basis in the written Constitution ratified by We the People, Dobbs restores the supremacy of the democratic Constitution and the sovereignty of the American people.

I think back to Election Day 1984. I was 13 years old. Ronald Reagan had just won 49 states in a colossal popular landslide that validated the Reagan Revolution. Those were heady times for conservatives. We believed that we were right, and that what was right was finally popular. Yet the obstacles before us seemed so massive and entrenched that undoing them could be the work of generations.

We lived to see it.

In 1984, the Soviet empire had stood for over six decades. The Berlin Wall had stood for almost 25 years, and the Cold War had persisted for nearly 40. To a teenager, these seemed impossibly old things. Yet, five years later, the Berlin Wall fell. Two years after that, the Soviet Union itself was gone. The whole world of the Cold War — the Warsaw Pact, the Sandinistas — was swept into the dustbin of history. South African apartheid went with it.

Conservative Republicans proved that they could win nationally. The party retook the Senate in 1980 after a quarter of a century. But the Democrats, in 1984, continued the House majority they had held for 30 years. That, too, seemed as if it would last forever. It lasted another decade. But then, in 1994, the Reagan Revolution came to the House, led by Newt Gingrich.

We lived to see it.

Crime and decay in our cities was such a deeply embedded condition that it seemed impervious to solution. Those of you too young to recall that era can watch literally any movie or television show made in the 1970s or 1980s and set in a then-contemporary American city. New York City was “ungovernable.” But then, led by Rudy Giuliani’s dramatic first year in office in 1994, many cities became remarkably safe and livable again. I would never have imagined, when I graduated college in 1993, that I would become a New York City homeowner in 2000.

We lived to see it.

Judges and scholars of the U.S. Constitution, in the 1970s, scoffed at the notion of reading the document, and the laws passed by Congress, as if the people who wrote and ratified them meant them to bind and limit the agents of the government. Laws were read creatively; the Constitution was treated as merely a platform for liberal-progressive values. The Second Amendment was handled as an embarrassment that nobody took seriously. But the impossible happened: Even Democrat-appointed liberal judges began talking about reading the Constitution by its original meaning, and statutes by their text. In 2008, the U.S. Supreme Court recognized an individual right to keep and bear arms — just as the Constitution says.

We lived to see it.

The big white whale was still out there. In 1984, only two members of the Supreme Court were avowedly against the illegitimate overreach of Roe, and the newest Justice (Sandra Day O’Connor) would not join them. In 1992, a Supreme Court with eight Republican appointees (plus one Democratic appointee who dissented in Roe) held, 5–4, that Roe must stand forever because a thing that stood for 19 years was too embedded in the fabric of our search for “the right to define one’s own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life.” The following year, one of the long-standing dissenters was replaced by an enthusiast of abortion. In 2016, another of the dissenters died with a Democrat in the White House, and the Democrats appearing poised to claim another term. The end to a legal regime that claimed 60 million American lives seemed further and further away.

We lived to see it.

And maybe, because it took so long, we are finally ready to accept in our political system the value of human life. We weren’t ready in 1992. But the political will is there now, in many states. The nation, and the world, is starving for children.

And because we lived to see it, other Americans yet unborn will live to see so much more that they never would have seen.

Correction: This article originally stated that all nine justices who decided Planned Parenthood v. Casey were Republican-appointed; eight of the nine were.