The Supreme Court’s overturning of Roe v. Wade can be a turning point for the United States.
The Supreme Court’s overturning of Roe can be a turning point for the United States.
‘T he real question today is not when human life begins, but, what is the value of human life?”
President Ronald Reagan asserted this on the tenth anniversary of the Supreme Court’s decision in Roe v. Wade, writing in “Abortion and the Conscience of America,” an unsolicited article in The Human Life Review. (The article was later published as a short book introduced by commentaries.) “The abortionist who reassembles the arms and legs of a tiny baby to make sure all its parts have been torn from its mother’s body can hardly doubt whether it is a human being. The real question for him and for all of us is whether that tiny human life has a God-given right to be protected by the law — the same right we have.”
Even then it was clear that “we live at a time when some persons do not value all human life. They want to pick and choose which individuals have value.” And Reagan wasn’t even living at a time when assisted suicide was law in any state in the United States, as it is now. But he already saw the desire to eliminate Down syndrome — by eliminating people with Down syndrome. At the time, a baby in Bloomington, Ind., had been left to starve to death, by judicial order. “The real issue for the courts was not whether Baby Doe was a human being. The real issue was to whether to protect the life of a human being who had Down Syndrome, who would probably be mentally handicapped, but who needed a routine surgical procedure to unblock his esophagus and allow him to eat.” Reagan quoted the testimony of a doctor who said that, even with the unblocking of the esophagus, the baby would have a “‘non-existent’ possibility for a ‘minimally adequate quality of life’ — in other words, that retardation was the equivalent of a crime deserving the death penalty.”
Thanks to the state of Mississippi and some courageous Supreme Court cases, we are at a Dred Scott moment. “Despite the formidable obstacles before us, we must not lose heart,” Reagan wrote in 1983. “This is not the first time our country has been divided by a Supreme Court decision that denied the value of certain lives.” He pointed out that Dred Scott “was not overturned in a day, or a year, or even a decade.” He recalled that “at first, only a minority of Americans recognized and deplored the moral crisis brought about by denying the full humanity of our black brothers and sisters; but that minority persisted in their vision and finally prevailed. They did it by appealing to the hearts and minds of their countrymen, to the truth of human dignity under God.” He urged that “from their example, we know that respect for the sacred value of human life is too deeply engrained in the heart of our people to remain forever suppressed.”
“Every legislator, every doctor, and every citizen needs to recognize that the real issue is whether to affirm and protect the sanctity of all human life, or to embrace a social ethic where some human lives are valued and others are not. As a nation, we must choose between the sanctity of life ethic and the ‘quality of life’ ethic.”
In some ways that is harder today, as abortion has been in our midst for 39 more years than when Reagan wrote. On the other hand, the science is so clear. The advent of 4D sonogram imaging should have been a game-changer. Surely it has been when an abortion-minded mother can see her baby. Many a pro-lifer on the front lines and moms themselves can testify to that fact. It requires a certain denial of reality to insist that an unborn baby is not a developing human life. The question really remains: Does that matter? Does he or she deserve protection. As the Court found finally that there is no right to abortion in the Constitution, so, too, we read in the Declaration of Independence, which we celebrate every July with fireworks: “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.”
The Supreme Court has liberated us from the lie that was Roe. Now can we declare independence from most abortion in America? There is a lot of talk of rare, horrific cases. Can we also talk about the majority of abortions, which are backup birth control? Can we make sure that women and girls know options other than abortion? Can we use private and public resources to help moms and children? And can we rehabilitate family in America? It is our most precious natural resource. And yet ideology has doctors giving children puberty blockers.
“Abraham Lincoln recognized that we could not survive as a free land when some men could decide that others were not fit to be free and should therefore be slaves,” Reagan wrote. “Likewise, we cannot survive as a free nation when some men decide that others are not fit to live and should be abandoned to abortion or infanticide.”
He continued: “As a nation today, we have not rejected the sanctity of human life. The American people have not had an opportunity to express their view on the sanctity of human life in the unborn. I am convinced that Americans do not want to play God with the value of human life. It is not for us to decide who is worthy to live and who is not. Even the Supreme Court’s opinion in Roe v. Wade did not explicitly reject the traditional American idea of intrinsic worth and value in all human life; it simply dodged this issue.”
Well, now that we are free of Roe, we have a choice to make in each of the 50 states. Do all lives matter, or not? And we need not only to protect unborn lives but to prioritize motherhood (and fatherhood). Women are amazing. Let’s stop lying about what’s possible and get them the resources they need to choose life and help theirs flourish.
This column is based on one available through Andrews McMeel Universal’s Newspaper Enterprise Association.