In addition to Ed Whelan’s reflections on today’s anniversary of Roe v. Wade, and Michael New’s welcome reasons for optimism, I would add a link to the remarks of Robert P. George at yesterday’s Cardinal O’Connor Conference on Life. Calmly outraged, soberly realistic, prayerfully hopeful, Robby reminds us that the soul of the American nation is at stake in the struggle over abortion.
Browsing around to major newspapers, however, I find the curious fact that none of the most prominent ones–not the New York Times, nor the Washington Post, nor the Los Angeles Times, nor the Chicago Tribune, nor the Boston Globe, nor the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, nor even (disappointingly) the Wall Street Journal–has so much as one editorial, op-ed, or column in its pages today on the appalling 36th anniversary of Roe v. Wade. With the exception of the Journal, these are all liberal papers, whose editors are deeply invested in the maintenance of the abortion regime. Wouldn’t they want to celebrate the anniversary of a Supreme Court decision they find so “liberating”?
Or–this is just a thought–perhaps their silence on this day owes something to a vestigial capacity for the recognition of injustice and of their complicity in it. That is, a vestigial capacity for shame. If so, that would be heartening indeed.