It has been 48 years since the Supreme Court legalized abortion in Roe v. Wade.
Today is the 48th anniversary of the Supreme Court decision in Roe v. Wade, in which seven justices found in the Constitution a supposed right to abortion. The decision struck down nearly all restrictions on abortion that most states had in place, and its reasoning made it nearly impossible to regulate the procedure even later in pregnancy.
Since 1973, Roe and ensuing abortion jurisprudence have succeeded in blocking the majority of laws intended to protect unborn human beings, despite the fact that those cases paid lip service to a compelling state interest in preserving unborn human life.
Forty-eight years later, what is the legacy of Roe? Conservative and liberal legal scholars alike agree that the Court’s constitutional reasoning was severely lacking. In each subsequent abortion case, justices have twisted and squirmed their way into increasingly tortured explanations for why the Constitution supposedly mandates that abortion remain legal across the entire country.
We are told by peddlers of abortion that Americans support Roe, but most Americans have little idea what it says or what it permits. Most Americans, in fact, grimace at abortion, especially in the later stages of pregnancy. They do not believe, as activists now insist, that abortion is a social good worth celebrating.
Even so, time and again, lower courts wield decades of jurisprudence against state governments attempting to offer some protection for human beings in the womb. The Court’s ongoing illogic is regularly applied to rebuke citizens and remind them that their will matters not at all — on abortion, the Court has spoken, and voters must stay silent.
But, of course, they haven’t done so. A silver lining of the post-Roe era has been a vibrant, tireless, growing pro-life movement, which rather than viewing the Court’s ruling as a reason to go home and give up has instead marched peacefully on Washington every year and used both political and cultural means to give voice to the unborn.
Despite one political party’s choice to morph into a staunch, monolithic defender of abortion on demand, at any stage of pregnancy, funded by the taxpayer, pro-life Americans have refused to let go of the issue. If abortion is indeed what we believe it be, it is hard to imagine they ever will, both for the sake of unborn children and their mothers, harmed no matter the circumstances by the choice they’ve made.
And what have these decades cost us? Upwards of 65 million unborn lives, according to the best available estimates. Even if one believes wholeheartedly in the “right to choose,” it is hard to face that fact without blanching. Whether we call ourselves pro-life or pro-choice or in between, we know these “clumps of cells,” these rapidly growing beings, these things lost to abortion are human lives.
The justices in Roe glossed over that essential question, but the intervening decades of medicine and science have shown us beyond a doubt that each abortion ends a human life. May our nation survive long enough to look back in horror on what we’ve allowed. And may God have mercy on us.