When William F. Buckley Called for Overturning Roe in 1974

Joshua Tait, a historian of conservative thought at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, dug up an old William F. Buckley column from the vaults last night:

The op-ed was published on September 10, 1974 — just under one year and nine months after Roe v. Wade — in Buckley’s nationally syndicated On The Right column. On the heels of Roe, abortion — previously a relatively obscure issue — had just catapulted into the mainstream as a hot-button political debate. It was a pivotal moment for American politics, but it was also transformative for the GOP, specifically. Up until that point, the Republican Party’s stance on abortion had been ambiguous-to-pro-choice. As I wrote last week, “In the years leading up to Roe, it was not at all clear that the GOP was going to be the pro-life party. While Roe overturned abortion restrictions in almost every state in the country, the one notable exception was New York, whose liberal Republican governor, Nelson Rockefeller, signed what then–Planned Parenthood president Dr. Alan Guttmacher approvingly described as ‘the most liberal abortion law in the world.’ Even Ronald Reagan signed an abortion-liberalization law when he was governor of California.” But after Roe, the party began “refashioning itself as the political vehicle for social conservatism”:

In an effort to appeal to the religious Right, Ford dropped Rockefeller from the vice-presidential spot on the 1976 GOP ticket. That year’s Republican platform noted a range of opinion on abortion in the party and called for “a continuance of the public dialogue on abortion” but added, for the first time, that the party “supports the efforts of those who seek enactment of a constitutional amendment to restore protection of the right to life for unborn children.” (The same year, Reagan told a news conference that the abortion bill he signed was a “mistake.”) The 1980 GOP platform recognized “differing views on this question,” but affirmed “our support of a constitutional amendment to restore protection of the right to life for unborn children.” By 1984, the language was unambiguous: “The unborn child has a fundamental individual right to life which cannot be infringed. We therefore reaffirm our support for a human life amendment to the Constitution, and we endorse legislation to make clear that the Fourteenth Amendment’s protections apply to unborn children,” the platform said, adding that the party supported “the appointment of judges at all levels of the judiciary who respect traditional family values and the sanctity of innocent human life.”

Buckley was writing against the backdrop of all of this. In the full text of his column, which Tait shared in a subsequent tweet, he places the dire significance of the Roe ruling — which overturned abortion restrictions passed by democratically elected legislatures in the vast majority of states — in the context of a long line of judicial-activist interventions: “The public, under the tutelage of its moral and intellectual leaders — is being trained, as regards the Supreme Court of the United States when it is interpreting the Constitution, to accept its rulings as if rendered ex cathedra, on questions of faith and morals,” he wrote. “Thus political candidates for office are routinely quoted as saying that they disapprove (let us say) of busing schoolchildren; but that if the Supreme Court rules otherwise, that of course will be that. It is a far different statement from one, republican in analysis and spirit, which would read: ‘I am against busing, but if the Supreme Court rules otherwise, I shall abide by its decision pending the final verdict on the question by the people through the amendment process.’” He continued on to make the case, in this broader context, for a constitutional amendment that would overturn Roe and send the issue of abortion back to the states:

The durability of the United States Constitution is in part testimony to the genius of its architects. But it endures also because it changes. It changes in considerable part at the shaping of the Supreme Court; concerning those elaborations of the Constitution much poetry has been written, mostly by those who, at any particular historical period, are enthusiastic about the direction the Court is taking.

The public needs to experience a release from a subtle thralldom to judicial morality. The polls are clear on the matter known as busing, and clear also on abortion when last there was a state plebiscite on the question. As regards busing, the people are overwhelmingly opposed. The polls are clear also that the voters are opposed to the total secularization of the schools. A constitutional amendment, such as proposed by President Ford, done athwart the will of the Court for the first time in modern history, would accomplish more than simply bring relief to the majority who consider themselves victims of judicial usurpation. It would deliver the republic from a presumptuous ethical-political tribunal which has come to treat the Constitution with something like an author’s possessiveness. Thus is mocked their fellow Americans’ powers of thought analysis, and their august commitment to self-rule. Accordingly, the special need for a constitutional amendment, as proposed by the President.

Buckley’s concern for the Court’s influence over the way that Americans think about self-government was prescient. Andrew Breitbart’s famous adage that “politics is downstream of culture” is only true up to a point; it’s undeniable that Roe, and many other landmark rulings like it, had profound effects on the national political culture. But history doesn’t only move in one direction: Nearly a half-century after this magazine’s founder called for abortion law to be returned to the hands of the American people, the Court appears poised to do just that. Our republican way of life — what Benjamin Harrison aptly dubbed “the American genius for self-government” — may just have some fight left in it yet.