Richard Thompson, TMLC President & Chief Counsel Today marks the 43rd anniversary of the U.S. Supreme Court’s infamous 1973 decision in Roe v. Wade. In this decision, 7 unelected judges, holding lifetime appointments, created out of thin air a constitutional right for women to kill the innocent children in their wombs. Thus far, 58 million innocent babies have been killed. The annual March for Life held in Washington DC is unique in our nation’s history. There is no other event where more than half a million people annually gather in our nation’s capital to protest a Supreme Court decision. Why is it taking so long to overturn Roe v. Wade? Many legal scholars, even those sympathetic to abortion rights, acknowledged that Roe v. Wade was not based on any precedent.
“What is frightening about Roe is that this super-protected right is not inferable from the language of the Constitution, the framers’ thinking respecting the specific problem in issue, any general value derivable from the provisions they included, or the nation’s governmental structure.”
— John Hart Ely, Yale Law Professor
“One of the most curious things about Roe is that, behind its own verbal smokescreen, the substantive judgment on which it rests is nowhere to be found.”
— Laurence H. Tribe, Harvard Law Professor
“As a matter of constitutional interpretation and judicial method, Roe borders on the indefensible. I say this as someone utterly committed to the right to choose. … Justice Blackmun’s opinion provides essentially no reasoning in support of its holding.”
— Edward Lazarus, former clerk to Justice Harry Blackmun
“[I]t is time to admit in public that, as an example of the practice of constitutional opinion writing, Roe is a serious disappointment. You will be hard-pressed to find a constitutional law professor, even among those who support the idea of constitutional protection for the right to choose, who will embrace the opinion itself rather than the result. This is not surprising. As a constitutional argument, Roe is barely coherent. The court pulled its fundamental right to choose more or less from the constitutional ether.”
— Kermit Roosevelt, University of Pennsylvania Law Professor
“Judges have no special competence, qualifications, or mandate to decide between equally compelling moral claims (as in the abortion controversy). … [C]lear governing constitutional principles … are not present [in Roe].”
— Alan Dershowitz, Harvard Law Professor
“[O]verturning [Roe] would be the best thing that could happen to the federal judiciary. … Thirty years after Roe, the finest constitutional minds in the country still have not been able to produce a constitutional justification for striking down restrictions on early-term abortions that is substantially more convincing than Justice Harry Blackmun’s famously artless opinion itself.”
— Jeffrey Rosen, George Washington University Law Professor
The fact that Pro-Life advocates still have to struggle to overturn Roe 43 years later is especially egregious when compared to how quickly the Supreme Court has reversed its decisions regarding homosexuality.
In 1986, the Supreme Court held that there was no constitutional right to engage in homosexual activity (Bowers v. Hardwick, 478 U.S. 186). Just seventeen years later, in 2003, the Court overturned that ruling and held all anti-sodomy laws were unconstitutional (Lawrence v. Texas, 539 U.S. 558). Just twelve years later, in 2015, the Court declared same-sex marriage a constitutional right (Obergefell v. Hodges, 135 S. Ct. 2584, 2588).
I deeply appreciate the unheralded sacrifices of the many people fighting on behalf of the unborn: those who participate in today’s March for Life; those who sacrifice their time as sidewalk counselors in front of Planned Parenthood facilities regardless of the weather, taunts from passersby, and harassment from clinic employees and the police; pregnancy help centers; respect for life committees; the many national Pro-Life organizations; and the people who pray this holocaust will end.
I want to specially mention the courageous actions of young students who wear their Pro-Life t-shirts to school, often in the face of unfriendly school officials and threats of discipline.
Our nation must be mindful of God’s ultimate justice as He beholds the faces of the millions of aborted children – the greatest among us – killed according to our laws. We should all tremble with fear knowing “the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether.”
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