On Jan. 22, 1973, the U.S. Supreme Court decided
Roe v. Wade and its companion case,
Doe v. Bolton. The Court ruled that abortion must be permitted for any reason before fetal viability—and that it must be permitted for "health" reasons, broadly defined in
Doe (so as to
encompass virtually any reason), all the way until birth.
Roe and
Doe legalized abortion on demand nationwide.
The
New York Times proclaimed the verdict "a historic resolution of a fiercely controversial issue." But now, 42 years later, abortion is as unresolved and controversial as ever. Three intractable problems will continue to plague the Court and its abortion jurisprudence until the day when, finally,
Roe is overturned.
First, and most importantly, the outcome of
Roe is fundamentally harmful and unjust. Why? The
facts of biology show that the human embryo or fetus (the being whose life is ended in abortion) is a distinct and living human organism at the earliest stages of development. "Human development begins at fertilization when a sperm fuses with an oocyte to form a single cell, a zygote," explains the textbook
The Developing Human: Clinically Oriented Embryology. "This highly specialized, totipotent cell marks the beginning of each of us as a unique individual."
Justice requires that the law protect the
equal dignity and basic rights of every member of the human family—irrespective of age, size, ability, dependency, and the desires and decisions of others. This principle of human equality, affirmed in the Declaration of Independence and the United Nations' Universal Declaration of Human Rights, is the moral crux of western civilization. But the
Roe Court ruled, to the contrary, that a particular class of innocent human beings (the unborn) must be excluded from the protection of the law and allowed to be dismembered and killed at the discretion of others. "The right created by the Supreme Court in
Roe,"
observes University of St. Thomas law professor Michael Stokes Paulsen, "is a constitutional right of some human beings to kill other human beings."
After
Roe, the
incidence of abortion rose dramatically, quickly topping one million abortions per year and peaking at 1.6 million in 1990 before gradually declining to
1.06 million in 2011 (the latest year for which estimates are available). Under the
Roe regime, abortion is the leading cause of human death. More than
57 million human beings have now been legally killed. And abortion has significantly and
detrimentally impacted the health and well-being of many women (and men). The moral gravity and scale of this injustice exceed that of any other issue or concern in American society today.
The second problem with
Roe is that it is legally, constitutionally mistaken. Justice Harry Blackmun's majority opinion claimed that the "liberty" protected by the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment includes a "right of privacy" that is "broad enough to encompass" a right to abortion. "As a constitutional argument,"
notes University of Pennsylvania law professor Kermit Roosevelt (who favors legalized abortion), "
Roe is barely coherent. The Court pulled its fundamental right to choose more or less from the constitutional ether."
The right alleged in
Roe is blatantly contradicted by the history of abortion law in the United States. Ratification of the Fourteenth Amendment roughly coincided with enactment of a wave of state laws prohibiting abortion from conception with the
primary aim (according to
clear and abundant historical evidence) of protecting unborn children. Most of these statutes were already on the books by the time the Fourteenth Amendment was adopted in 1868, and many of them remained unchanged until
Roe struck them down more than a century later. "To reach its result," Justice William Rehnquist thus concluded in his
dissenting opinion, "the Court necessarily has had to find within the scope of the Fourteenth Amendment a right that was apparently completely unknown to the drafters of the Amendment."
Blackmun's reasoning was fallacious, his facts erroneous, his key historical claims
demonstrably false. The process behind the decision, we now know, was
remarkably shoddy.
Roe and
Doe constituted a full-blown exercise in policy-making—the arbitrary (untethered to the Constitution) invention of a new nationwide abortion policy to reflect the personal preferences of a majority of the justices.
Even pro-choice legal experts don't try to defend
Roe on its merits. "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,"
wrote the eminent constitutional scholar and Yale law professor John Hart Ely. "It is bad because it is bad constitutional law, or rather because it is
not constitutional law and gives almost no sense of an obligation to try to be."
Third,
Roe is undemocratic. It struck down the democratically decided abortion laws of all 50 states and imposed abortion-for-any-reason nationwide, whether the people like it or not. Because the Court lacked any constitutional warrant for this move, it usurped the rightful authority of the elected branches of government to determine abortion policy.
The radical scope of the
Roe regime was not and has never been consistent with public opinion, which
favors substantial legal limits on abortion. (Polling questions on
Roe are often
inaccurate, and ignorance of the extent of the decision is widespread).
Roe has disenfranchised millions and millions of Americans who will not rest while
Roe and abortion on demand persist. They want to have a say. The Court decided they could have none.
So these are the intractable problems of
Roe v. Wade. The Supreme Court abused the Constitution to usurp the authority of the people by imposing a gravely unjust policy with breathtakingly disastrous results.
Unjust. Unconstitutional. Undemocratic. Together, these problems will lead, eventually, to
Roe's collapse.
