EDITORIALS/Abortion for states to decide
Abortion is now a matter for the states and, more particularly, the consciences of the voters who live in them to decide.
The right to an abortion is not in the Constitution and the correction of so grievous an error on Roe is a painful but necessary chapter in the American story.
The high court’s 6-3 decision in the Mississippi case Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization handed down on Friday did not ban abortion but dramatically reverses the Roe v. Wade ruling that legalized abortion in 1973 and its 1992 complementary case, Planned Parenthood v. Casey.
The ruling remedies rare judicial blunders that lent respectability to the medically conducted killing of a woman’s pre-born infant but that continued to eat at the conscience of the nation and rightly so.
The May leak of Justice Samuel Alito’s draft of the Dobbs decision had left little doubt that Roe v. Wade’s 50-year run would halt as one of the world’s most extreme laws governing the treatment of the unborn. In the interim, abortion defenders vowed to meet with indignation a reassignment of the life-ending practice from federal jurisdiction to the states. Some got violent as liberals screaming in the streets tend to do.
Demonstrators made good on their threats by warming up with protests at the homes of the nine justices and with a recent domestic terrorist attempt on the life of Justice Brett Kavanaugh. A shadowy group called Jane’s Revenge, named in honor of Roe v. Wade plaintiff “Jane Roe,” has claimed responsibility for acts of destruction at Catholic churches and pregnancy crisis centers.
Abortion is a very emotional issue, but murder is murder, yet there are cases where a medical procdure might be necessary to save the life of the mother and that, in the end, is her decision.
Yet such violence seen as a result of the reversal constitutes a convulsion of fury and pain that comes with facing up to the disposal of 62 million human souls.
The decision to extinguish life within her womb cannot but leave a woman struggling to stave off self-recrimination that threatens to emerge in a haunting fashion. It’s unsurprising that legions on the always-angry left have assembled to lash out at the very notion that the “right to choose” might not be synonymous with the right to kill another human being.
Pastorally, many women who have had abortions and live with guilt for decades have found forgiveness through Christ in their Christian faith. Grueling decisions are often made for medical reasons that are not tantamount to murder for convenience.
The irony underlying the eruption of angst is that the Supreme Court’s Dobbs ruling does nothing to restrict abortion. Rather, it corrects Roe’s vain attempt to find a legal basis for the practice in the U.S. Constitution. There is no legal basis.
A majority of Americans favor limits on abortion after 15 weeks of pregnancy, but few support a total ban on the practice. Progressives, mostly on the East and West Coasts, are destined to remain abortion-friendly; the more traditional midlands portend a future as havens for life. In so mobile a society as modern America, it is unlikely that an individual will fail to obtain the abortion she seeks and abortion tourism is emerging to become a thing with free gift cards and suppers to celebrate when the procedure is done.
When passions subside over Roe’s demise, the 50 states will be at liberty to enact abortion laws in accordance with the consciences of the women and men who reside there. This is, after all, still a free country.
The far left has predictibly errupted in rage and liberals have gone so far as to challenge the legitimacy of the court simply because they disagree. To be a Democrat today is to be for murder, apparently.
Bill Clinton’s rare, legal and safe abortion philosphy has been out the window for some time.
Meanwhile, conservatives for five decades have prayed fervently and they elected President Donald Trump who promised to appoint conservative justices — and that promise explains much of the disdain seen from the “Orange man bad” crowd, especially on the left.
Letting the states decide abortion is, in the end, the right decision, constitutionally.