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Roe’s Legacy
Roe v. Wade was decided in 1973, one year after I graduated from high school. For nearly two centuries in our history, unborn children were recognized as members of the human race with the same right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness as any other person. Roe changed all that. Unborn babies became fetuses, parasites, bits of protoplasm completely bereft of any rights at all. In the last 43 years, over 60 million fetuses have been aborted in the US alone and, of that 60 million, 18 million were black. Worldwide, an estimate of nearly 1.5 billion babies have been aborted since the Roe decision pushed the green light for the US in 1973.
How important are these figures? Since 1973 there have been approximately 158 million live births reported in the US. (Stay with me now, dear reader, there is math.) That means there have been 218 million US pregnancies in the US reported since Roe was decided. Of those pregnancies, a full 27 percent were aborted. Put another way, more than one in four children conceived in the US since Roe have been destroyed, are lost and forgotten.
The numbers: 60,000,000 lives lost. How is this not the greatest tragedy of the last half-century? How is this not the most horrific loss of life ever in the recorded history of mankind? How is this not suicide of the species?
I can’t believe that the Left, those self-professed fonts of human empathy, cannot see this. Do they really push political war over the right to kill off their own children?
If good is to survive and justice is to be served, the practice of abortion must end. We’ll let history be the judge of those who claim otherwise.
Published in General
When you start figuring in the children and grandchildren that could have come from these first order lost lives, this tragedy in individual lives also begins to look like a suicide of an advanced western society.
Are you kidding? Roe is the Holy Grail, the one Sacrament of the Left. They will do anything to protect it. Including offering their own children as a sacrifice.
Oof. I never thought of it that way.
In major urban areas (at least in New York City) more Black (African-American if you force me to adopt the nomenclature of the moment) are aborted than are born alive. Apparently one of the goals of The Left is to kill off Blacks.
That 60 million figure is about the same total as deaths associated with World War II, the bloodiest war in world history.
Hear, hear, DK!
Maybe we can convince liberals this is another case of separating a child from its parents . . .
The elites, who aren’t having any, are sacrificing other people’s children. (And spending other people’s money to do it.)
Its a pretty sad world when we can say things like “order of magnitude more dead than the holocaust” and not be hyperbolic.
If you look into the history of Margaret Sanger and Planned Parenthood, they were more up front about it back in the days before a certain Austrian paper hanger made eugenics unfashionable.
My pro-life parents always stressed to us that different people support legalized abortion for different reasons, and that some of those people really are well meaning, while others are not. Once, when somebody on tv said something he found particularly objectionable, my usually calm father became very angry, and he said, out of the blue and to no one in particular, “The driving forces behind abortion are racism and greed”. I was very young at the time, and preferred to believe that our opponents were mostly well meaning, “Really, Dad?” I said. “Do you really think so?” He looked at me straight in the eye and said “I know it.”
A year or two after that happened, I was speaking to a guy I knew about abortion: he had actually gotten a girl pregnant, and the two of them decided to give the baby up for adoption; he was very supportive of her all through the pregnancy: he assured me that he would always counsel any of his friends to choose life. Then he said, “But you know, all those black welfare mothers out there, they should get abortions.”
It would be nice to think that he was just one strange guy, but he probably isn’t. None of this is to say that everybody who supports abortion is racist-obviously that isn’t the case-but it’s definitely a factor for some people.
We are also in danger of not having sufficient population to support the planet. Many European countries don’t have enough people to re-populate their societies. And if I’m not mistaken, our own birthrate is dropping. Abortions play a role in this problem. Who will take care of our parents?
According to Wikipedia the death toll of the Holocaust was 17 million. Counting Jews alone it was 6 million.
The United States has killed ten times as many babies as Jews were killed in the Holocaust.
Sort of.
Our founders were passionate about the sanctity of life – except that they originally defined life as starting around week 15 of pregnancy. So the majority of present-day abortions would have been legal at the founding.
More to the point, in the modern era, abortion was already legal in a number of states comprising about half the population of the country by the time Roe was decided (including, of course, in California thanks to Reagan). The ramping up of legalization happened to coincide with the new introduction of a safe and effective (relatively speaking, of course) method of abortion – the vacuum procedure used predominantly today.
So call me cynical, but I don’t think the morals of our country took a huge downhill turn. Rather, I think that large swaths, perhaps even majorities, in our country have always seen first trimester abortions and morally conscionable, but didn’t get worked up about the legal status of abortion until a reliable but clinic-based method popped up. And if Roe v Wade were to be overturned (which I pray it is), and the states were again given the choice, I fully expect to see abortion remaining legal for at least half of the population.
And that’s the way it was before Roe v. Wade. The left had their states with abortion, the right had their states with restrictions or outright bans, but no one prevented women from going to another state if need be (unless they were underage and transported without parental consent by the “impregnator” who was typically several years older).
But I digressed. My bad . . .
In states on both sides of the issue, there were groups and organizations who tried to persuade voters to elect officials who would pass (or revise) state laws in their favor. Roe v. Wade took that away, and this may have been the very first crack in the wide separation our two sides experience today.
As well, Roe‘s finding of a ‘right to privacy’ extended to other situations…
I have tried to explain to my daughters and younger friends that selling Roe back then soft-pedaled it with the misunderstanding that it was “just a bunch of undifferentiated cells” and the promise that it was only in the first trimester before it became something more than a lump of undifferentiated bio-matter. I wasn’t quite old enough to think that through at the time, but by the time I was, I was sickened to learn that the soft pedal had been discarded, without much whimper.
It’s more the right to have unprotected sex with someone with whom they would never consider raising a child.
This….
In Doug’s numbers you see that almost a third of those children not brought to term are black, and depending on how you google and the census data you pull from, black are only between 12% and 14% of the population during the Roe era. Under any reasonable linguistic justice this would be called genocide. Yet it is the unstated (except when they slip up) objective for the progressive rationale for Roe’s unwavering support.
However the bigot card is hung around the necks of the conservative, life affirming, religious side of the political spectrum. This is profoundly Orwellian to say the least. It must have something to do with that masterful ability of the intellectual elites to hold multiple incongruent thoughts without one’s head exploding.
And what happened to the promise “the pill” would prevent all this from happening? “The Pill” would prevent women from having children out of wedlock, drastically reduce the number of abortions (even before R v. W), and free women to explore their sexuality.
Now we have skyrocketing single-motherhood, abortions on demand (although it’s being rolled back a lot, and demand is down), and women exploring their sexuality who find out, “Okay, I know what it’s all about. Where can I find a decent man to marry?”
Sheesh . . .
Muslims and Mexicans
And, with the modern left, nothing is more important than eliminating barriers to sexual gratification. Nothing.
I think you overstate your case. I don’t believe that our founders would agree. Belief that “human life” begins when the fetus is distinguishable as a human being at 15 weeks is not congruent with the indiscriminate right to end a pregnancy. Science has come a long way since then. We now know what pregnant women have always known; that they are “with child” when pregnant, carrying a baby. Killing that child for convenience requires a society of callousness and inhumanity that is very difficult to fathom. Yet here we are. Yes, there were states that allowed abortion before 1973. One has to wonder whether or not the practice is protected by the 10th Amendment. I can see abortion justified in those awful circumstances, rape or incest, when the mother’s life is at risk or when severe genetic or developmental issues will result in the infant’s suffering and imminent death. That’s it.
The ultimate question to be resolved is whether or not the protections of the 14th amendment to life, liberty and property extends to the unborn? And if it does apply, when does it apply? This will determine the federal limits on state abortion policy.
I was astounded that the moment Kennedy announced his resignation, the left started screaming about how Roe v. Wade was about to be overturned! This was their first instinct! Their first worry! Suddenly the immigration issue was shoved past the back seat and into the trunk and told to shut up. In their minds, their beloved right to abortion was about to be overturned.
Setting aside the fact that they cry about this every time there’s a conservative victory of some sort, that their brains immediately and instinctively focused on that single issue upon Kennedy’s announcement is rather disturbing.
In one of the more bizarre alignments of interests, apparently the logic of the Roe decision was sometimes used in the initial fights to force states to recognize parents’ right to home-school their children (according to an acquaintance who has done legal work in the home school world).
You mind backing that one up? I’ve never heard of such a thing.
Yes. New York state has taken a number of steps that would ensure that abortion would still occur regardless of the status of the Roe v. Wade decision. I suspect California and probably Massachusetts and several other states have done the same.
The Roe v. Wade decision removed from the public the right to debate the issue, which cemented the sides and has prevented for 45 years reasoned discussion of the topic. Hence it was particularly moronic of a majority of the justices of the US Supreme Court, after seeing the massive damage Roe v. Wade did to public discourse, to remove from public discussion the topic of “marriage” with the Obergefell decision.
Two points.
I took @mendel point to be that not only did some states permit abortions pre-Roe, but the numbers of states allowing abortions in some form was actually increasing before the decision. Justice Ginsberg has actually raised the issue of whether Roe might have been a mistake, since the trend was favorable in terms of liberalizing abortion law, and it was Roe that galvanized resistance.
As to whether the 14th Amendment forbids states to allow abortions, I think that issue will only come to the Supreme Court if Congress passes a federal law outlawing abortion which is signed by a President. I think that unlikely, and even more unlikely any Court in the forseeable future would rule that way. That is a much different proposition than overturning Roe and leaving abortion to the states.
You are exactly right, Drew. I received this link this morning in my catholicvote.org newsfeed:
23 Tweets From the Left on Kennedy’s Retirement.
To say that their immediate response is “rather disturbing” is putting it mildly. That these people are so wed to the concept of killing babies is diabolical.