Roe Falls: The End of the Beginning

Although it seems anecdotal that the opposite is more common, I found my way into the world of politics because I stood up for life. It was in middle school that I first learned that people of a foreign culture living alongside my own still sacrificed children to demons in temples that mimicked health clinics with priests masquerading as doctors. My horror was instinctive and called for some sort of action, and I spent much of my time in the years that followed praying in clinics, marching in protests, and doing as little as I could to help the unborn.

My entire worldview has been formed around this one simple belief: Murdering babies is bad and should be illegal. Yet even in pro-life circles, and even over the past decade, that outcome seemed far from guaranteed. Everyone wanted to see roe overturned, and most hoped that someday it would be. But it was usually seen as something on the horizon – the ultimate goal of a struggle that, if we’re lucky, might find a solution in our lifetime.

It happened yesterday. After nearly half a century of big-business slaughter, a Supreme Court majority — composed of Samuel Alito, the three judges appointed by Donald Trump, John Roberts as a running mate, and Clarence Thomas, who assented with a flamethrower — has toppled Roe v. calf. According to the court, Judge Alito writes that “the Constitution does not grant a right to an abortion. Roe and Casey must be overridden and authority to regulate abortion returned to the people and their elected officials.”

But that’s not a win. in the Dobbs, the court did not abolish the sacrifice of children; it just knocked them down mandatory victims of children. As the final clause there suggests, the court yesterday managed to uphold nothing more than the assertion that “the nation’s historical understanding of ordered liberty does not prevent elected officials from deciding how abortion should be governed.” A brief overview is given of what it used to look like roe:

Until the second half of the 20th century, there was no support in American law for a constitutional right to abortion. No state constitutional provision has recognized such a right. Until a few years before Roe, no federal or state court had recognized such a right. Didn’t have a scientific paper either. In fact, abortion has long been a crime in every single state. Under common law, abortion was punishable and unlawful at at least some stages of pregnancy and could have very serious consequences at all stages. American law followed common law until a wave of legal restrictions in the 19th century expanded criminal liability for abortion. When the Fourteenth Amendment was passed, three-fourths of states had made abortion at any stage of pregnancy a crime.

This summary has the double effect of reminding us how little basis there is roe in American history and in American law, and how much damage – beyond the 63 million human victims, of course – the Burger Court’s decision has caused. Almost the entire legal and moral landscape of theroe America has been torn apart over the issue of a child’s right to life. After 50 years of brutally damaging the conscience and constitution of an effectively possessed nation, there can be no quick or easy return to the historic American consensus that killing babies is bad and should be illegal.

roe is dead. This means that the first phase of a cultural and spiritual war has been decided in our favor. But the war will continue, and new campaigns will see the conflict spill over into more than just the cultural and spiritual realms.

The most dedicated advocates of legal child sacrifice have already made it clear that they will wage violent jihad in their defense. Maternity centers are burning coast to coast, Judge Brett Kavanaugh nearly got an assassin’s bullet and organized terrorists are warning of more consequences. That was predictable, or at least it should have been. Only once in our history has the country been so divided over the basic rights of a human person; this conflict was resolved on a battlefield.

Even then, the division was one of states against states. We learned at the cost of 600,000 American lives – just 1 percent of those already lost in the war that began by Roe-that there cannot be a union whose members cannot agree on what constitutes a human person worthy of the protection of the law. But that is exactly the situation Dobbs now sends us frantically in direction. Many states will now reaffirm the most basic right bestowed on all human beings by their Creator. Many, like much-discussed Virginia, will try to negotiate an impossible compromise between the camps of life and death. Most important will be those states that are fully committed to the cause of Moloch. Chief among the indictments is Massachusetts, whose progressive Republican governor left the state in the postroe America explicitly pitting one state of the Union in a life-and-death conflict against a number of others. This is not a path to lasting peace. It’s political brinkmanship — not to mention murder by proxy.

Robert P. George, a right-wing liberal philosophy professor known for his committed pro-life stance, took to Twitter yesterday to encourage magnanimity halfway to victory and instructed other pro-life advocates: “Please read Lincoln’s second inauguration and let that spirit guide you. Let us not gloat over those of our fellow citizens – good people who genuinely care about the welfare of women – who see the fall of Roe as a disaster. malice against anyone; charity for all.”

Outside my office window, right in front of my desk, is a ten-foot statue of David G. Farragut, the Tennessee admiral who fought for the Union in the First Civil War. So my thoughts drift towards the Battle of Mobile Bay instead: