Abortion belongs with voters, not Supreme Court

In 1944, 14-year-old George Stinney stood less than 5 feet tall and weighed under 100 pounds. According to reports at the time, Stinney’s small stature made it difficult for prison guards to strap his small arms into the electric chair. When his executioner finally flipped the switch, Stinney’s convulsions knocked off the mask he was wearing, exposing his tearful face to onlookers.

Stinney, a young African-American boy living in South Carolina, had been found guilty of brutally beating two white girls to death with a railroad spike. The trial lasted two hours, and the jury deliberated for 10 minutes before sentencing Stinney to the electric chair.

In December of 2014, seven decades after his death, Stinney was exonerated.

In 2018, 31 states still utilize the death penalty to punish offenders. Across America for most crimes, state legislators ultimately decide the most fundamental questions about the value of human life. It would seem that the government putting its own people to death would be a matter of grave public concern, yet anti-capital punishment protests are rare.

The national reaction to the death penalty stands in stark contrast to the reaction to abortion, which still drives massive protests on both sides. Emotions are likely to become even more frayed, as President Donald Trump unveiled Judge Brett Kavanaugh to replace Justice Anthony Kennedy on the U.S. Supreme Court. Kavanaugh may hold the deciding vote to overturn the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision, which legalized abortion across the nation.

Before Roe, abortion was treated much as the death penalty continues to be — state voters and lawmakers were able to determine what their consciences could tolerate.

Roe and a number of other “reproductive rights” cases ripped the abortion issue from the hands of voters. Fueled by gender politics, the court instead conjured a then-unprecedented “right to privacy” that continues to have no basis in the U.S. Constitution.

So while state legislatures were once able to determine to whom all the rights and privileges of citizenship applied — even if they had yet to be born — the Supreme Court invalidated those laws in favor of its own will. This heavy-handed usurpation of representative democracy has driven the emotional debate for the last 45 years.

Yet in their most recent poll, Gallup found 53% of respondents believe abortion should either be “illegal in all circumstances” or “legal only in a few circumstances.” This, of course, is around the same number of Americans who support the death penalty.

In one instance, citizens are empowered with matters of life and death and in another they are not — a dichotomy that has triggered decades of discontent.

A fifth conservative on the Supreme Court wouldn’t necessarily render Roe a dead decision walking. And even if Roe were overturned, abortion wouldn’t suddenly be banned — the issue would simply revert back to states or fall to Congress, where the democratic process would once again take hold.