Roe reviled, revered, revisited
Through the five decades of uproar over Roe v. Wade, and especially in recent months’ anticipation of a new Supreme Court ruling on abortion, two questions have always been worth asking:
What are the activists saying and doing? And what are the implications for all of us if their claims are wrong?
Those questions are helpful in evaluating any issue, but since Monday’s leak of a possible Supreme Court decision overturning Roe, furious protests make them not just worthwhile but urgent.
One sign at a local protest read, “Supreme Court rapist not your choice.” By contrast, a photo of a protest at the Supreme Court showed a handmade placard that read, “Liberal atheist against abortion.”
Extreme positions and juxtapositions abound.
At one end of the spectrum are abortion-rights activists who fear the end of the Roe era as a coming apocalypse. At the other end are anti-abortion activists who rejoice at abating what they have long viewed as an ongoingapocalypse.
Abortion-rights activists predict an increase in deaths of women from illegal, unsafe abortions. Anti-abortion activists already mourn as tragic deaths the estimated 63,000,000 abortions performed in the U.S. since 1973.
Most activists for or against abortion are not “extremists,” but passions run very high for two primary reasons — the life-and-death reality of abortion itself, of course, and the sweeping and thus unwise nature of the Roe v. Wade decision.
The late justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, an abortion rights advocate, repeatedly lamented Roe’s ill-advised aspects. In a famous lecture she gave in 1992 (oft-quoted in recent days), she asserted that a more modest ruling “might have served to reduce rather than to fuel controversy” and expressed regret that the 1973 Court decided to “fashion a regime blanketing the subject, a set of rules that displaced virtually every state law then in force.”
That “set of rules,” with its lax trimester approach, has been rendered obsolete by modern medicine. Surgeons can perform life-saving surgeries on fetuses in utero, or, per Roe, other doctors can dismember and discard those fetuses.
At what point do we decide this dissonance is too extreme for a civilized society?
If the Supreme Court’s looming decision does indeed return the regulation of abortion to the states, we will very likely get a wide array of laws. In fact, we have that now. Mississippi’s newly restrictive abortion law, among a handful of similar state efforts, is what provoked the still-pending Supreme Court decision in the first place.
What are the implications if one side or the other in this conflict is wrong?
If anti-abortion activists are wrong about the humanity of fetuses and the need to protect them, then the restrictionsthey support may unnecessarily risk the health of pregnant women — hundreds, perhaps thousands — each year. Women unable to get abortions will have children they do not want, with any number of negative scenarios unfolding. The anti-abortion activists will have to redouble their pregnancysupport programs.
If they are right about the humanity of fetuses, then they will be responsible for saving thousands of lives each year — and they’ll still need to expand those pregnancy support programs.
If abortion-rights activists are right that a woman’s right to choose whether to carry a pregnancy to term outweighs the possible value of a fetus’s life, then they have nothing to do or worry about, other than fighting to keep abortion widely available.
But if they are wrong about the value of human life in utero, well — dear God.
A society that values human life would err on the side of caution. It is possible to do that without going to the extremes so many fear. A start would be to understand that life does not begin at conception or fertilization of the egg but at the egg’s implantation in the womb. “Morning after” pills are a partial solution both sides should embrace as we fumble and lurch toward a more humane culture.
There is no question that our culture desperately needs to become more humane.