Catholic Online Forum

The pro-life position should be presented as exactly what it is: a matter of justice and fundamental human rights. Religions, such as Catholicism, rightly teach that abortion is a grave moral evil, but the question is not fundamentally a matter of religious doctrine. Like slavery, it is a matter of natural justice. The governing principle of political morality is the principle of the equal protection of the laws. To uphold that principle and insist on it in our political practice is not to “impose religious dogma,” it is to fulfill our basic moral obligations as a society dedicated to “liberty and justice for all.”

For a political order to withdraw the law’s protections from any class of human beings for any reason (race, sex, ethnicity, age, size, stage of development, condition of dependency, or whatever) is to commit a grave injustice against them. That’s what Roe v. Wade did. For us, as Americans, Roe is not just bad constitutional law, it is a betrayal of a hard-won constitutional principle. That is why Roe must be overturned and why we must fight in the domain of politics, and not merely in the domain of culture (though there, too), for the protection of unborn members of the human family.

Roe has never been accepted by the American people as a whole as a valid constitutional decision. It is widely regarded, even among liberal academics, as poorly reasoned—at best. Many scholars and others (including more than a few who are not pro-life in their moral and political convictions) regard it as a glaring (and even embarrassing) example of the judicial usurpation of authority left by the Constitution in the hands of the people and their elected representatives. Even Roe’s diehard supporters tend to defend it on the grounds that it is an “established precedent,” not on the grounds that it is correct as a matter of constitutional interpretation.