Thirty years have passed since
Roe vs. Wade and its companion case
Doe vs. Bolton were issued by the US Supreme Court. As many of us
continue to work to overturn these decisions, many think that the decisions
constitute a "compromise" position on the divisive issue of abortion. After all,
they say, our current national policy on abortion allows a woman to have a child
if she wants, and to abort the child if she wants.
But Roe and Doe are about as far away from a "compromise" as
you can find. The decisions allow for abortion throughout the entire nine months
of pregnancy, and do not recognize any right of the unborn child to be spared
death by abortion. With a nation divided about abortion, one might think that
under a "compromise" solution one could find some reason to protect at least
some unborn children. But in Roe and Doe, one searches in vain for
any situation in which an unborn child is protected. As the University of
Detroit Law Review pointed out, "The Supreme Court's decisions…allowed
abortion on demand throughout the entire nine months of pregnancy" (Paul B.
Linton, Enforcement of State Abortion Statutes after Roe: A State-by-State
Analysis, Vol. 67, Issue 2, Winter 1990).
In this framework, every unborn baby is disposable. Every. That's
hardly a "compromise" position.
"Leave it up to the woman to decide" sounds to many like a fair compromise.
But this position completely destroys equality before the law, because it
constitutes a complete removal of protection from the child. The lives of unborn
children who are wanted and carried to term do not have any more protection
from the law than the lives of unborn children who are unwanted and carried
to the abortionist. The lives of the wanted are protected only by their "wantedness,"
which, of course, can be subject to change at any time. As far as the law is
concerned, they are all non-persons, regardless of circumstance. That's
hardly a "compromise."
A "compromise" usually, and by definition, allows some accommodation to both
sides in the dispute. But current abortion policy allows no accommodation to the
claims that innocent human life makes upon us.
The more you know about the Roe and Doe decisions, the clearer
this becomes. In fact, the Gallup polling company, in an extensive analysis of
the opinions of Americans on abortion, admits that the level of support in
surveys for Roe vs. Wade is lower if more information about the decision
itself is offered in the question, and higher if less information is offered.
(See
www.gallup.com/poll/specialReports/pollSummaries/sr020122iii.asp)
In Judgement at Nuremberg, one of those responsible for the Holocaust
says that he "never thought it would go that far," and was told that it "went
that far" as soon as a single innocent life was taken. There is no room for
"compromising" about human life. Permitting one life to be destroyed is already
extreme. Unless we're all protected, we're all in danger.
