Burning Roe v. Wade

Note: I purchased this volume to burn on a bonfire for the upcoming 45th anniversary of Roe v. Wade.  When I searched through the pages to find where the dissenting opinion of Justice Bryon White was, so I could remove it before burning the book, I COULD NOT FIND IT.  This book says it contains the complete text, but it does not.  I wrote a review of the volume for Amazon, but my review was rejected without them offering any specific reasons. I'm not going to spend a lot of time guessing what their problem was, but likely it is that I was blunt about abortion.  Below is my final review, a combination of what I sent originally and some changes and additions for the one I presently have on submission. As of this moment, it hasn't been approved.

The Review
First of all, Roe v. Wade is one of the most despicable documents in history.  It and slavish submission to it are responsible philosophically for the deaths of millions of human beings since 1973.  That itself is enough to earn this little volume a zero.  Less than zero. 

But if a person simply hopes to be objective and neutral, and approach the subject of abortion with an open mind and learn about Roe v. Wade by reading the original, full text, this volume fails.  Why?  Because it blatantly omits three additional dissenting and concurring opinions, ones that might give insight to the true meaning of Roe.  In particular, it does not include the scathing dissenting opinion of Justice Bryon White, joined by Justice William Rhenquist, who later became Chief Justice.

If you want to be educated about Roe, don’t buy this book.  In fact, there are no easily available sources of White’s opinion.  You will find it referenced on anti-abortion websites, but those are too easily dismissed.  The copy of Roe I have is from a bound law book in the law library at our county courthouse.  Because abortion is about blood and death, the truth about Roe v. Wade is hidden. If you want to find the complete text, you will have to dig.

White wrote: “I find nothing in the language or history of the Constitution to support the Court’s judgment. The Court simply fashions and announces a new constitutional right for pregnant mothers and, with scarcely any reason or authority for its action, invests that right with sufficient substance to override most existing state abortion statutes.  The upshot is that the people and the legislatures of 50 States are constitutionally disentitled to weigh the relative importance of the continued existence and development of the fetus, on one hand, against a spectrum of possible impacts on the mother on the other hand.  As an exercise of raw judicial power, the Court perhaps has authority to what it does today: but in my view its judgment is an improvident and extravagant exercise of the power of judicial review that the Constitution extends to this Court.”

Justice White wrote those words above and much more. His dissent is one of the best reviews of Roe v. Wade.  But don’t take my word for it. Find the complete text somewhere. Unfortunately it’s not in this volume.

40 Sorrowful Years

I sent this in to the Asheville Citizen-Times yesterday.
It should come out on the 21st or 22nd.

Guest Editorial by Meredith Eugene Hunt

40 years represents a mere turning of a clock—the earth moving around the sun.

      Time magazine’s January 14th cover story proclaimed, “Abortion-rights activists won an epic victory in Roe v. Wade. They've been losing ever since.”  This statement is wrong on the only scale that matters. 40 years after Roe, prenatal children are still being aborted “legally” in our country. 

      While abortion seems entrenched into our culture, in the realm of reasoned argument, the abortion-choice movement has lost the game entirely.  With the advances in observing the life of children in the womb, the work to educate university students on the true nature of abortion, and the logical arguments that demonstrate the humanity and personhood even of an embryo, abortion-choice rhetoric shows itself to be empty.  It’s strong on absurdities, non sequiturs, false history, and demonizing characterizations of pro-lifers.  If you add to our intellectual victory the network of non-profit agencies that serve women in a crisis pregnancy and confirm the compassionate heart of pro-life ideas, the defeat of the abortion choice “position” is total.

      The problems is, legal abortion isn’t dependent on sound jurisprudence or moral reasoning.  It never was.  “Pro-choice” efforts in those directions have been no more than gauze over the power to kill.  They’re an illusion to make the terrible seem less terrible—to comfort people so they can do what they want, and to mislead the desperate. 

      If so, then only a power in the opposing direction can counteract it.  I mean the power to save.  Am I talking about violence?  No.   We are entering an era for artists who communicate when people become deaf to reason, and martyrs who give themselves to saving the lives of others.

      We saw a shadow of the power to save in the Rescue Movement in the early 90’s when 34,000 people were arrested for peacefully blocking doors of abortion centers.  I see some hope now from young people who are impatient.  They’re behind personhood amendments in various states and they understand the principles of rescue, of intervening in a way that validates their belief that each abortion takes the life of a child. 

      On January 11 this year the Alabama Supreme Court recognized that “unborn children are persons with rights that should be protected by law.”  This ruling sets up yet another conflict between powers, one that someday will explode when a state refuses to back down, and instead decides to actually protect all people within its jurisdiction.

      Meanwhile, at a minimum, we need to maintain a prayerful witness outside the places where prenatal children are aborted, the same as we should if born children were being killed under the forceful shelter of government.