What Will Happen with Roe v. Wade?

The issue of abortion is front and center again after the leaked report of the Supreme Court opinions on overturning Roe v. Wade. In response, the pro-abortion crowd is now protesting outside the homes of Supreme Court justices, clearly violating federal law by using intimidation in order to sway a legal opinion. Democrats in the Senate then tried to push through the Women’s Health Protection Act, a bill that would have codified into federal law a woman’s right to abort her baby at any time.

Clearly, the pro-abortion crowd is worried about this Supreme Court decision. But what is it all about? As a history refresher, Roe v. Wade was a decision involving Texas woman Norma McCorvey (known as “Roe”) who wanted to abort her third baby in 1969. However, in Texas, abortions were only permitted when it was necessary to save a mother’s life. A lawsuit was filed on her behalf against the Texas district attorney (“Wade”), stating the Texas abortion laws were unconstitutional. The Texas District Court ruled in favor of Roe, causing Texas to appeal the decision to the Supreme Court.

The Supreme Court issued a 7-2 decision in 1973 that stated the Constitution protects a pregnant woman’s freedom to choose to have an abortion without excessive government restriction. This effectively abolished any other federal or state laws regarding abortion. No longer did it matter if a state wanted abortion to be completely illegal, the federal courts ruled that a woman had a right to abort her baby.

In 1973, the court tried to put some balance to abortion by restricting it based on the trimester of the pregnancy. During the first trimester, governments could not prohibit abortions at all; during the second trimester, governments could require reasonable health regulations; during the third trimester, abortions could be prohibited entirely so long as the laws contained exceptions for cases when they were necessary to save the life or health of the mother. However, even that level of restriction was abandoned with the Supreme Court decision in 1992 with Planned Parenthood v. Casey. It allowed for abortion at any time, if the fetus was not “viable,” meaning anytime prior to the third trimester when the baby’s lungs would have developed sufficiently for life outside the womb.

In 2003, President Bush signed into the law the Partial-Birth Abortion ban, which finally put some federal restrictions on abortion. The ban made it illegal for a baby to be murdered while the baby is delivered “past the [baby’s] navel . . . outside the body of the mother,” or “in the case of head-first presentation, the entire fetal head is outside the body of the mother.” This was not even a ban on late-term abortions; just a ban on this particular method of killing the baby while it has been partially birthed outside of the mother’s body. Yet there were still 176 members of Congress who voted against this bill.

But let’s not forget what the issue of abortion is really about. It is the dismemberment of a living human being with a heartbeat and a nervous system while in the womb. Since the 1973 Supreme Court decision, there have been over 63 million babies murdered in the womb by the very ones who are supposed to protect them. 63 million lives lost. There have been roughly 875,000 abortion per year for the past 5 years. For perspective, there were 6 million Jews killed by Nazis in the Holocaust.

Now, the nation awaits for the Supreme Court decision to overturn Roe v. Wade, which should be officially released in June 2022. What does this really mean for abortion in America though? There is clearly a growing fear from many that when Roe v. Wade is overturned, women can no longer freely kill their children in the womb.

Unfortunately, that is not what will actually happen if Roe v. Wade is overturned. The Supreme Court decision won’t make abortion illegal across the country. It will simply allow each state to decide whether abortion is illegal or not. And this situation has a very familiar sound to it.

In the 1860s America sat in a very similar situation. Half of the states wanted slavery to be legal. Those states wanted to retain the right to treat a segment of the population as though they were less than human. From a Constitutional perspective, they were right that the states should have the authority to make such decisions. This country made up of individual states was based on the idea of limiting the federal government’s power and giving more power to the individual states. Each state should have the ability to decide for itself how it would govern its people.

However, President Abraham Lincoln saw slavery as such a morally reprehensible institution that the nation needed to be unified in ending the practice of slavery. He saw it as something America as a nation should stand for – freedom for all people, as the Constitution stated. All people were created equal. If that was going to be in our founding documents as a nation, then the nation as a whole needed to uphold that. America could not be a great nation while allowing some states to own another person as property. And Lincoln was right.

America is standing at the same juncture. The overturning of Roe v. Wade will allow states the right to determine their own abortion restrictions, or lack thereof. States would be allowed to legalize or prohibit abortion in whatever fashion they want. We have to ask ourselves if this is the kind of nation we want to be. While constitutionally, states have the right to govern themselves and the limits should be on what the federal government can do, just like slavery. But this is an issue far worse than slavery.

Just as America in 1860 needed to be united in its stance against the treatment of a segment of the population as though they were less than human, America needs to be united in 2022 in its stance against the treatment of a segment of the population as though they were less than human. Abortion treats babies as less than human depending on their physical location – either in the womb or outside of the womb. To the pro-abortion crowd, babies in the womb are disposable. It is no different than saying people who are black are disposable in the 1860s or people who are Jewish are disposable in the 1940s in Germany.

The argument for “states’ rights” must be followed by states’ rights to what? When it was a states’ right to own another person as property, the federal government stepped in to prohibit that. When it was states’ rights to limit the rights of another person, the federal government stepped in to prohibit that. Likewise, when it is a states’ right to allow the murder of innocent people, the federal government should step in to prohibit that.  

Right now though, we see protestors rabidly and zealously demanding the right to kill babies. They are threatening federal justices at the mere idea that some individual states may prohibit the murder of innocent humans. By shouting “Abort the Court!” the protestors unwittingly admit they know that abortion is the ending of life. Abortion is murder; and everybody knows it.

While some states may pass laws to ban or at least restrict abortion, others will open the floodgates for abortion at any time for any reason at any point in the pregnancy. The human slaughter in those states will be horrific. Instead of allowing each state to decide which humans have value and which ones don’t, the nation needs to rule that all humans have worth and value no matter their location. America needs a federal ban on abortion. No longer should we tolerate the murder of the most innocent and defenseless segment of the population as though they are less than human.