Roe v. Wade: The Bernie Lomax of the American Left

After Hurricane Ivan, we had house and yard damage like many in our area. A typical sight was uprooted trees everywhere. We had one downed soft oak in our back yard which was on the fence line that uprooted and ripped up the fence. However, some of the roots were still buried in the ground. After taking the power saw to it, only the stump was left. Being the cheap skate that I am, I went to digging around the stump and with some help from a neighbor’s winch, I made some progress, but a sizable portion of the tree root was still underground. After some time, I just started putting more muscle into rocking it out of the ground. Earlier, I had dug here, tugged there, cut elsewhere, but now, I was just using frustrated effort against that stump and it was what turned the corner in helping me to uproot it completely.

Americans, it is time to rock abortion from the national soil. Most of abortion and its facilitator, Roe v. Wade have been uprooted and exposed. Abortion is murder; its promoters are accomplices; its doctors, butchers. And Roe should not be allowed to go quietly; this menace that has facilitated the murder of millions should be stomped by the light of truth and justice until its reign is a memory. If many of us will use our “frustrated effort,” Roe will collapse even faster.

The proponents of Roe have lost on every front: legally, morally, ethically, and scientifically. It’s not even a law. Those who say that “Roe is the law of the land” are confused. It’s only an opinion about the Constitution and a bad one to boot. The American people need not wait for the Supreme Court to overturn Roe. The Constitution says nothing about viability, trimesters, a right to privacy, or a right to choose—let alone a right for a woman and a doctor to conspire to kill her unborn child. All of the legal gymnastics in Judge Reinhardt’s court aren’t going to yield a “universal right to kill a child” from the Constitution.

Biology
Abortionists have obviously lost on the biological front. Does anyone really believe that life starts when the baby starts breathing? Does any doctor (except those that do abortions) really believe that what we see on a sonogram is something other than an infant? Imagine some doctor treating a new born the same way that Nancy Keenan discards the rights of the preborn. Any reputable doctor will tell you that the fetus in the womb is not “something like an appendix”; that doctor is going to call the contents of the mother's womb “a baby.”

Rhetoric
But we all know that. We know that the conceptus is a baby, a person. So why does this insanity continue? Well, abortionists have been good at semantics, but they are now losing on the rhetorical front. There was a time when killers of preborns bragged about being abortionists; those days are gone. Now, they are “pro-choice” and prolifers are “anti-choice.” But just ask these second-rate wordsmiths if the “right to choose” involves whether or not our doctors can stick a stiletto in the back of a baby’s neck, insert a tube to extract her brain matter so that he can crush her skull. Or, does “choice” involve peeling the skin right off her body by a saline solution. Under such ridiculous euphemisms as “choice” and “freedom” abortionists ask for the same kinds of choices that Hitler exercised in Germany and Pol Pot in Cambodia.

Relations
Abortionists have also lost on the relational front. I would never trust an abortionist or someone that had an abortion to watch my children, teach them, or coach them, would you? Someone that is that morally confused should not be given any kind of care over children. They are usually the same ones that are red-faced from screaming that “Bush lied; kids died.” They rail at the injustice of putting to death a rapist while being incensed that someone would dare insist that they get counseling or wait 48 hours before they have their offspring gutted in an abortuary.

Opinion
The baby killers have lost in the court of American opinion. In spite of having many liberal elites as well as the Hollywood money on their side, the American people are turning against Roe. Now, for the first time since Gallup began asking the question about support for abortion, most Americans say that they are prolife. Prolifers have not advanced because they have more money, can file the most (or best) amici briefs before the Court, have a roomful of silver-tongued belles like Sarah Weddington that can go to the Court and argue for the rights of baby killers. Rather, prolifers are winning because they’re right. The power of being right, unfortunately ebbs and flows in with the American public, but eventually, in some cases (like slavery, for example), right wins out.

History
Roe has lost on the historical front. Justice Harry Blackmun’s history of abortion law is flawed—badly. Blackmun, who wrote the majority opinion for Roe v. Wade in 1973, was wrong about the primary purpose of abortion law in the 19th century, claiming that its primary purpose was to protect women from dangerous abortion practices. In his article on 19th century state abortion law, law professor James Witherspoon repudiates this claim by concluding “That the primary purpose of the nineteenth-century antiabortion statutes was to protect the lives of unborn children is demonstrated by the terms of the statutes themselves”(1). Blackmun relied on the research of Cyril Means who was a NARAL attorney. Much of Mean’s historical analysis has since been rejected, and with it, the historical ground for Blackmun’s opinion.

Posterity
If you have supported abortion; I’d start rethinking it. One day, if you’re young enough, you’re going to be viewed by your children and grandchildren with shame just as the descendants of slave owners eventually bore the shame of their slave-owning progenitors. In the future, your ancestors are going to read about how doctors were unmerciful as they would dismember, stab, or burn infants to death. Just like the stories of slavery brutality are told today and portrayed on television, so one day the brutality inflicted upon the millions of infants will be revealed to school children. They will wonder how you and the others of your time could sanction something so brutal to be perpetrated among the most helpless among us. One day, perhaps it will be your female grandchild will ask your daughter:

• Didn’t they know that a baby is a human being?
• How could they be that cruel to do that to a baby?
• Why did they do it?

The question is, will your daughter have to sit there speechless, trying to apologize for you?

I don’t know about you, but I don’t want to die before this stain is removed from our nation. I want to be a part of the generation that buries abortion instead of more aborted children. I want to be a part of that generation that sees the child killers in retreat rather than on the streets displaying placards, marching for their right to kill.

The Derelict
In the comedy, Weekend at Bernie’s, two young insurance executives, Larry and Richard, are unaware that their boss, Bernie Lomax, is going to have them killed. But the mob does a double-cross on Bernie and kills him instead. Larry and Richard find dead Bernie, thinking that he died from a drug overdose. Instead of reporting the death to the authorities (because they fear being killed by the mob themselves), Larry and Richard drag their boss’s cadaver everywhere they go, propping up the body to make him look alive. Dead Bernie is seen everywhere: at the beach, in the speedboat. The two execs drag him to a party and when asked to explain Bernie’s odd behavior, they say he’s “dead drunk.”

Roe v. Wade has become the Bernie Lomax of the American left. While Americans become more and more prolife every day, while states continue to strangle abortion with increased regulation and the American people move to ban it by referendum or in state constitutions, abortionists continue to prop up Roe, trying to animate this legal cadaver, calling it a “precedent” or as Arlen Specter called it, a “super-duper” precedent (I’m not making that up…). What has been the instrument of death for millions of American children is now propelled by the wishful thinking of those that are now on the backside of history.

I predict that within two generations abortion will be considered as indefensible as the slavery of the antebellum south. The Roe decision will be vilified in the court of public opinion just as Dred Scot is today. The moral force to stop this menace will not be abated. If I were a part of the cadre of the morally-bereft that still defend it, I would head for the lifeboats, abandoning that barge of the dead, that derelict called…Roe, and cut my losses.

Note

(1) James S. Witherspoon, 1985 “Reexamining Roe: Nineteenth-Century Abortion Statutes and the Fourteenth Amendment,” St. Mary’s Law Journal 17 (1): 29-71.