A Legal Shame

On January 22, 2013, we marked the fortieth anniversary of the U.S. Supreme Court decision Roe v. Wade—an unconstitutional, immoral, and tragic decision that has unleashed a torrent of murder and misery upon our nation.

On January 22, 1973, seven Supreme Court justices decided that a woman has a right to kill her innocent unborn child for any reason whatsoever. In producing this ruling, the irresponsible activist Court led by Chief Justice Warren Burger deliberately chose to ignore the intent of the Constitution’s authors and, through some incomprehensible twist of logic, reinterpreted the Fifth Amendment due process clause regarding the execution of criminals to justify legalizing the murder of innocent unborn persons.

Roe v. Wade was also an immoral decision. The Declaration of Independence states “that all men are created equal” and “that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” The right to life is an “unalienable” right, meaning that it cannot be taken away; thus, to deprive an innocent human being of life is a violation of that right. Our nation’s Founders could scarcely have imagined that, two hundred years later, the judicial branch of government would somehow justify allowing innocent human beings to be killed in their mothers’ wombs right here in the United States of America.

Finally, Roe v. Wade was an immensely tragic decision. During the past forty years, some 55.5 million innocent unborn human beings have been murdered in their mothers’ wombs through legalized abortion. That alarming and staggering figure is more than nine times the number of innocent Jews murdered in the Holocaust and exceeds the fifty million people killed in World War II. As a result of this massacre of the unborn, our country is currently missing some 55 million inhabitants; in addition, many of those aborted in the 1970s and 80s would now be married and raising children of their own, so our country is really missing around 70 million people. How different things would be in our country today if we had all these missing people contributing to our economy and using their God-given talents to serve our nation in a variety of professions and fields. Their absence is an incalculable and irretrievable loss to our nation.

Unfortunately, this unimaginable abortion massacre continues, with 3,000 to 4,000 abortions still taking place in the United States daily. Most women having these abortions are black or Hispanic single teenage mothers living in inner cities under the poverty line who cannot afford to raise the child they have conceived. Many are pressured into aborting their child by friends or family members. So despite their misgivings and inner awareness of the evil of abortion, they end up going through this awful experience that they will regret for the rest of their lives. Some do not realize what they are doing when they go to have an abortion, but once they have had it, they know that what they did was wrong and they deeply regret it.

Abortion “rights” advocates claim that a woman has “the right to choose” to terminate her pregnancy. However, most women who have abortions do so because they perceive that no other options are available. For them abortion is a desperate last resort, not a free and willful choice. Moreover, despite talk about keeping the procedure “safe,” abortion has traumatized and damaged the health of the tens of millions of women who have gone through it, leading to breast and ovarian cancer, pregnancy complications, post-traumatic stress disorder, grief, depression, anxiety, guilt feelings, and even suicide.

Abortion advocates also deny that racism or eugenics play any role in the abortion industry. However, a whopping 79 percent of abortion clinics in the United States are situated in or near black and Hispanic neighborhoods.[1] Planned Parenthood is still following the eugenics philosophy of its foundress Margaret Sanger, who regarded blacks and poor Americans as “unfit” to reproduce and who dedicated her life to controlling the population of these “undesirables” through the promotion of contraception and sterilization in their neighborhoods.[2] According to the National Vital Statistics Report issued by the U.S. government, African-American women on average have five times the number of abortions that white women have, and Hispanic women have 2.3 times that number.[3] In fact, abortion is the leading cause of death among African-Americans, exceeding all other causes put together.[4]

The collateral damage to women and society from abortion is immense. Since 1973 it has left 55.5 million women deeply wounded mentally, emotionally and physically and has deprived our society of tens of millions of members. This is the legacy of Roe v. Wade, the most catastrophic Supreme Court decision in American history.