OPINION:
The U.S. Supreme Court held oral arguments on Dec. 1 on a landmark case, Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, which challenges the infamous 1973 Roe v. Wade decision that legalized abortion nationwide.
Mississippi’s attorney general, defending that state’s law that bans abortions after 15 weeks, argued that the states and the people — not the nine justices of the Supreme Court — should decide how to handle abortion, given that the U.S. Constitution does not enumerate a right to abortion.
The abortion industry and its allies in the Biden administration leaned heavily on the legal doctrine of stare decisis, arguing that women have come to depend on Roe and, therefore, the precedent cannot be overturned without decimating the Court’s legitimacy. Mississippi countered that following the Constitution — and responsibly correcting an error such as Roe in interpreting the Constitution — preserves rather than destroys the Court’s integrity.
Justice Brett Kavanaugh homed in on the fundamental, human issue that overrides the sterile legal issue of stare decisis: “You can’t accommodate both interests [of the pregnant woman and of the unborn child]. You have to pick. That’s the fundamental problem. And one interest has to prevail over the other at any given point in time.”
Despite a mother’s alternatives of adoption or aid from government programs and pro-life pregnancy centers, the Biden administration and abortion businesses assert that ending a child’s life can be required for women to avoid potential negative economic, emotional or physical consequences.
None of these addressable consequences, however, rise to the level of the excruciating pain and the final, fatal consequence suffered by an aborted child who has been denied the most fundamental value of all: the right to life.
Jonathan Imbody
Glen Allen, Va.
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