Editor’s Note: America’s Shame for the last 37 years: Roe vs. Wade

In the anniversary of the Roe vs. Wade decision “The Americano” wants to join the hundreds of thousands of Americans who march every year on our nation’s capital to continue our peaceful protest against abortion. We stand with them in solidarity and in spirit on behalf of the millions of innocent babies who were not allowed to live. Roe vs. Wade simply means that our society is allowed to kill an unborn child and that we have no right to object. 37 years of Roe vs. Wade can be explained in simple terms: 50 million babies killed.

Roe v. Wade, (1973), was a landmark case decided by the United States Supreme Court on the issue of abortion. It is one of the most shameful cases in American judicial history. The Court held that a woman may abort her pregnancy for any reason, up until the “point at which the fetus becomes ‘viable.’” The Court defined viability as the potential “to live outside the mother’s womb, albeit with artificial aid,” adding that viability “is usually placed at about seven months (28 weeks) but may occur earlier, even at 24 weeks.”

The court issued its decision on January 22, 1973, with a 7 to 2 majority vote in favor of granting abortion rights to Norma L. McCorvey. As Justices White and Rehnquist wrote back then dissenting from the decision, there is 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 the 50 States are constitutionally disentitled to weigh the relative importance of the continued existence and development of the fetus, on the 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 do 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.”

That decision lacks a valid constitutional foundation. The U.S. Constitution is silent on the issue, and the proper solutions to the question would best be found via state legislatures and the democratic process, rather than through an all-encompassing ruling from the Supreme Court. All nine justices in Roe failed to adequately recognize that life begins at fertilization (also referred to as conception) and should therefore be protected by the Constitution.

Norma L. McCorvey became a member of the pro-life movement in 1995; she now supports making abortion illegal. In 1998, she testified to Congress: “It was my pseudonym, Jane Roe, which had been used to create the “right” to like abortion out of legal thin air. But Sarah Weddington and Linda Coffee never told me that what I was signing would allow women to come up to me 15, 20 years later and say, “Thank you for allowing me to have my five or six abortions. Without you, it wouldn’t have been possible.” Sarah never mentioned women using abortions as a form of birth control. We talked about truly desperate and needy women, not women already wearing maternity clothes.”

As a party to the original litigation, she sought to reopen the case in U.S. District Court in Texas to have Roe v. Wade overturned. However, the Fifth Circuit decided that her case was moot, in McCorvey v. Hill. In a concurring opinion, Judge Jones agreed that McCorvey was raising legitimate questions about emotional and other harm suffered by women who have had abortions, about increased resources available for the care of unwanted children, and about new scientific understanding of fetal development, but Jones said she was compelled to agree that the case was moot. On February 22, 2005, the Supreme Court refused to grant a writ of certiorari, and McCorvey’s appeal ended. Today, McCorvey “Jane Roe” or Roe v Wade is now a prolife Christian. She’s recently done a commercial about it. Watch the video here.

The majority of Americans feel like McCorvey today. A Gallup poll conducted in May 2009 indicates that a minority of Americans, 37%, believe that abortion should be legal in any or most circumstances, compared to 41% in May 2008. Similarly, an April 2009 Pew Research Center poll showed a softening of support for legal abortion compared to the previous years of polling. People who said they support abortion in all or most cases dropped from 54% in 2008 to 46% in 2009. Almost four decades later, around 50 million unborn children have been killed by the Roe vs. Wade decision. Those babies committed no crimes and are being killed in the most brutal ways imaginable, sucked from their mother’s wombs. Almost forty years later, Roe vs. Wade continues to be America’s shame.

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