No, Abortion Is Not A State Issue
My one critique of Justice Alito's draft opinion.
Let me preface by making it abundantly clear that the pending overruling of Roe v. Wade is incredibly good news.
Roe has been the single most violent and destructive decision ever passed down by the Supreme Court of the United States. Its possible overruling in the coming months is evidence of God’s grace, mercy, and justice. May we continue to pray for Roe to land on the ash heap of history.
But there’s one argument in Justice Samuel Alito’s draft opinion that isn’t quite right.
I read most of the draft opinion the hour after it leaked, and I was ecstatic. Alito brilliantly took down the poor legal arguments that instituted Roe in the first place, and he did so with clarity. “Roe was egregiously wrong from the start,” he wrote.
There is no maneuvering around this opinion in the future to argue that abortion is protected by the Constitution through some made up “right to privacy” in the Fourteenth Amendment. According to Alito’s draft opinion, it simply doesn’t exist.
Yet, I do have one criticism of Alito’s opinion. It might seem that I’m just being nitpicky and that I’m another conservative who’s never satisfied with anything, even if something goes my way. And that could be true in a lot of cases, but when we’re talking about the murder of unborn children, we need to get things right.
One of Alito’s main arguments is that the Constitution requires abortion to be a state-level issue. “It is time to heed the Constitution and return the issue of abortion to the people’s elected representatives,” Alito argued. While this would be 100x better than Roe and would save thousands, if not millions of lives, it’s a bad argument.
The legality to murder unborn children should not be decided by elected representatives in each state. This question has already been answered by our Constitution and, more importantly, by our Creator.
There is no legal right to murder, even if some states want there to be. No person shall “be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law,” the Fifth Amendment declares.
Abortion clearly contradicts the Constitution.
And it clearly contradicts God’s law.
For you created my inmost being; you knit me together in my mother’s womb. I praise you because I am fearfully and wonderfully made.
—Psalm 139:13-14.
You shall not murder.
—Exodus 20:13.
The end of Roe must happen for there to be any hope of justice for the unborn, but let’s not mistake the end of Roe for the end of abortion. Dozens of states have either codified or protected “abortion rights” in state law. Even if Roe falls, babies will still die, and according to Alito’s argument, that’s fine as long as it’s a state decision.
But let’s use Alito’s argument with another injustice that plagued America. Alito wrote that “It is time to heed the Constitution and return the issue of abortion to the people’s elected representatives.”
Read that argument again, except I’ll swap out the word “abortion” for the word “slavery.”
“It is time to heed the Constitution and return the issue of [slavery] to the people’s elected representatives.”
That should remind you of some history lessons. We fought a Civil War over that very argument because some believed that, under the Constitution, states should have a right to own black people. Others correctly understood that no state has a right to deprive someone of “life, liberty, or property without due process of law.”
Federalism does not solve the crime of abortion just like it didn’t solve the crime of slavery. A state’s elected officials have no right to legalize injustice. That argument flies in the face of our Constitution and displeases our Creator.
Alito’s draft opinion is a good start, but by no means is it the just end to this horrific practice.
Couldn’t agree more with all this. As a Catholic Gentleman nothing would please me more than to see the SCOTUS do a complete turnaround and not just allow the states to decide, but rather call it what it IS --- MURDER --- and outlaw it altogether. But I think that’s a “bridge too far” at this time.
We’ve been taught to equate the liberals’ argument that "the fetus is not a human being" to how that same argument was once used about African-Americans. They were considered “property” and “sub-human”. We need to make clear what every person with even half a brain now KNOWS --- it’s a HUMAN LIFE AT INCEPTION!!!
It took a long time to get the majority of the populace to change their beliefs and attitudes about African-Americans. And, as Buffalo, NY last week clearly shows, SOME people still haven’t yet.
So, for now, I’ll accept that the killing is at least NOT PROTECTED by any reasonable law and certainly not by anything in the Constitution. Then we can start working on educating the people on (no pun intended) THE FACTS OF LIFE!! Once we get that drilled into their brains, then we can work on including the unborn under the umbrella of killing ANY LIFE is illegal.
It’s like a sinking ship. It won’t do any good to get rid of the water pouring in until we plug up the hole. So let’s stop the “leak” first and then start getting rid of the problem.