The Pro-Life Movement In America Must Recover Its Intellectual Foundation

The U.S. Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade and Planned Parenthood v. Casey is clearly good news and a sign of progress. The correction by the majority opinion in the Supreme Court, as crafted by Justice Alito, is a much-needed return to Constitutional facts: “The Constitution does not confer a right to abortion… Roe and Casey are overruled.”

It is fundamental that the founding document of the United States be purged from the egregiously false interpretation that it conferred on the Supreme Court the right to grant women the legal right to kill their babies. It is lamentable that it took the Supreme Court nearly 50 years to state that obvious fact.

The decision is helpful in another regard: it restores greater legitimacy to the Supreme Court. It was clearly a delegitimizing factor for the Court to have ruled that, based on their decision, mothers could kill their children in America. The decision helps to dissipate the question of the Court’s legitimacy.

The overturning of Roe and Casey also allows states to enforce laws to protect the lives of the undelivered babies in the womb. The unchecked slaughter of about 60 million babies since 1973 is an unprecedented evil in human history. The decision also demonstrated the overwhelming historical evidence of the pro-life protections of babies in the womb before Roe and Casey – namely, that nearly every state in the Union had established protections and criminalized the killing of babies in the womb. 

Finally, the decision creates cultural impetus for further laws to be enforced to protect the right to life of the child in the womb. This impetus, though, cuts both ways. The decision in its text, from a historical perspective, obliterated the false claims and improper understanding of stare decisis maintained by the Court’s minority opinion, but failed to render fully the necessary relation of stare decisis to justice.

The pro-life community’s decades-long grassroots efforts against the abortion industry, coupled with the undercover investigations publicly unmasking the horrors of that industry and Planned Parenthood, have certainly helped make the ruling possible, without which even more babies would have been sacrificed.

The Dobbs Decision’s First Fundamental Error

Nonetheless, the majority opinion’s legal, moral and philosophical reasoning was deeply flawed. The theoretical errors that allowed Roe and Casey survived the majority opinion and are visible also in the responses of varied pro-life outfits that continue to rest the pro-life cause on unsound theoretical foundations that have also contributed to the delay of justice for babies in the womb. In the aftermath of the decision the immediate reaction was tainted by many who offered their analysis, but had in fact never read the actual decision.

One can cite, for example, the inability of religious and pro-life leaders to see that the foundational reasons for the decision are simply part of the logic of the pro-abortion movement, thus unsustainable as an example of justice or right reason. For instance, Cardinal Joseph Tobin (Newark), proclaimed: “The United States Supreme Court’s ruling on Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization to overturn the 1973 decision that legalized abortion nationwide recognizes that even the most helpless and dependent human beings have a right to life and possess inherent dignity and worth.” Cardinal Tobin claims that the decision vindicated the right to life of the unborn. Archbishop Nelson Perez of Philadelphia and others echoed this error: “I am grateful to the Justices … for their opinion, which affirms the deep value inherent to every human life.” 

Yet the Court did not affirm this. The Dobbs decision states exactly the contrary: “Our opinion is not based on any view about if and when prenatal life is entitled to any of the rights enjoyed after birth.” Here the Court proclaimed that they are not affirming that babies in the womb have any rights, nor did they state when, if at all, they possess such rights or even that their rights are to be perceived from the decision to be equal to the rights enjoyed after being born.

Alito and company do not affirm that a right to life exists or that the child in the womb has equal rights to any of us after birth. The decision makes no moral, philosophical or scientific claims about the child’s status or necessary legal protections. Undoubtedly, the celebratory tone of these bishops erroneously presumed that the teaching of the Catholic Church – which has been clear and consistent for 2022 years, condemning abortion without exception – was being affirmed by the Supreme Court. Clearly, it was not.

The Second Error

The second error of interpretation regarding the Dobbs decision is exemplified by Archbishop Jose Horacio Gomez, president of the USCCB: “For nearly fifty years, America has enforced an unjust law that has permitted some to decide whether others can live or die; this policy has resulted in the deaths of tens