The Force Is Not With Roe vs. Wade : Contrary to Common Wisdom, the Public Doesn’t Want It

To the astonishment and chagrin of those pro-abortion activists who have argued for 16 years that the Supreme Court’s Roe vs. Wade decision settled the argument over abortion once and for all, it now appears that precisely the opposite is true: In the wake of the court’s decision in Webster vs. Reproductive Health Services, it now seems as if the abortion debate will dominate the headlines for the foreseeable future.

This is an amazing reversal of the common wisdom as enunciated by the major teaching centers of American public life. With the exceptions of the American Catholic bishops, evangelical Protestant leaders and a scattering of Orthodox Jewish figures, virtually every other opinion-shaping center in our political culture--the mainline Protestant leadership, the prestige press, the popular entertainment industry, the universities--has hammered home the twin messages that Roe was irreversible, and that Roe was right, for a decade and a half.

Remarkably, this message has been decisively rejected by the American people. The blunt empirical fact, as demonstrated by the Los Angeles Times and the Boston Globe polls released at the time of oral argument in the Webster case, is that an overwhelming number of the American people reject abortion in 99% of the cases in which abortion is obtained today--in order to solve a personal problem, a career problem, a financial problem or a dilemma with a sexual partner or spouse. The “hard cases”--maternal health, rape and incest--account for less than 1% of the 1.5 million abortions performed annually in the United States. The rest are termed, euphemistically, “abortions of convenience” or “contraceptive abortions.” And these are precisely the abortions that more than three-quarters of our people do not want to remain legalized.

Matters as solemn as the nature of the human person, the source of “human rights” and the responsibilities of the civic community to the weakest in its midst should not and ought not be settled by head counts. But what these amazing statistics tell us is that public officials who work to constrain or repeal the abortion license as defined by Roe vs. Wade are working with, not against, the force of public opinion.

The National Abortion Rights Action League won’t--can’t--admit that. Neither can Planned Parenthood, the National Organization for Women and the other lead agencies in the pro-abortion lobby. But that is the hard fact of the matter. The propaganda campaign has failed. And it has failed because it tried to teach the American people something that they know, in their hearts, is wrong--that the abortion license is congruent with our deep national commitment to liberty and justice for all.

That commitment ought to frame the new abortion debate in the weeks and months to come. The abortion license broke a 200-year-old pattern of expanding the community of the commonly protected in America. And in doing so, it has led to terrible coarsening of our public life. Listen to the remarks of my House colleague, Rep. Patricia Schroeder (D-Colo.), on the MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour on July 3: “I find it amazing that it should be state and federal policy that absolutely every child should be born, whether they have AIDS, no matter what condition they’re in, whether they’re wanted, what condition their parents are in.”

Unborn children should have their lives terminated because one of their parents contracted AIDS? Or because their parents don’t want them? (Other people surely do.) Or because their parents are poor?

This is American liberalism? This is the tradition that freed the slaves, gained women the vote, enacted Social Security, made our streets and public buildings accessible to the handicapped?

No, this is a deeply confused, embittered, crabbed and radically distorted notion ofan America that has traditionally understood itself as a community of character,a community of hospitality and mutual care.

And that is what is at stake, publicly, in the new abortion debate. Will America yield to the cold, inhospitable, unwelcoming jurisprudence of Roe vs. Wade? Or will we recover our founding traditions of hospitality to the stranger and the weak? The pro-abortion forces have given their answer. Happily, the American people have also given theirs--and it is a very different answer indeed.