Legacy of Roe v. Wade

In January 1973, the Supreme Court of the United States gave our nation Roe v. Wade and its companion decision Doe v. Bolton. In so doing it effectively removed every legal protection from human beings prior to birth. The legacy of Roe is virtually incalculable. In its wake it has left death and sorrow and turmoil:

  • the deaths of millions whose lives were destroyed before birth and even during the very process of being born
  • countless women traumatized so deeply by abortion that they spend years struggling to find peace, healing and reconciliation
  • men who grieve because they could not choose to protect a child they helped bring into existence
  • a society increasingly coarsened by toleration and acceptance of acts that purposely destroy human life.

These attacks on human life are carried out within the family and with the active involvement of those in the healing profession—institutions that traditionally have protected the weak and the vulnerable.

Often they are carried out at the urging of fathers who, rather than protecting their child, believe their only responsibility is to help pay for an abortion. Today, those who support and provide abortion freely acknowledge that killing is involved. Choices once treated as criminal and rejected by the common moral sense have become socially acceptable.

In 1992, the Supreme Court reaffirmed Roe v. Wade—in large part, it said, because admitting error and reversing a prior decision would undermine the Court’s authority. It said also, “People have organized intimate relationships and made choices that define their views of themselves and their places in society in reliance on the availability of abortion in the event that contraception should fail” (Planned Parenthood v. Casey). In other words, Americans had come to rely on legalized abortion as a backup for contraceptive failure.

In 2000, in Stenberg v. Carhart, the Court expanded the abortion liberty beyond killing in utero; it now wrapped in the mantle of the U.S. Constitution the practice of killing during the process of birth. Abortion has come to be seen by many not only as a right to end a pregnancy prior to birth, but also as a guarantee that a child aborted will not survive. This is clear in regard to partial-birth abortion. It is also clear in the growing reports of children who, having survived mid- and late-term abortions, are put aside and left to die because they were not supposed to live in the first place.

Today, some seek ways to alleviate human diseases through research that involves the deliberate destruction of human embryos. Such research, it is claimed, will enhance human life, when in actuality it “reduces human life to the level of simple ‘biological material’ to be freely disposed of” (The Gospel of Life, #14).

Often these embryos, targeted for experimentation, were created in laboratories by in vitro fertilization attempts to assist infertile couples. Such efforts, however, embrace the manufacture of human life without considering the consequences, including the many ethical dilemmas resulting from such misuse of technology.