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Missing Lives
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 The U.S. Supreme Court’s most aggressive
act of “raw judicial power,” in Justice Byron
White’s phrase, is now a quarter of a century old. It was on
 Since
that time, about 40 million human lives have been aborted in this country.
That’s more than double the population of Australia.
As one who
enjoys music, I’m haunted by an odd thought. I sometimes wonder if
the next Mozart or Gershwin has been aborted. Not that this is the most
important thing about those missing lives, but the question makes the real
cost of abortion vivid to me.
The Great War,
as World Both the
New York Times and the Washington Post chose
to mark the silver anniversary of Neither article
mentioned the profit motive, the angle that usually preoccupies these liberal
dailies. Abortion “providers” were portrayed as selfless
humanitarians besieged by religious fanatics. They are, in the words of Jack
Hitt in the Times, “helping another person exercise a
constitutional right.” Making money apparently has nothing to do with
their willingness to do what most doctors shrink from doing.
![[Breaker quote for Missing Lives: The cost of abortion]](2007breakers/070727.gif) “If
you do twelve [abortions] in a row, it
can make you feel bad,” one abortionist told Hitt. Doing just one would
be enough to make some people feel bad, but there’s no accounting
for taste in these things.
The purpose of
legalizing abortion, says Hitt, was “to eliminate botched abortions. To
that extent, Roe has been successful.” So much for
the pretense that Roe was an impartial attempt to divine the
meaning of the Constitution. It was, as its critics have said all along, a judicial
attempt to make public policy masquerading as jurisprudence.
Former Justice
Harry Blackmun, author of the majority opinion in Roe, sees the
decision as “a necessary step on the road to emancipation for
women,” according to Harold Koh of Yale Law School, who has
interviewed Blackmun at length. Like most of his colleagues, Blackmun
wasn’t embarrassed to tell us what he wanted the Constitution to
mean, even if that didn’t square with what it had universally been
understood to mean. Nor does the sheer number of abortions seem to
trouble him, even now.
Of course
Blackmun wasn’t quite candid enough to say, in that famous majority
opinion, that he was consciously advancing his vision of “the
emancipation of women.” You won’t find that in the text.
Instead, he affected to be interpreting the Ninth and Fourteenth
Amendments, without respect to his own policy preferences and sympathies.
To read that opinion, you’d think he was entirely aloof from
contemporary trends and fashions, and that it was sort of an accident that
the result just happened to coincide with the “progressive”
agenda du jour. How surprised this austere jurist must have been
when the Times and Post applauded his ruling!
In the liberal
press it’s the abortion “providers” and their allies in the
judiciary who are morally sensitive, and the anti-abortion protesters who are
crude and crass. Those protesters don’t rate sympathetic treatment
any more than, say, a doomed fetus.
Nor does this
press display any sense of loss when that doomed fetus is multiplied by tens
of millions. If Shakespeare’s mom gets an abortion, the only important
thing is that she’s exercising her constitutional rights.
Joseph Sobran |
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| Copyright © 2007 by the
Griffin Internet Syndicate, a division of Griffin Communications This column may not be reprinted in print or Internet publications without express permission of Griffin Internet Syndicate 
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