Thirty-five years after the Supreme Court unilaterally struck down state
laws restricting abortion, the cost of that decision continues to increase
our moral deficit, which will have far greater (and eternal) consequences
than the impact from economic challenges during a possible recession.
Depending on how one counts the number of abortions per year since 1973,
more than 50 million people who might have been are not. These were people
who, regardless of the circumstances of the women who carried them, had the
potential to contribute to the country and to the world. But now they
cannot, because they are not. Would we be fighting the battle over
immigration had we not rid ourselves of a generation of humans who likely
would have done the work for which we are now importing illegal aliens?
Actions have consequences.
Roe and its companion case, Doe v. Bolton, took the question of endowment of
life by "our Creator" and placed it in the hands of individuals. History has
shown what happens when humanity seizes such power for itself: political
dictatorships, eugenics and scientific experiments unrestrained by any
moorings to a moral code. Each becomes her and his own god; each becomes a
taker of life, rather than a giver, inverting the creation model into one of
destruction and transforming the pregnant woman from life-giver to
life-taker.
The social restructuring unleashed by the judicial fiat that was Roe created
a cultural fissure that remains today. We moved quickly from acknowledgement
of a right to live, to assertions of a right to die. In her essay "The Women
of Roe v. Wade," Harvard professor Mary Ann Glendon calls to mind the
novelist Walker Percy who prophesied two years before Roe that "Qualitarian
Centers" would spring up, "where, as one of Percy's characters explained,
doctors would respect Œthe right of an unwanted child not to have to endure
a life of suffering.'" State governments, Percy suggested, might eventually
recognize a right to die. Arrangements would be made for the sick and
elderly to push a button that would transport them to a "happy death" in
Michigan, a "joyful exitus" in New York, or a "luanalu-hai" in Hawaii.
Percy's fiction increasingly resembles fact.