Just as slavery and its lingering effects scarred America for centuries, the national sin of Roe v. Wade has weighed our nation down with the shame and devastation of legalized mass murder. Just as slavery deeply challenged the patriotism of those scarred by that evil regime in America, so has the unconstitutional and morally abhorrent abortion regime in America.
Also just as slavery plainly contradicted the philosophy and law of the American founders — who wrote “all men are created equal, and… endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, [and] among these are Life” — so does Roe v. Wade, which even leftist “scholars” agree is a garbage decision. Just as slavery created a constitutional crisis that existentially threatened America, so did Roe v. Wade.
The attention on the protesters using violence and intimidation to retain a clearly unconstitutional and clearly immoral court diktat has obscured that if the Supreme Court does not overturn Roe, its legitimacy is finished. At that point, after decades of fruitlessly investing in keeping as many courts as possible closer to constitutionalism, the right will fully agree with the left that the Supreme Court is an illegitimate, utterly politicized institution, as I explained on EWTN last week. That will finish off what was left of the American republic and mark its complete conversion into something entirely different.
For it is highly politicized decisions like Roe, its companion Planned Parenthood v. Casey, and others such as those sanctioning the New Deal starting with West Coast Hotel Co. v. Parrish, that have undermined the court’s legitimacy. The court maintains legitimacy precisely in doing its job of applying the law faithfully, instead of taking politics into consideration. Just as overturning Plessy v. Ferguson restored the Supreme Court’s legitimacy, so would the overturn of Roe v. Wade.
Besides keeping the Founders’ America alive for “one more season of restraint,” fixing warped Roe v. Wade jurisprudence would also enliven the country, not just literally but also figuratively. It would breathe new life into an America that all of us should be able to admit has been on life support for some time.
Those of us who have been willing to admit what abortion is — the taking of a human life — have for decades been weighed down with the knowledge our own country has been allowing this on a mass scale, and even demanding we participate in and celebrate it. Such a regime not only delegitimizes itself but drains its own lifeblood.
The potential overturn of Roe v. Wade is a massive opportunity to overturn a horrifying evil, and therefore to do great good. The opportunity to do great good is a strong and previously unavailable motivator. It would be a huge energizer for those who have resisted the usurping regime’s massive efforts to get us to stop seeing and talking about what we have seen that regime do to our nation. It would be the fall of a great spiritual Berlin Wall inside our nation.
It would allow us to finally stop talking about “norms” and start talking about whether those norms nourish or destroy life. We could stop talking about marginal tax rates and about whose duty it is, exactly, to provide for those who cannot provide for themselves. In short, we can start making the necessary bold moves to re-seed and water a culture of life. Without Roe, we can start from the beginning and move holistically, from the bottom up instead of merely tinkering around the corners of an entirely corrupt edifice.
That’s the most needed action in this moment, as the political and immoral left has become very clear about its frightening degradation into a death cult. Overturning Roe would show that major, enduring cultural victories are still possible, and that all of the nation’s institutions don’t belong to the left. Perhaps that’s why this poll showed a move to the right after people heard about the leaked majority opinion to overturn Roe.
An outpouring of creative social entrepreneurship and policy could be in the offing as states finally have the opportunity to make good on their voters’ belief that the unborn are people deserving of the best care a civilization can offer. By returning this existential policy to the people again, it could allow them to get involved in more immediate, tangible, and fruitful ways than demonstrating in the streets or on Twitter.
People who want to save lives could be more able to adopt a baby now that abortion isn’t killing nearly all of the potential adoptees, or help sponsor local children living with their own needy families like many churches do for children in faraway nations. It would be even less tenable to ban Christians from helping with foster care and adoption when the need for connecting children with parents increases through refusing to kill inconvenient children.
We’re so used to losing, who knows what the biggest win in generations could do to energize the American majority that remains committed to families and the rule of the real Constitution, not the murderous “living” one. But I do know that nothing is so energizing and refreshing as a baby. There’s nothing more unifying, more animating, and more lively. A baby is a life, and a baby makes a life. This is true both for us as individuals and for us as a collective.
Children are a reason to get up in the morning, to make a morning at all. Discharging our responsibilities to children is the way to make it “Morning in America” again, both in our homes and in our civic life. Caring for them is the best way forward. It is the only way.
Without children, a civilization dies, both spiritually and literally. We are on the cusp of continuing to lose our babies, but there’s a chance we can get them back. And we need to, for our nation’s life is inextricable from theirs.
As every good parent learns, having a child is the way to become human again. Being human means becoming the kind of person who will sacrifice himself to benefit another. A society without enough of such persons is soon not a society at all. The Supreme Court’s decision, therefore, can either mean life or death not only for the unborn, but also for their nation. We must all hope, pray, and prepare.