After hearing news of the victory at El Alamein, Winston Churchill responded, “Now this is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning.” That is my sense of the significance of the Supreme Court’s overruling of Roe v. Wade, the 20th Century’s counterpart to Dred Scott v. Sandford. Just as Justice Taney opined that black men had no rights that a white man was bound to respect, Justice Blackmun dismissed the humanity of very young human beings, whether they were black or white or any other hue.
The Court has now corrected the notion that the Constitution stands for that proposition, but it refrained from trying to do more than is possible for a court. It did not declare that the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments protect the lives of the unborn. That would have been as impracticable as it would have been for Justices McLean and Curtis, the dissenters in Dred Scott, had they been the majority, to hold that the Constitution forbade slavery.
The killing of the unborn is, sad to say, commonplace in modern society, as common and unthinkingly accepted as infanticide was among the ancient Greeks and Romans. Looking at it as is it and seeing what it involves requires new and better moral eyes, a vision that perceives what many people would prefer to ignore. Only when we recognize human beings as our brothers and sisters, without regard to their age, will abortion become unthinkable.
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