Ten Legal Reasons To Condemn Roe vs. Wade Ten Legal Reasons To Condemn Roe vs. Wade
Susan E. Wills, Esq.
Decisions of the U.S. Supreme Court rarely attract much public interest. One news cycle and a few days’ discussion in the op-ed section is probably the norm for even the most important and sweeping decisions. The average person probably has to cast back to a high school history course to recall the names of even a few landmark cases other than Miranda v. Arizona (known mainly from the scripts of popular police shows).
But one Supreme Court decision eclipses all others in the past century. Far from being forgotten, in the thirty years since Roe v. Wade announced that the “constitutional” right to privacy encompasses a woman’s decision to abort her child, its fame (or infamy) just keeps growing.
Many Americans, including members of Congress, believe or act as if Roe and the U.S. Constitution have equal authority. They are wrong, both as to Roe’s place in American constitutional law and as to the duty of citizens and judges to follow it unquestioningly. Few decisions in the history of the Supreme Court have cried out so loudly for reversal on both moral and legal grounds. And rarely has any decision been so fraught with conspicuous errors of law, fact, and reasoning as the majority opinion in Roe.
This article is addressed to all who may think that Roe deserves a measure of deference as a landmark of constitutional law (notwithstanding its immoral outcome). Not so! Legally speaking, Roe is an abomination and an embarrassment to lawyers and public officials who feel compelled to defend it.
Who Says So?
Among the legal scholars who have roundly criticized the Court’s ruling in Roe as not being grounded in the U.S. Constitution are the following:
* Six justices of the U.S. Supreme Court, unfortunately not simultaneously seated: Byron White, William Rehnquist, Antonin Scalia, Clarence Thomas, Anthony Kennedy,[1] and Sandra Day O’Connor[2]
* Virtually every recognized constitutional scholar who has published a book or article on Roe—including many, like Harvard’s Laurence Tribe, who support Roe’s outcome on other grounds (although he’s switched grounds over the years).[3] Yale Law School professor John Hart Ely spoke for many when he stated that Roe “is bad because it is bad constitutional law, or rather because it is not constitutional law and gives almost no sense of an obligation to try to be”[4]
* Edward Lazarus, a former law clerk to Roe’s author, Justice Harry Blackmun, who writes:
As a matter of constitutional interpretation and judicial method, Roe borders on the indefensible. I say this as someone utterly committed to the right to choose, as someone who believes such a right has grounding elsewhere in the Constitution instead of where Roe placed it, and as someone who loved Roe’s author like a grandfather. …
What, exactly, is the problem with Roe? The problem, I believe, is that it has little connection to the constitutional right it purportedly interpreted. A constitutional right to privacy broad enough to include abortion has no meaningful foundation in constitutional text, history, or precedent. …
The proof of Roe’s failings comes not from the writings of those unsympathetic to women’s rights but from the decision itself and the friends who have tried to sustain it. Justice Blackmun’s opinion provides essentially no reasoning in support of its holding. And in the almost thirty years since Roe’s announcement, no one has produced a convincing defense of Roe on its own terms.[5]
Re: Ten Legal Reasons To Condemn Roe vs. Wade Could have used this post for the gov't classes I subbed for last week!!! This was a hot button topic for some.
Re: Ten Legal Reasons To Condemn Roe vs. Wade Can you invision it...
"Gee, God, why didn't you help us come up with a cheaper way to fuel our cars?"
I sent someone but they were aborted.
"What about a fail safe economy and making sure we don't send our jobs to off shoring outsourcing?"
They were aborted too
"but..."
you know the answer
A woman got 10 yrs for killing her infant... yet if she would have done it before they were born it would have been acceptable???!!!! I don't see the logic. And the local paper says Hilary wants to bring more jobs to WNY... yeah, sure you mean everywhere except Buffalo... but no way, not another 4 years. Be gone! Sorry!
--- ...Bless my enemies, O Lord. Even I bless them and do not curse them.
Amen
