The decision in Dobbs v Jackson Women’s Health Organisation is a necessary victory on the path to eradicating the wrong of abortion. Few would have believed it possible, let alone see it realized in their lifetimes, yet here we are. We have the tireless work of an anti-abortion movement to thank for this, which spent the last several decades since Roe make the argument against abortion and for life. The decisions of Roe and Casey were wrong and depended upon the most tenuous and tendentious arguments. In the end, the appeal was largely to inertia; that is, having made a terrible decision and enabled the practice to generate a unjust social order, stare decisis remained the only legal bulwark protecting it from being struck down. Finally, owing to the choices of Trump, three new justices, Gorsuch, Kavanaugh, and Coney Barrett, when given the opportunity, joined Alito, Roberts and Thomas in a stunning 6-3 decision in the most extraordinary of circumstances reversing Roe and Casey.
However, as much as we may rejoice in this decision, it is palpably only the end of the beginning. In order to eradicate the wrong of abortion, we had to reverse the lie that there is any fundamental human right to kill the child in utero (let alone that this right could ever be reserved to the mother (and father)). And I dare say that none within the anti-abortion movement is satisfied with the decision about whether such a right or privilege exists being left to the states. Even before Dobbs, minds had already considered the grounds for a federal ban on abortion based on the 14th amendment. The impetus for this will only intensify as states that permit abortion promote interstate travel, often paid for by employers, so residents where abortion is prohibited or strictly regulated can travel out-of-state to one where an abortion can be procured.
To paraphrase Lincoln in his House Divided Speech:
“A house divided against itself, cannot stand.”
I believe this government cannot endure permanently half pro-abortion and half anti-abortion.
I do not expect the Union to be dissolved — I do not expect the house to fall — but I do expect it will cease to be divided.
It will become all one thing or all the other.
Either the opponents of abortion will arrest the further spread of it, and place it where the public mind shall rest in the belief that it is in the course of ultimate extinction; or its advocates will push it forward, till it shall become lawful in all the States, old as well as new — North as well as South.
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