Roe Vs Wade

Radical, Legally Untenable and Immoral

The following article is taken from Justin Taylor's blog:

Law professor Michael Stokes Paulsen has a remarkably helpful and concise explanation of what Roe v. Wade (especially combined with Doe v. Bolton) actually means: “The Unbearable Wrongness of Roe.”


 Here are excerpts from his three critiques:


(1)The Radicalism of Roe
“I suspect that if more people understood Roe‘s and Doe‘s actual holding fewer would support that constitutional regime. Roe was a truly extreme decision, creating an effectively unrestricted constitutional right to abort a living human being for any reason the mother might have, throughout pregnancy right up to the point of birth.”
(2) The Legal Untenability of Roe
“[Roe] has absolutely no basis in the text, structure, or history of the Constitution. No rule or principle of law fairly traceable to the text, discernible from its structure, or fairly derived from evidence of intention or historical understanding of an authoritative decision of the people, remotely supports the result reached in Roe. In terms of fair principles of constitutional interpretation, Roe is perhaps the least defensible major constitutional decision in the Supreme Court’s history.”

(3) The Immorality of Roe
“The result of Roe and Doe has been the legally authorized killing of nearly sixty million Americans since 1973. Roe v. Wade authorized unrestricted private violence against human life on an almost unimaginable scale, and did so, falsely, in the name of the Constitution.”

Professor Paulsen does not quote Augustine—or Martin Luther King’s approving quotation of the same—to the effect that “an unjust law is no law at all.” But that’s essentially what he argues:

The Court’s decision in Roe v. Wade should not be accepted as law, in any sense. It should be resisted by legislatures and it should be refused enforcement by executive officials because it is not the law. It should be resisted by all citizens, with all the resources at their disposal, and perhaps even with resources not (yet) at their disposal. Anything less is holocaust denial.

Read the whole thing here.