Blue Gill on the Fly: January 2010

“We renew our pledge … to work to support candidates who will do everything in their power to someday bring about the day when Roe v. Wade joins Scott v. Sandford as an aberrant footnote to our nation’s great history.”

On this day 37 years ago, seven unelected lawyers (all male) spat on centuries of Western tradition, the plain text of the Constitution, and decades of precedent and declared that there existed in the Constitution a heretofore undiscovered right for women to kill their children in utero. In one fell swoop, one of society’s burning moral questions was removed completely from the democratic process and placed in the hands of a black-robed oligarchy, jealous of protecting its own prerogative and manifestly afraid of “appearing weak” above all things; on at least one occasion it would refuse to reverse itself in order to teach the lowly population to be “tested by following” so that they might know the truth of the unelected Court above all other pedestrian concerns.
Almost four decades later, somewhere around 50 million unborn children have been victimized by the breathtaking arrogance of the Court. They committed no crimes, were afforded no due process or trials at all, and every appeal made on their behalf has fallen on deaf ears. They have been killed in the most brutal ways imaginable, unceremoniously sucked from their mother’s wombs, and carelessly discarded without even the dignity of an unmarked grave. Every reasonable effort to curb the abuses of the system that has produced these gruesome results has been summarily rejected by society’s robed masters. And so the carnage marches on.
The truth that these children are biologically human and biologically distinct from their mothers is beyond question to anyone who believes in the most basic tenets of science. Why, then, are they declared so totally bereft of rights in our society? The fact that a woman can, with the protection of the law, kill her child on the day of its planned full-term delivery, indicates clearly that the only answer to this question is “physical location within their mother’s womb.” If a child is in this place, it may be killed with impunity; if it is in another, to kill it is murder. Even the more generous (but less accurate) characterization of the Court’s jurisprudence as respecting “stages of development” rather than physical location provides us no more satisfactory answer. If a child can be kllled with impunity because it has not reached 24 weeks’ gestational age, why may it not be killed because it hasn’t reached its first birthday? Or puberty? Logic and reason provide no defensible answer to these questions, because in the legalized abortion regime, logic and reason - like science and law - have been sacrificed on the altar of self-aggrandizement and convenience at any cost.
The evil Roe v. Wade has wrought has cheapened and weakened our society. It has decimated minority population growth, especially among African-Americans. It has caused us to devalue the handicapped and less fortunate, as mothers who carry these precious children to full term are now somehow thought to be less responsible for the decision. The damage to the fabric of the family itself - the most basic building block of our society - has been incalculable.
And so today, hundreds of thousands of Americans will march on our nation’s capital to continue our peaceful protest against this policy which has been foisted upon us. And though most of us cannot be physically present with them, we stand with them in solidarity and in spirit, saying a silent prayer together on behalf of the fallen, and in the hope that the guilt of the blood spilt on our land might somehow be purged.
At RedState, we stand in solidarity with them. The question does not and should not divide us along conservative/libertarian lines, for even the most libertarian among us must recognize the right of the state to prevent and punish the killing of innocent humans. And we renew our pledge today and every day to work to support candidates who will do everything in their power to someday bring about the day when Roe v. Wade joins Scott v. Sandford as an aberrant footnote to our nation’s great history.
On this day, we remember the nameless and the forgotten, and we lament our inability to even grasp the sorrow or the extent of their loss. Requiescat in pace.