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Earl Aagaard’s opinions about everything that interests him. Og also enjoys gardening, travel, reading, woodbutchery, and lots of other stuff.

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REGARDLESS OF YOUR POSITION ON ABORTION, WHAT DO YOU THINK OF ROE v. WADE?

This was the Supreme Court decision that took jurisdiction over abortion away from the 50 States, and substituted the judgment of seven justices - based on Harry Blackmun’s reading of history and the law. Anyone who thinks Blackmun did a good job in this landmark decision had better read Joseph Dellapenna’s NEW BOOOK, Dispelling the Myths of Abortion History before expressing that opinion in the future.

The book

tells the history of abortion and infanticide in Anglo-American law from 1200 AD to the Supreme Court’s last abortion decision in 2000. Based on 30 years of research and legal scholarship, Dellapenna has produced a definitive history of abortion, establishing him as the premier historian of abortion and abortion law in the English-speaking world.

Dellapenna himself is a “moderate” on the subject, and says that if he were legislating, abortion would be unconstrained through the first trimester.

But Dellapenna’s concern is not the politics of abortion. He rather sets out to provide a faithful interpretation of the history of abortion in English and American law. His aim is to “set the record straight regarding the history of abortion.”

The book is an exhaustive critique both of the Court’s rationale for creating a right to abortion in Roe and of the pro-abortion historians who have sought to devise alternative historical rationales for Roe. It completes the scholarly demolition of Justice Blackmun’s opinion in Roe, and serves to debunk myths about abortion in pre-Roe America.

He concludes with a sustained plea for returning the abortion issue to the democratic process. “We in the U.S. should consider the approach of most other western democracies: Leave abortion to legislative action in a search for an accommodation of the competing interests in a statute that can command sufficiently broad support to quiet the controversy.” After making a mess of the abortion issue for the past 33 years, the Court would do well to seriously consider this too.

Of course, for those convinced, by what we know from science, that a new and unique individual comes into being when egg and sperm meet and form the zygote, this will be a lot better than what we have now, but will still perpetrate a grave injustice. If all human beings have the same rights, then it doesn’t matter how old or young one is, nor how abled or disabled, nor how inconvenient or expensive—the right to life is inviolable, and must not be taken away by a vote of the legislature.

But, our country was set up so that difficult problems of this type could be dealt with differently in different states, leaving citizens with the option of leaving places where injustice was practiced, and moving to other places that suited them better. Roe v. Wade unjustly put an end to that possibility, and the sooner it is overturned, the better for all of us.

READ THE WHOLE REVIEW

Posted by .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) on 11/12 at 11:43 AM

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