REGARDING the overturning of the Roe v Wade judgement, the Express reports that the ‘decision by the Republican-stacked nine-judge panel’ of the US Supreme Court has ‘overturned a 49-year-old case that legalised abortion’ and ‘robs millions of women of reproductive rights, including the victims of rape and incest’.
The report quotes President Joe Biden condemning the decision as ‘expressly [taking] away a constitutional right for the American people’ – ‘a realisation of extreme ideology and a tragic error of the Supreme Court’ but also inadvertently blurting out the truth that ‘the ruling means abortion rights will be determined by individual states unless Congress acts’.
As Laura Perrins commented yesterday, this is a restoration of democratic rights. Justice Samuel Alito pointed out in his 6-3 Supreme Court ruling: ‘The Constitution makes no reference to abortion, and no such right is implicitly protected by any constitutional provision.’
That was no more sufficient for the heavily pro-choice media coverage than for the raft of Leftist ‘progressive’ politicians, former President Barack Obama speciously commenting that the court had ‘relegated the most intensely personal decision someone can make to the whims of politicians’.
The ‘whims of politicians’ apparently count only when said politicians back abortion. The less than disinterested British Prime Minister was also quick to jump on the bandwagon. The overturning of legal protections for abortion in the US was, Boris Johnson opined, ‘a big step backwards’. He said: ‘I have always believed in a woman’s right to choose’. No doubt he has.
Contrary to media opinion the Supreme Court has not ‘scrapped’ the Constitutional right to abortion but ruled that there never has been such a right; the Constitution was created in 1787 and far from allowing a right to kill unborn babies, it enshrined the right to ‘life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness’; this is why in 1973 legal activists argued that the Constitution allowed abortion under the right to ‘privacy’.
But since Justice Alito’s opinion on the legal status of Roe v Wade was leaked, abortion campaigners have intimidated Justices, issued dire threats, attacked churches and vandalised pregnancy support centres – one was firebombed – telling us all we need to know about the motivation and aims of this lobby and their vicious acts in support of violence against unborn babies.
If, as we are told, the American people favour abortion, it seems strange that abortion campaigners are going into such meltdown. Were that the case it would mean a State-by-State landslide of pro-abortion legislation. The meltdown is because the American people by and large do not agree with such extremism. According to a poll conducted on June 22, the strong majority of Americans believe that unborn babies should have rights.
Outside the Supreme Court a poster proclaimed ‘We were never the land of the free’ – as if abortion rather than the right to be born is the basis for all freedoms. Another stated ‘Abortion on demand without apology’. This is their non-negotiable stance – that unless abortion is decriminalised, up to birth and for any reason, abortion rights will never be safe. To add to the lie upon lie, another young woman was seen holding a poster stating ‘Pro-life is a lie, they don’t care if people die’. Yet it is the pro-life movement that provides real care for women and babies, not the ‘don’t care’ abortion providers.
In the UK, neither does the 1967 Abortion Act enshrine what Johnson calls ‘a woman’s right to choose’. Rather it legalises abortion on certain specified grounds. Yet since enactment it has indeed been treated as providing for abortion on demand.
Contrary to Mr Johnson’s convenient argument about women’s rights, the early feminists warned that abortion would not just kill babies but harm women – and they were right.
The Express comments that ‘it is remarkable that the US Supreme Court has chosen to curtail the freedom of women to make decisions about their own bodies’, calling it ‘a retrograde step’ and noting how ‘remarkable’ it is that in America ‘in many places, anyone can buy a semi-automatic weapon used to end life, while women cannot decide for themselves what to do with their own bodies’.
In any other context, attempting to protect life would be seen as praiseworthy, and yet when it comes to the first stage of everyone’s life, attempts to protect it are greeted with scorn and anger. Restoring the right for voters to decide whether they want to protect unborn life is not a tragic error – a step backwards – but a long-awaited step in the right direction.
