In February, five Supreme Court Justices voted in camera to overturn Roe v. Wade and send the issue of abortion back to the states, where it resided until 1973. Justices Clarence Thomas, Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett had all signed on to the majority opinion overturning Roe that had been drafted by...
The worst thing about the U.S. Supreme Court’s 1973 legalization of abortion in all 50 states and U.S. territories has not been the 55 million—and counting—dead babies, as horrible as that has been, but the damage it has caused to the rule of law, specifically the U.S. Constitution. In his dissent, Justice Byron White branded...
The overruling of Roe is the greatest triumph to date of the conservative legal movement. The Court had no business inventing a constitutional right to abortion.
I have no desire to defend President George H.W. Bush or his execrable appointment of David Souter to the Supreme Court, but I was confused by the chronology of the Turnock v. Ragsdale case laid out by Scott P. Richert in the February issue (“Robert Bork, R.I.P.,” Cultural Revolutions). In December 1989, when that case...
The Supreme Court’s recent Casey decision on abortion is a memorable example of sociological balderdash. The joint decision began, “Liberty finds no refuge in a jurisprudence of doubt,” to which Justice Scalia fired back in his dissent, “Liberty finds no refuge in this jurisprudence of confusion.” Scalia’s observation becomes painfully clear when one reads the...
After the Roe reversal protests erupted all across the country, with the largest in New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles—cities in states with virtually zero probability that their lawmakers will pass laws restricting abortion.
I met Judge Robert Bork once, in the summer of 1989, when I was interning at Accuracy in Media. I was working on a feature story for the Washington Inquirer, AIM’s weekly newspaper, about the Smithsonian Institution’s use of tax dollars to fund the performance of Santeria and Palo Mayombe rituals on the Mall in...
The pro-life movement today almost completely identifies with the Republican Party, despite its support by a few Democrats such as Pennsylvania Sen. Robert Casey (sometimes). It wasn’t always so. In 1972, at the age of 17, I worked against Michigan’s Measure B, which would have legalized abortion in the state. It lost, with 61 percent...
Gerald N. Rosenberg, an assistant professor of political science and an instructor in law at the University of Chicago, has some simple advice for activists who think a United States Supreme Court ruling is an end-all: not only are you wrong, but your money is better spent out of court than in court. In The...
The two most prominent newspaper journalists covering the U.S. Supreme Court have written biographies of two of the most prominent justices of our time. Predictably, Linda Greenhouse of the New York Times, who has written Becoming Justice Blackmun: Harry Blackmun’s Supreme Court Journey, and Joan Biskupic of USA Today, who recently published Sandra Day O’Connor:...
Neat! We know what the Supreme Court debate is all about—the debate, that is to say, over who shall take retiring Justice Anthony Kennedy’s seat. The debate is about abortion. Or so declares Sen. Susan Collins, the Republican moderate from Maine, whose vote could prove essential to confirmation of whatever nominee the White House puts...
Brett Kavanaugh’s nomination by President Trump for the blessed vacancy left by retiring justice Anthony Kennedy, author of the civilization-defying Obergefell opinion, supplied the heat necessary to cause the vaunted American melting pot to boil over and reveal its rancid contents. Those contents included the innocent limbs and brains of David Daleiden videos, eagerly devoured...
It is hard to keep a straight face while reading the hysteria over the United States Supreme Court agreeing to hear Dobson v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, the Mississippi case challenging the state statute prohibiting nearly all abortions after the 15th week of pregnancy. For those in the legal establishment, the greatest fear seems to be that this...
The pro-life movement has made great strides in recent years, though many people who consider themselves active pro-lifers may not realize it. That’s because the good news has all happened at the state and local levels. State laws combining health-code restrictions on abortuaries with reasonable waiting periods and required ultrasounds have given local pregnancy-care centers,...
Pro-lifers upset with Trump mistake their situation. They're not missing an opportunity to declare a universal right to life; they're rather in a pitched battle to stop the other side from reestablishing a universal right to abortion.
If Justice Alito’s mysteriously leaked draft opinion on the Dobbs case becomes official, it will overrule a whole line of dubiously reasoned federal abortion cases and will be the greatest victory for sensible jurisprudence in at least five decades.
In early March, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals went exploring in the empty spaces beyond the text of the 14th Amendment and discovered a constitutionally protected right to suicide. Judge Stephen Reinhardt, writing for an 8-3 majority in Compassion in Dying v. Washington, went on to conclude that a Washington State law forbidding assisted...
Partial-birth abortion is back in the news, and for the first time, there appears to be some hope for the pro-life side. Of all the extraordinary things that the United States Supreme Court has done in the past few decades, none matches its 1973 decision in Roe v. Wade. Justice Blackmun’s majority opinion articulated a...
What is the justification for abortion? Is abortion a moral or therapeutic concept? Medical or legal? Sociological or personal? These considerations underlie Gosnell: The Untold Story of America’s Most Prolific Serial Killer, a narrative of the comprehensive criminal enterprise of Kermit Gosnell, M.D., Philadelphia’s notorious baby killer and drug trafficker, by the Irish journalists Ann...
I met Judge Robert Bork once, in the summer of 1989, when I was interning at Accuracy in Media. I was working on a feature story for the Washington Inquirer, AIM’s weekly newspaper, about the Smithsonian Institution’s use of tax dollars to fund the performance of Santeria and Palo Mayombe rituals on the Mall in...
Austrian sociologist Hans Millendorfer claims to have discovered, at least in his native Austria, a perplexing correspondence: his statistics show a rise in abortions paralleled by a rise in civility. To those of us who consider abortion a violent and evil act, it seems strange that such violence should be accompanied by an increase in...
Abortion politics has consumed my adult life, starting in 1972 when, at 17, I helped defeat the abortion-legalization Measure B on Michigan’s ballot. A few weeks later, on January 22, 1973—like December 7, 1941, a date that will live in infamy—the U.S. Supreme Court dive-bombed the country by erasing all state abortion laws—including in those...
President Barack Obama surprised even battle-hardened pro-life Americans with his official remarks on the 39th anniversary of Roe v. Wade, the Supreme Court decision that has, since 1973, littered garbage dumps across America with the corpses of 50 million babies, 32 percent of them African-American. In a White House press release praising the landmark case...
President Barack Obama surprised even battle-hardened pro-life Americans with his official remarks on the 39th anniversary of Roe v. Wade, the Supreme Court decision that has, since 1973, littered garbage dumps across America with the corpses of 50 million babies, 32 percent of them African-American. In a White House press ...
There are few issues more emotional than abortion. The dogmatism of the respective combatants strikes fear in the hearts of lesser mortals—which means almost every politician. Three decades after Roe v. Wade, the issue of abortion is unlikely ever to be resolved politically. The major parties have largely followed the passions of their most active...
I will resist the temptation to steal my own thunder for next week’s John Randolph Club meeting in Philadelphia, where I intend to talk about the most important aspect of the Palin Pandemonium: the conservative Christian rejection of the natural order. There are at least two other aspects of McCain-Palin that are troubling: abortion and...
Flip-flopper. Like racist or isolationist, it’s not a word that you’d like to have attached to your name. In recent years, it has been used to whap the likes of John Kerry and Mitt Romney over the head. It means that your finger is in the wind, that you are not a Decider, that, like...
Law professors like to debate among themselves which of the U.S. Supreme Court’s many opinions is the very worst. There has been a general consensus that the most loathsome is the one in Dred Scott v. Sandford (1857), in which the Court decided that the right to hold slaves in the territories was a “fundamental...
Lucy just pulled the football away from Charlie Brown again. In the budget compromise that averted a government shutdown, it was the Republicans not the Democrats who blinked on the funding of Planned Parenthood, and it was the pro-lifers who look to the GOP and not the abortion supporters who look to the Democrats who...
Christine Blasey Ford’s Kavanaugh hoax put both the justice and Mark Judge through the mill. We owe Judge a chance to try to rebuild his life.
Lucy just pulled the football away from Charlie Brown again. In the budget compromise that averted a government shutdown, it was the Republicans not the Democrats who blinked on the funding of Planned Parenthood, and it was the pro-lifers who look to the GOP and not the abortion supporters who look to the Democrats...
In June 2005, the U.S. Supreme Court handed down its decision in Kelo v. City of New London, depriving property owners of rights that virtually everyone has always assumed they had. Very soon—before you can say “sequel to Lawrence v. Texas”—the Supreme Court will no doubt take up the issue of same-sex marriage. You think...
IN THE SUPREME COURT OF THE UNITED STATES On Writ of Certiorari to the Court of Appeals June 21, 2017 Justice Breyer delivered the Opinion of the Court. Sheila X is a single woman living in San Diego. Shortly after giving birth to a child, she received her Law School Admission Test scores. ...
If Mitch McConnell’s Senate can confirm his new nominee for the Supreme Court, President Donald Trump may have completed the capture of all three branches of the U.S. government for the Republican Party. Not bad for a rookie. And the lamentations on the left are surely justified. For liberalism’s great strategic ally and asset of...
After Dobbs, the many-headed ruling class is licking its wounds … and itching for a rematch. The upcoming midterm election will measure the resistance to the Court's attempt to return to America's constitutional origins.
Hope, as they say, springs eternal. Lately, those of us who believe in the rule of law and an objective interpretation of the Constitution according to the original understanding of those who framed it (and the people’s representatives who ratified it) have been dealt some cruel blows. The two most prominent are the Supreme Court’s...
With all the febrile ebullience of a rerun of a 1950’s sitcom, the Republican Party will descend upon San Diego determined to efface any evidence that Pat Buchanan ever existed and committed to staging the miraculous spectacle of a political convention without any politics. Yet most Republicans, whether or not they are present at the...
In its most recent exercise of liberal democracy, the state senate of Massachusetts voted 32-8 to override Gov. Charlie Baker’s veto of what is called the Roe Act. One day earlier, Monday, the state house had voted to override. The Roe Act is now law in the Bay State. And what does it say? ...
“A good name is rather to be chosen than great riches,” said wise King Solomon. In the fall of 2018, Democrats pressed with all their might to take Brett Kavanaugh’s good name away, in an effort to retake control of Congress. This was, to say the least, unjust, as the nominee himself—by all reasonable accounts...
I would like to add three comments about Chronicles Editor Paul Gottfried’s acute analysis of America’s historical conflicts over abortion (“Feminism Left and Right Drove America’s Permissive Abortion Laws” January 2022 Chronicles). First, as I have documented in numerous publications, while I would never discount the influence of the women’s rights movement of the...
Although the U.S. seems to be as woke and post-biblical as any other transformed Western country, our abortion laws since Roe v. Wade (1973) have been wildly out of line with those of the rest of the West. Betsy Clarke, writing in Chronicles’s sister publication, Intellectual Takeout, offers this well-considered observation on the subject: ...
Something died in America 42 years ago today. That’s when the U.S. Supreme Court handed down its 1973 edict, Roe v. Wade, forcing all 50 states to almost completely legalize abortion on demand – even those states that already had legalized it. About 57 million babies have been killed since. But something more died: Maybe...
The overruling of Roe v. Wade is a momentous achievement of the conservative legal movement and an act of great courage. The blowback will be fierce, but America is beginning to see a rebirth of the rule of law.
“If a woman of her own accord drops that which is in her, they shall crucify her and not bury her.” —The Assyrian Code, c. 2000 B.C. Ancient history is worth keeping in mind when confronting the claims of the pro- and anti-abortion and euthanasia camps, since both tend to couch their arguments in terms...
When the Vietnam War ended in 1975, over 58,000 Americans had lost their lives over the course of almost 20 years. Whatever one may think of the justice or prudence of the U.S. intervention in Southeast Asia, only the most callous of souls regards that loss of life with complete indifference. When the Northern Illinois...
The staunchest pro-lifers don't want to settle for Trump’s compromise, but the alternative on the ballot in November isn’t an absolute anti-abortion position.
The case called Planned Parenthood v. Casey was decided by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1992. At the time there was some thought that it might be the vehicle for overturning Roe v. Wade, the 1973 case that made abortion a constitutional right. But Casey only made things worse: it reaffirmed Roe, and added an...
When the Vietnam War ended in 1975, over 58,000 Americans had lost their lives over the course of almost 20 years. Whatever one may think of the justice or prudence of the U.S. intervention in Southeast Asia, only the most callous of souls regards that loss of life with complete ...
Is Donald Trump a Burkean? Would Russell Kirk vote for him for president? Can a paleoconservative legal scholar imagine any benefit to a Trump presidency? Of course, the neoconservatives are piling on Trump. Most notable was National Review’s January 21 issue, “Against Trump.” “Trump,” say the editors, “is a philosophically unmoored political opportunist who would...
The U.S. black population has been disproportionately devastated by the practice of abortion, yet many black leaders have been cajoled into dutifully mouthing the abortion politics of their white leftist overlords.