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Ever since the Supreme Court opinion in Roe v Wade made privacy — which included abortion—a federal Constitutional right in 1973, the right-to-life debate has come and gone out of the public eye. At this point, most people who paid attention to the Roe opinion knew was not based on anything in the Constitution. It was more of a sociological and cultural decision than a legal one.
A couple of years ago, New York’s Catholic Democratic Governor had the World Trade Center in lights to celebrate its abortion-on-demand-until-the-day-of-birth law. This law was framed as empowering women by guaranteeing “reproductive health.”
This and eight other similar state laws were largely ignored as merely codifying Roe v Wade. But the state of Virginia’s pediatrician former governor’s ghoulish advocacy for abortion until delivery of the infant was jaw-dropping as he explained that killing the infant after birth was allowed. Adding insult to injury, in California, minors can obtain abortions without parental consent.
The normalization of the intentional killing of human beings weaved its way into our culture. Life was not only cheap for the unborn but for other vulnerable or unwanted persons, such as the elderly. Half the states have laws that charge a person for two murders if he or she kills a woman in any stage of pregnancy.
Fortunately for unborn children, the recent Supreme Court case, Dobbs v Jackson, brought the abortion debate to the forefront. The pro-Roe crowd went so far as to surround the homes of conservative Supreme Court justices. The media could not continue to ignore the large numbers of people participating in marches for life. More and more people publicly admitted that aborting a baby is not the solution for an unplanned pregnancy.
We can only hope that more and more physicians prefer to practice medicine in the mode of Dr. Mildred Jefferson, the first black woman accepted to Harvard Medical School:
“I became a physician in order to help save lives. … I am not willing to stand aside and allow the concept of expendable human lives to turn this great land of ours into just another exclusive reservation where only the perfect, the privileged, and the planned have the right to live.”
Brian Johnston is the Western Director of the National Right to Life Committee and Chairman of the California ProLife Council. Author and lecturer, he has served as a public advocate in many capacities: as California Commissioner on Aging, on the board of the National Legal Center for the Medically Dependent, and as a film producer and commentator. He has appeared on many programs, including PBS NewsHour, Fox News, NBC Nightly News, and many other programs. Mr. Johnston is the host of the syndicated radio program Life Matters with Brian Johnston. He recently authored The Evil Twins – Roe and Doe: How the Supreme Court Unleashed Medical Killing.
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