What’s being lost in all the vitriol following the Supreme Court’s overturning of Roe v. Wade is a growing awareness that the original 1973 opinion was deeply flawed. In Roe, an activist Warren court created a Maginot Line in the sand that, far from settling a dispute, divided the nation.
A decade ago, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg called Roe faulty because it rested on an implied 14th Amendment right to privacy, rather than explicitly affirming women’s rights over reproduction. The court then eroded this right to privacy by asserting the states’ competing interest in protecting “potential human life.”
Roe “stopped momentum on the side of change,” Ginsberg said at a 2013 Chicago law school forum. Ginsburg would have preferred settling the issue as part of a process that included the state legislatures and the courts.
Absent Roe, perhaps abortion would have become just one of many reproductive medical options available to women. Instead, the court’s liberal judicial activism fabricated what became the epitome of female emancipation to one side, and the equivalent of murder to the other, with neither willing to give ground.
Like the Liberty Bell, Roe was a cherished symbol of freedom that cracked when it was barely out of the box. Tragically, it ushered in a half-century of divisiveness from which our nation may never recover.
Peter Busowski
Jeannette