Ending abortion demands we support women and children | GARY COSBY JR.
I once taught a Sunday school class about the concept that destroying the works of Satan is good, but it is not enough. When one destroys something, one must build something good in its place.
As the Supreme Court of the United States seems poised to overturn the landmark Roe v. Wade ruling that opened the door to legal abortion, it will be incumbent upon us to build a new work that will aid the women who will be giving birth, women who previously would have had an abortion.
In 1973, the court used the Roe decision to more or less create a right for women to choose to have an abortion based upon an extremely loose interpretation of Section 1 of the 14th Amendment, saying the right to privacy covers the right for a woman to choose to have an abortion.
Section 1 states: “All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside. No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.”
How the court managed to interpret that section to mean abortion was a constitutionally-protected right is tied to a judicially-determined right to privacy implied in the Constitution. Justice Harry Blackmun, in writing the Opinion of the Court stated this: “This right of privacy, whether it be founded in the Fourteenth Amendment's concept of personal liberty and restrictions upon state action, as we feel it is, or, as the District Court determined, in the Ninth Amendment's reservation of rights to the people, is broad enough to encompass a woman's decision whether or not to terminate her pregnancy.”
Blackmun also wrote, conceding a point about how to define a “person” said this: “The appellee and certain amici argue that the fetus is a 'person' within the language and meaning of the Fourteenth Amendment. In support of this, they outline at length and in detail the well-known facts of fetal development. If this suggestion of personhood is established, the appellant's case, of course, collapses, for the fetus' right to life would then be guaranteed specifically by the Amendment.”
And thus, the great debate of when a person is a person began, the original ruling setting the woman’s right to an abortion as being unfettered in the first trimester of pregnancy, then subject to more stringent controls in the second and third trimesters. That ruling was modified by another ruling in a 1992 case, which affirmed the right to an abortion and did away with trimesters in favor of viability of the fetus as the determining factor of when the right to an unrestricted abortion was no longer available.
At least 43 million legal abortions have occurred between 1973 and 2021, according to statistics from the Centers for Disease Control. The estimate understates the total number of abortions because states do not have to report abortions to the CDC and several states, including California, did not report abortions for some or all of the years it has been legal. Fox News reported that the National Right to Life Committee says there have been more than 63 million abortions since 1973.
As sad as it is to contemplate all these abortions, and it is truly sad — gut-wrenching in fact — it is equally sad to know that many state legislatures, in their haste to end legal abortions, will act without compassion toward women.
Supporting the women having children is going to be a huge issue in the immediate aftermath of the fall of Roe. Are we willing to pay more taxes to support women who will be raising a child they once would have aborted since many of these women will receive little to no help from the biological fathers? Are we willing to pass more stringent laws to ensure that the biological fathers are forced to financially support these women and children? How many new state and federal programs will it take to handle the increase in live births every year and how much will it cost?
Abortion isn’t going to stop when Roe v. Wade falls. Women who have the means will simply travel to states where abortion will remain legal, but what happens to women without the means? Let us not fool ourselves. As conservatives, we have complained for many years about single mothers who have exploited state and federal assistance under the various social programs available.
Abortion has been a cheap way out for society — merciless, but cheap. What must follow in the wake of the downfall of Roe will be expensive in every conceivable way, except, one hopes, in the moral sense, but if we who have fought hard to end legal abortions turn our backs on the women and all the new babies who come as a result, we are no better than the abortionists we have spent years decrying.
Gary Cosby Jr. is photo editor of The Tuscaloosa News. Readers can email him at gary.cosby@tuscaloosanews.com.
This article originally appeared on The Tuscaloosa News: Ending abortion demands we support women and children | GARY COSBY JR.
