Do You Know Roe?

Before Roe, all states permitted abortion if necessary to save the mother's life, and some permitted abortion in additional circumstances.⁷ But Roe deemed any prohibition on abortion as unconstitutional.

If Roe is overturned, policy decisions about abortion will be made by the citizens of each state through the democratic process, rather than by courts. Some states will place limits on abortion, in others there will likely be few limits.⁸

Not until Roe v. Wade is reversed will the people again be able to govern themselves on the important public policy issue of abortion.

Even legal experts who support abortion believe Roe is not well-reasoned and is a case of extreme judicial overreach.

• The late Yale Law Professor John Hart Ely said, Roe v Wade is "a very bad decision . . . because it is not constitutional law and gives almost no sense of an obligation to try to be."¹⁶

• Attorney Edward Lazarus, former law clerk to Roe's author, Justice Blackmun, put it this way: "As a matter of constitutional interpretation and judicial method, Roe borders on the indefensible . . . [It is] one of the most intellectually suspect constitutional decisions of the modern era."¹⁷

• Harvard Law Professor Lawrence Tribe criticized Roe saying, "behind its own verbal smokescreen, the substantive judgment on which it rests is nowhere to be found."¹⁸

• Justice Sandra Day O'Connor said, "The Court's abortion decisions have already worked a major distortion in the Court's Constitutional jurisprudence . . . no legal rule or doctrine is safe from ad hoc nullification by this Court."¹⁹

• And then-Circuit Judge (now Justice) Ruth Bader Ginsburg said Roe "ventured too far in the change it ordered and presented an incomplete justification for its action."²⁰

When experts on both sides of the abortion debate agree that Roe is bad law, reversing it makes good legal sense and would return abortion policy back to the people to be decided through the democratic process.



 

Claims that thousands of women were dying from illegal abortions at the time of Roe were fabricated for political purposes. The late Dr. Bernard Nathanson, a chief strategist for legalizing abortion, said he and his associates invented the "nice, round shocking figure" of "5,000 to 10,000 deaths a year" from illegal abortions:

I confess that I knew the figures were totally false, and I suppose the others did too if they stopped to think of it. But in the "morality" of our revolution, it was a useful figure, widely accepted, so why go out of our way to correct it with honest statistics?²⁹

Research confirms that the actual number of maternal deaths resulting from abortion in the 25 years prior to 1973 averaged 250 a year, with a high of 388 in 1948.³⁰ In 1966, before the first state legalized abortion, 120 mothers died from abortion.³¹ While any death is a tragedy, by 1972, when abortion was still illegal in 80 percent of the country, the number dropped to 39 maternal deaths from abortion.³²