Abortion and a Constitutional Showdown

Written By: Mark Crutcher, President Of Life Dynamics

Release Date: 2020

Introduction

America’s political landscape is changing dramatically and things now routinely happen in our legislative process that would have been considered unimaginable just a few years ago. For example, states are now passing legislation that allows the production, possession, use and marketing of marijuana despite the fact that federal law classifies marijuana as a Schedule 1 illegal drug. Obviously, these states have made a conscious decision to openly defy federal law.

Another example of this, and the one the pro-life movement should be paying close attention to, is the sanctuary city issue. If a poll of the American people had been taken just ten years ago, how many of them would have predicted that the mayors of major cities and the governors of our largest states would soon be openly defying the federal government’s Constitutionally established authority to control immigration? And how many of them would have said that candidates would be campaigning for office on an “open borders” platform and a promise to put federal law enforcement officers in jail if they attempt to enforce the nation’s immigration laws? And how many people would have said that elected officials would be calling for illegal aliens to be given free college tuition, free healthcare, and the right to vote in American elections?

The list goes on and on, but the point is that no more than ten years ago conventional wisdom would have been that these ideas are preposterous and would not be tolerated by the public. But as we now know, conventional wisdom would have been wrong.

What the pro-life movement needs to understand is that conventional wisdom can also be wrong about the battle over abortion. And what I’m suggesting is that the Left’s frontal assault on America’s immigration laws may have created a model for what the pro-life movement can do to protect the unborn, and their sanctuary city campaign may have paved the way for us to use that model.

Ground Zero

The Roe vs. Wade decision was issued in January of 1973, and since then two types of justices have dominated the Supreme Court. With extremely rare exceptions, they have been those who are resolutely pro-abortion and those who might lean pro-life but have tacitly accepted that abortion is “settled law” and not open to reconsideration.

What these two factions have in common is that neither one wants to see a case brought before the Court that would force them to re-examine the fundamental justification for legalized abortion that was manufactured in Roe. So they have spent almost 50 years artfully dodging any case that would put them in that situation, and only rendering decisions that allow for a bare minimum of abortion regulation.

It is obvious that the abortion lobby and the Supreme Court have concluded that the rationale upon which Roe was built is legally fragile and cannot survive scrutiny. Some of them have even stated this in public. It is reasonable to assume that technology also played a role in their misgivings about the long-term future of Roe. In 1973, it was easy to dismiss the contention that the unborn are living human beings as mere opinion, but since then scientific breakthroughs like ultrasound coupled with advances in fetal medicine have turned that opinion into an observable fact. The reality is, one hundred percent of the technology that has come along since Roe was issued has reinforced the pro-life position, and that trend will continue with new technology that is on the horizon.

At this point, it is clear that both the Court and the abortion lobby accept that if Roe is ever revisited – it is doomed. That has created their mutual dependence on the concepts of settled law, precedent and stare decisis.

This was never more evident than it was in the hearings over the confirmation of Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court.

Early on, Kavanaugh’s enemies saw that he was well qualified for the position and if traditional standards for evaluating Supreme Court
nominees were used, he would be easily confirmed. So they abandoned those standards as irrelevant and accused him of being a violent sexual predator who did not have the proper “judicial temperament” to be on the Court.

By the end, these hearings had devolved into a national embarrassment. It also became undeniable that this circus-of-the-absurd had nothing to do with temperament or these bizarre and unsubstantiated sexual assault charges. It was about abortion.

Although Kavanaugh was eventually confirmed, it would be shortsighted for the pro-life movement to take an “all’s-well-that-ends-well” attitude. Instead, we need to see the depravity and the corruption displayed in these hearings as a flashing red warning sign. Kavanaugh’s enemies carried out a scorched earth campaign to defeat him and they didn’t care what was true, what was a lie, or how many innocent people got trampled in the process. In their minds, he was going to tip the scales against legalized abortion despite the fact there was nothing to support that assumption in his writings, in his prior decisions, or in the testimony he gave during the hearings.

Of course, all their hand wringing and doomsday predictions were quickly exposed as complete nonsense. Just five months after being sworn in, Kavanaugh teamed up with the Court’s most radical abortion supporters to reject a case that would have prevented taxpayer funding for Planned Parenthood. And with that, the covert pro-life agenda his enemies claimed to see so clearly, turned out to be a mirage.

But the question is: what will happen when a case is accepted by the Supreme Court that could actually lead to personhood for the unborn; or a piece of legislation is proposed in Congress to end legalized abortion by statute that has a realistic chance of passing?

In either of those two scenarios, the ensuing battle would be so vicious and so protracted that it would make World War II look like a pillow fight at an 8-year-old girl’s sleepover. And the Kavanaugh confirmation process proves it.

In the end, the Kavanaugh hearings reaffirmed two basic truths about contemporary American politics. The first is that the Left is populated, dominated, and financed by totally amoral people who will wallow in any cesspool and do whatever it takes to advance their godless agenda. As for the conflict over abortion, they figured out long ago that it is the political equivalent of a knife fight in a waterfront bar, and they made a decision that nothing would be too savage, too immoral, or too nasty for them to use.

The second truth is that, even after all these decades, there is not one shred of evidence that the ivory-tower intellectuals who sit on the Supreme Court, or the gated-community country-club patricians who own the Republican Party, have what it takes to fight for the unborn against those kind of people in that kind of environment. To the contrary, the pro-life movement has many examples, over many years, that when the first punch is thrown in a waterfront bar fight these guys are out the door with their heads on fire.