As I write these words, the American public is on tenterhooks, awaiting the official release of the Supreme Court’s opinion in the case of Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health, testing the State of Mississippi’s 15-week abortion ban. Of course, an unprecedented leak of a draft majority opinion in the case, authored by Associate Justice Samuel Alito, indicates that the Court will reverse the two milestone cases Roe v. Wade and Planned Parenthood v. Casey, and return the regulation of abortion access to each of the 50 States, where it was before Roe was decided in 1973.
This is important to note because of the persistent misperception that reversing Roe will cause abortion to be illegal across the United States. Abortion proponents are invested in this myth, of course, as it helps to foment outrage at the perceived injustice. In reality, only one State, the relatively sparsely populated Oklahoma (population 4 million) has passed a law banning abortion in all cases. In contrast, accounting for the population of only six States—California (39 million), New York (20 million), Pennsylvania (13 million), Illinois (13 million), New Jersey (9 million), and Virginia (8 million)—the reversal of Roe will have absolutely no effect on legal abortion access for more than 100 million people. And while more populous states than Oklahoma will have restrictive abortion laws (Texas, for example, 30 million), the fact is that for a majority of the population, abortion will be as easily accessed after Dobbs as before. The approximately 26 States poised to enact laws protecting unborn children comprise a minority of the population: about 130 million of 335 million total.
Of course, in both States that protect unborn life and those that do not, public debates and activities will ensue to attempt to change the legislation. Thus, the abortion controversy will move from Washington, D.C. to various States’ legislatures and governors’ offices. And the debates will be informed by politicians, activists, scholars, and journalists, working to persuade their various opponents of the justice of their positions.
An early and major contribution to this public debate is an excellent new book by Ryan T. Anderson and Alexandra DeSanctis, Tearing Us Apart: How Abortion Harms Everything and Solves Nothing (Regnery Publishing). Anderson (president of the Washington, D.C. think tank, Ethics and Public Policy Centre) and DeSanctis (visiting fellow at EPPC and staff writer for National Review) consider the various ways that abortion affects public goods far beyond the obvious injustice of taking an innocent human life. While both are practicing Catholics, the purpose of Tearing Us Apart is to appeal to a broad range of people from any or no religious persuasion and inclination.
The authors note at the outset that the “basic case for the right to life of the unborn child rests on three theses: 1. Biological: A new human comes into existence at conception. 2. Moral: Human beings are created equal and possess intrinsic dignity and worth. 3. Political: Governments exist to, at the very least, protect innocent human beings from lethal violence.” The genius of stating these as the central theses is that numbers 2 and 3 are (at least in theory) universally held by all Americans. If one abstracts them from the issue of abortion, one would get a nearly unanimous affirmation of the equality of all human beings and the duty of governments to protect them from lethal violence.
The purported debate, then, is solely on the first thesis, that a new human comes into existence at conception. But Anderson and DeSanctis demonstrate that this thesis is less open to rational debate than theses 2 and 3. Citing scholarly literature summarizing the views of mainstream biologists, the authors demonstrate that “Ninety-five percent of biologists affirm that a new organism is created at fertilisation”, including biologists who nonetheless favour legal abortion access. The logical implication, of course, is that proponents of abortion access must suspend their commitments to theses 2 and 3 on the question of abortion. But why? And, more importantly, if these commitments can be suspended for abortion, why not any other arbitrarily identified state of human life?
The answer is that there is no reasonable way to suspend commitment to theses 2 and 3 for abortion and keep it for virtually anything else. Thus does abortion cause the several harms identified by Ryan and DeSanctis: to equality, medicine, the rule of law, politics, and popular culture. The incoherence of people arbitrarily suspending their commitment to equality and the government’s duty to protect humans from lethal violence on the question of abortion infects the entirety of the body politic. The harm is not simply to the child and the mother, although that is the most immediately measurable, but to the very way that we order our lives together. This is why, as the American bishops have correctly stated, abortion is the preeminent moral issue of our time. Tearing Us Apart is an admirable explanation of why that is the case. And the book is a single contribution to the debate, rigorously and persuasively arguing for the protection of unborn life in a post-Roe world.
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