This week, President Trump nominated Brett Kavanaugh to fill Justice Anthony Kennedy’s seat on the Supreme Court after he retires in a few weeks.
As an originalist who reveres the Constitution, Kavanaugh will affirm the Constitution and the rights it protects, including the right to life. The nomination of Judge Kavanaugh is evidence of President Trump’s continued commitment to his pro-life promises on the campaign trail.
For those of us in full-time, pro-life work, the possibility of a textualist justice shifting the Supreme Court’s majority against Roe for the first time since the 1973 ruling is welcome.
For forty-five years, overturning Roe has been a well-known goal of the pro-life movement. As a direct result of that unjust ruling, over sixty million American preborn children have died violent deaths in legal abortions in the United States, and countless women and families have suffered the fallout of those losses.
As their violent movement continues to die out, the abortion industry is understandably irate right now. Many prominent abortion zealots have attempted to smear the pro-life movement by claiming that pro-lifers are trying to hide our intention of overturning Roe.
I want to be perfectly clear when I say that we not only intend to overturn Roe, but we also intend to ensure that each preborn child in the United States enjoys the right to life and protection from the barbarity of abortion and every woman receives the care she deserves. The pro-life movement has never run from these facts, and we’re not about to start.
But what are the odds of successfully walking back Roe? According to scholars and judges on both sides of the abortion debate, Roe is a deeply flawed legal decision that is not difficult to challenge.
Relying on Griswold v. Connecticut’s absurd “emanations from penumbras,” seven male justices on the Supreme Court conjured a right to abortion out of the so-called right to privacy – one that overrode the preborn human’s very right to life.
But even beyond its legal shortcomings, Roe is doomed because America has tried abortion and found its promises lacking. Every year, the chasm between the tenets of Roe and public opinion grows wider.
Roe, which enshrines abortion-on-demand for any reason through all nine months of pregnancy stands in stark contrast with the convictions of America, which accepts abortion unenthusiastically and with great reservation, if at all.
For a growing swath of the population, abortion has proven a stain on the American legacy – one that needs to be consigned to the ash heap of history with other failed, dehumanizing experiments like slavery and Jim Crow.
The abortion industry was content to peddle death for decades, raking in handsome and easy profit as millions of American women came through its doors seeking to solve a problem.
Meanwhile, as more and more women realized abortion was not the answer they were looking for, the pro-life movement was innovating, discovering real solutions, and connecting with the pregnant women who needed help.
As a result, abortion is becoming less relevant to the people groups that were once most likely to seek it out. That’s what the pro-life movement means when we say we’re making abortion unthinkable. Abortion is a dehumanizing, violent act of killing that has no place in a just society, and our country is inching closer and closer to acknowledging that fact in federal law and mainstream culture.
President Trump’s Supreme Court nominee is not a radical outlier on abortion. Kavanaugh reflects the better direction in which our society is – by the grace of God – heading.
The closer we come to abolishing abortion, the more ferocious the cries of the dying abortion lobby will grow. We expect this and are remain undeterred by it. Our job and our intention is to stay the course until every human’s right to life is acknowledged and respected by law and culture.
Brian Fisher is the President of Human Coalition.
The views and opinions expressed in this commentary are those of the author and do not reflect the official position of The Daily Caller.
