In light of last Friday's annual March for Life, this one coming 47 years since the Supreme Court decided Roe v. Wade, JWI founder and director Hadley Arkes takes issue with the sovereignty that the Court has taken for itself on the issue of life. Writing a follow-up to his previous article in The Catholic Thing, Arkes points out that, with Roe, the Court gave itself the exclusive power to enumerate a new right, while Congress and the presidency conceded to this new right to abortion without re-litigation for years. The creation of this new right, Arkes says, disfigured our laws and changed Americans’ moral sensibilities over time, since the political parties were once far more unified in the pro-life cause. Arkes continues, saying that pro-lifers should strive to heed Lincoln’s understanding of the separation of powers, by respecting the Court’s sovereignty but urging it to reconsider its stance on abortion through constitutional actions by Congress and the presidency, as the pro-life movement continues.

Some quotes from the article are included below:

“Over the last twenty years some of us have sought to make Lincoln’s understanding explicit as part of the preamble, or understanding, attached to pro-life legislation.  That effort failed, for various reasons until 2002 when we succeeded in passing the Born-Alive Infants’ Protection Act, the Act that sought to protect children who had survived abortions.”

“What I am suggesting is that the simple logic of the separation of powers – the logic explained by Lincoln and exemplified by his Administration – that this logic of the Constitution could have been enough to have spared us the decision that disfigured our laws and altered the moral sensibilities of our people.”

“And yet my sense of the pro-lifers is that [after Roe v. Wade were overturned] they would still march every January in the cold. For something in them just doesn’t want to make things easy.  They might prefer to remember with cold sobriety that the temptation to do thoughtless, even murderous things, may spring even from decent people living in good places.”

You can read the full article here.