January 22, 1973 should be a day that lives in infamy. On that date, the U.S. Supreme Court announced decisions in two abortion cases: Roe v. Wade and Doe v. Bolton. An ethic that serves to continue human civilization itself—the value of every human life—was suddenly and deliberately attacked by a worldview that decided it knew better.
Well, today, 51 years later, the prolife movement is still alive, and Roe v. Wade is dead.
But it’s not a time for gloating (if there ever was such a time). More than a half century later, we should look back at what Roe v. Wade was trying to accomplish. We paid a terrible price for it; what did we get out of it?
The decision itself was a masterclass in reaching a predetermined outcome. If you want a detailed account of how the Supreme Court essentially cheated its way through the case, check out Clarke Forsythe’s excellent book, Abuse of Discretion.
To keep in short, in the popular telling, Roe v. Wade was all about Supreme Court Justice Harry Blackmun ensconcing himself in the prestigious Mayo Clinic’s library, doing exhaustive research on the history of abortion law. He produced a wise and sagacious majority opinion in Roe that was somehow both revolutionary and simultaneously protecting the status quo of American history.
In reality, he just cribbed some fake history from pro-abortion legal briefs and ran with it.
No better anecdote for the seriousness of Blackmun’s scholarship can be written than one reporter seeing him give a statement about his Roe opinion in 1991, on the eve of the Supreme Court’s next pivotal abortion decision, Planned Parenthood vs. Casey, in 1992:
“He would take no questions; he spoke from notes. His wife Dottie sat next to him, wearing a T-shirt that said, ‘The Supreme Question: Row vs. Wade.’ Underneath it was a cartoon of a man rowing while another was wading in the water. I was surprised that she treated the topic as a joke.”
Supreme Court Justice Dottie Blackmun, everyone.
The process of Roe v. Wade was heinous, but what about the promises? We’re an ends justify the means type society now, right? What was this significant decision that bucked centuries of tradition and law and democracy supposed to deliver? Was it worth it?
Saving Women’s Lives
The immediate promise of Roe was saving the lives of thousands of women who were dying from illegal abortions.
The only problem with that is thousands of women weren’t dying from illegal abortions. The groups pushing abortion created statistics out of thin air, and media outlets eager to sign up for their crusade ran them unquestioningly as the gospel truth.
It was all bullshit. There’s no polite way to characterize it. The other major promises of Roe were just a little too far out for the American public to swallow, and we’ll get to those in a moment. So, they had to amp up a public health emergency to justify their policy changes. Doesn’t that sound familiar? A crisis of tens of thousands of women dying sounds like a very palatable reason to accept just about anything.
You can easily see how that claim was false in two ways. First, look at states today that have banned abortion: where are all the dead women? Shouldn’t they be stacked up like cordwood as trophies by us malevolent forced-birth religious zealots? Nope. Not a single woman has died since Roe was overturned. Believe me when I say that if one had died, the media would be running her as a lead story for months straight. For years. For decades. Organizations would be named after her. Forgot that poor woman’s situation in life, she would be the new Horst Wessel of the modern day eugenics movement. Her symbolic importance for the Revolution would forever outstrip her importance as a mere human individual.
Never mind the many women who have died from legal abortions, usually because of gross negligence and conditions that no state health authority would accept in any other medical setting.
Consider this second reason to doubt illegal abortion statistics: what about the future we’ve created? Did accepting abortion-on-demand make being a woman safer in America? No. In fact, it’s the opposite.
A woman aged 25 to 34 is more likely to die today than in 1970. If illegal abortions were taking women’s lives on a societal scale, those numbers would show up somehow, right?
But there’s a deeper point to be made here. Think about that death rate statistic considering all of the advances in medicine, all of the poverty reduction programs and money spent, and the large-scale victory of feminism. Abortion and women’s lib. was supposed to make life better for American women. Instead, young women are overdosing on drugs and committing suicide at far greater rates. People living their best lives now shouldn’t be relying on mind-altering substances to get them through life, until it becomes unbearable to continue living.
It appears the smartphone and social media are far more deadly than abortion bans. If we were willing to upend the basic value of human life in order to respond to a made-up crisis in 1973, why are we so willing to accept a very real, undeniable crisis staring us straight in the eyes in 2024? We’ll accept killing our own children as a public policy solution, but we can’t, say, ban pornography? Or regulate social media use? Increase drug crime enforcement?
We live in a messed-up society where a ban on partial-birth abortion is a bridge too far, but we’ll watch people commit suicide at rates far beyond imaginary illegal abortion statistics and do… nothing.
Why? What’s so important about abortion?
Fulfillment of the Sexual Revolution
Have sex whenever you want, man, with whoever you want. Sounds great, right? No consequences.
That was going to be the great advance of hormonal birth control. We would achieve the great progressive dream of abolishing the family while having a ton of fun in the process.
Except there’s one tiny problem: birth control fails fairly often. What then? Well, that’s why you have abortion. When you consider the Abortion Industry’s own statistics that half of women having abortion were using a method of contraception in the month they got pregnant, abortion is just highly effective birth control.
So, what have we gotten in trade for those 60+ million unborn children?
Did we abolish the family? We’re slowly closing in on that reality. It has required other advances in the Sexual Revolution to continue. But, is it worth it? People seem awfully unhappy these days. Poverty hasn’t been solved. Teachers and administrators in public schools who are supposed to replace the role of parents seem pretty unhappy with how children act these days. They are totally unequipped to fix a bad home life for children. Should we just house children in schools? Well, those are called orphanages, and their existence is often used as an excuse to keep abortion legal, so children aren’t forced to grow up in institutions, so that argument goes. I guess we haven’t gotten around to replacing parents just yet, huh Plato?
Are we having great sex? Not really. Sometimes it’s hard to accept the studies of self-reported sexual activity, but if they are to be believed, then we are having a lot less sex these days. Pornography, weight gain from processed foods, and the Internet have a ton to do with that. Nevertheless, removing the potential negative consequence of having a son or daughter has not led to more and better sex.
The Sexual Revolution is a multi-faceted topic worthy of hundreds of books about it. But abortion is of primary importance for it. Abortion is the necessary pressure relief valve for the Sexual Revolution to continue functioning. And so far, its function seems to be creating higher levels of misery with even less sex.
Achieving Maximum Economic Efficiency Through Eugenics
Modern-day politics in all its forms has a very basic problem: people make bad decisions. And as you might expect, poor people tend to make more bad choices than middle class or rich people. That’s one of many reasons why they are poor.
Seemingly unable to fix that most basic of human problems, modern politics has reached a terrible conclusion: it’s not that poor decisions tend to make a person poor, but that poor people naturally make poor decisions.
If it was poor decisions that create poverty, the obvious conclusion would be to try to help people make better decisions. This includes religion, morality, policy, and economic choices. Modern politics certainly believes that’s true on some level, as they continue “nudging” people constantly with policy and messaging.
But if there’s something fundamentally wrong with poor people themselves, what then? Perhaps a more charitable way to frame elite opinion on the matter is that it’s the structure of society that forces these susceptible people into poverty. Well, if that’s the case, then you blow up society. You fundamentally change it, and those susceptible people will no longer be poor. But what do you do until then? As history has shown, poverty can’t be abolished and the New Soviet Man created with only a single Five Year Plan. Well, then you must find a way to limit poverty until you reach Utopia. And if it’s the people themselves who are naturally poor, if you eliminate them, then you eliminate poverty.
We don’t want to see being poor as a moral failing (which in itself it certainly isn’t), so we’ll just view poor people as fundamentally warped? Is that really a nicer belief? And even worse, according to modern thinking, if you and your progeny are destined for poverty, is that a life really worth living?
Abortion (and birth control) began with the original promise of stopping the poor from swamping the Earth. Today, it’s more a concern of natural disasters from climate change than starvation, but it’s same sentiment, alive and well today. These elite people, whether they think poverty is a matter of genetic determinism or class structure, really do believe that poverty is an existential risk to humanity. And, thus, in the name of the common good, they must find a way to eliminate poverty—before it eliminates us.
As Margaret Sanger, founded of Planned Parenthood and the mother of modern population control policy put it, “[Charity] encourages the healthier and more normal sections of the world to shoulder the burden of unthinking and indiscriminate fecundity of others; which brings with it, as I think the reader must agree, a dead weight of human waste. Instead of decreasing and aiming to eliminate the stocks that are most detrimental to the future of the race and the world, it tends to render them to a menacing degree dominant.”
Obviously abortion is just one tool in the modern policy toolbox of poverty reduction (or rather, reduction of the poor). But it hasn’t delivered on its promises.
It’s no secret that abortion’s top customer is Black women. In most cases that’s proportionally true, but here in Michigan, it’s absolutely true: Black women have a majority of abortions in the state, despite being only about a seventh of the female population. One uncomfortable truth that is never spoken in polite circles is that abortion does an effective job in reducing this subset of the population destined for poverty.
It’s so effective, it ought to be shocking. One day at my job with Right to Life of Michigan, I was asked to evaluate an educational resource. One of the claims was than abortion took more Black lives than AIDS, heart disease, and a couple of other causes of death combined.
So, I began looking up death statistics by race. Looking up AIDS statistics by race was extremely frustrating. Perhaps that’s not the case anymore. But that day, I had a job to do, so I decided to zoom out and try working backwards. I was looking at the CDC statistics for all causes of death in a certain year, and I had a terrible realization: there were more Black abortions that year then EVERY cause of death combined. Death on such a scale is unimaginable. In any other circumstance, that would only be defined as ethnic cleansing.
Then I began looking up additional years. It got so bad, I had to stop. A few decades ago, the numbers were even more disparate. Only in recent years with abortion in decline have the Black abortion numbers become even close to the Black deaths figure. No matter what abortion data set you look at, abortion has taken more Black lives than everything else combined since Roe in 1973.
What did we get for all this? Are Black people better off having so many of their children destined for poverty removed from their midst? It doesn’t appear to be that way. You know, “decimating” is supposed to mean only 10%, and abortion has cost a lot more than 10% of the Black population since 1973
Have we made a dent in eliminating poverty? Well, as defined by modern policy wonks, not really. Many people today argue the working class and youth are far worse off. I could quibble about this and would use a very different definition of poverty based on basic questions: are people clothed? Fed? Sheltered? But in any case, few would argue the working poor are far better off today than in 1973; certainly the type of people who decided Roe v. Wade wouldn’t argue that.
Did we eliminate generational poverty? Far from it. I could point to many other circumstances here, for example, globalization decimating Midwest industry in cities large and small.
Some would say, “imagine how worse off we’d be if we had that many more poor children?” But such a question betrays the subtle bigotry of seeing poverty as a destiny for certain people, a disease of individuals or society, rather than a temporary economic reality.
We’re running out of young people, and that’s starting to show up in other economic and policy areas. Western Civilization has embarked on a contradictory mission of importing as many immigrants as possible to make up the population shortfalls, while simultaneously funding population control programs in the nations still producing this vital resource for our economic engine of accumulating more cheap stuff.
Social Security’s bankruptcy date is only 9 years away. Medicare is in even worse shape, going bankrupt in 7 years. Meanwhile, our presidential election will feature two elderly candidates, both of whom believe in spending money like drunken sailors. At least one of those candidates is open to not wiping out our next generation of taxpayers en masse, and it’s not the “Very Catholic” Joe Biden.
Western Civilization seems to be in a state of utter malaise. Some of our leaders praise the situation and seem to be fundamentally anti-human. They believe the less people, the better. Others feverishly try to replace humanity with technology as quickly as possible to hold on to our current levels of stuff. None seem to want to examine abortion for what it is, or what it has done.
Was it Worth the Cost?
Abortion hasn’t led to an economic revolution, more sex, or flourishing and free young ladies.
As we look at those promises, we see there are plenty of other circumstances that arguably had more effect overall on life in America than abortion policy. For example, social media, globalization, etc. But that should lead us to this important question: was that it? Is there nothing more?
Did we really engage in the mass human sacrifice of 60+ million of our children, only for Instagram to have more impact on the lives of young women? Is abortion just a minor footnote in the daily life of America? Were the gods of progress unimpressed, not finding the aroma of this sacrifice to be pleasing?
Certainly for such blood money we should have so much more to show for it. That’s the deal with the Devil we were promised when seven judges took it upon themselves to fundamentally reshape America with a judicial decree in 1973.
For what shall it profit a man if he shall gain less than nothing, and lose his own soul in the process?
The Dobbs decision in 2022 that ended Roe was a great moment for human flourishing. It may not seem that way today with states embroiled in bitter abortion battles, but history will see it differently. All of Western Civilization is facing a dreadful cliff of decline. The rest of the world is on the same path, just behind us. WEIRD countries (Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich and Democratic) are hemorrhaging population at a rate unthinkable for all of human history, except major wars or plagues. Facing this, any reasonable person should agree that priority number one is to stop the bleeding to stabilize the patient. Yet, weirdly, we don’t. Just the opposite, we’ve got future leaders like Gretchen Whitmer out there, cussing and yelling for more blood, to “fight like Hell.”
Until we stabilize our patient, we’re not going to achieve better health. We’ll never fund entitlements with a shrinking base of young people. Economics won’t grow under the burden of crumbling infrastructure and massive debt. Telling people not to commit violence is difficult when we tell them violence against their own children is to be encouraged in specific circumstances.
People won’t be convinced their own lives are worth living if we so casually disregard the lives of others entrusted to our care.