On Sunday, June 26, 2022, I stood before both of my congregations in their services, and stated that the overturning of Roe v. Wade by the United States Supreme Court, almost 49 and a half years after the decision was handed down, was 100% good. Then, during prayer, I gave thanks to God that Roe v. Wade was no longer the law of the land. In the month since, I’ve thought about that statement. I stand by it with no wavering at all. I totally believe what I said! Here’s why.
1. Historically, abortion was not allowed. In colonial America, the common law passed down from Sir William Blackstone held that the abortion of a “quickened” fetus was a “very heinous misdemeanor,” with the penalty as much as life in prison. Quickening was when a pregnant woman first feels her child move, generally in the fourth month. Since there were no pregnancy tests in those days, evidence that a baby’s movement had been felt might have been the only way to establish with any certainty in a court of law that a pregnancy had existed.
In the 1800s, states began to pass laws forbidding abortion at any stage, whether the baby could be detected or not. Science was telling us that life begins when a sperm enters an ovum, and the law was catching up. In 1859, the newly formed American Medical Association began to lobby for laws AGAINST abortion. An AMA committee report stated:
“The frightful extent of [abortion in the US] is found in the grave defects of our laws, both common and statute, as regards the independent and actual existence of the child before birth, as a living being. These errors, which are sufficient in most instances to prevent conviction, are based, and only based, upon mistaken and exploded medical dogmas.” By 1910, every state except Kentucky had passed an anti-abortion law, and Kentucky’s courts had declared abortion at any stage of gestation to be illegal. By 1967, not much had changed. In 49 states, abortion was a felony; in New Jersey, it was a high misdemeanor. 29 states also banned abortion advertising, and many outlawed the manufacture or distribution of abortifacients. In 1967, though, state abortion laws began to change after years of organized campaigns by pro-abortion forces (information from ewtn.com).
2. Abortion is rarely a medical necessity. “Dr. Susan Rutherford, a Navy veteran and board certified OB-GYN specializing in maternal-fetal medicine, has seen only one patient in her entire 35+-year career that required an abortion to save her life. ‘She was 16 weeks with severe pre-eclampsia, her liver function was rapidly deteriorating, and she was developing DIC (disseminated intravascular coagulation), which would result in uncontrollable hemorrhaging (bleeding) throughout her body,’ says Rutherford. Thankfully, a tragic circumstance like this is rare.
“‘(F)or most of my career... (I) have been the recipient of complicated obstetrical patients,’ she says. ‘At one point, I was the primary referral person for doctors who, together, delivered about 4,000 patients per year (two hospitals). So if there were situations requiring abortion to save a life, I should have seen some’ (adflegal.org).
3. Very few pregnancies are due to rape or incest. USA Today, hardly a conservative rag, states, “Just 1% of women obtain an abortion because they became pregnant through rape, and less than 0.5% do so because of incest, according to the Guttmacher Institute.”