It’s been over four decades since Roe v. Wade and the companion case, Doe v Bolton, the Supreme Court decisions that made abortion legal in all 50 states for any reason, through all nine months of a woman’s pregnancy. Yet it remains unsettled. Why?
Roe was a case based on legal quicksand. In 1973, the majority on the high court found a new constitutional right hiding in the “penumbra of the Bill of Rights.” For the uninitiated, a penumbra is the secondary shadow the moon cast on the earth during a solar eclipse. In other words, the Supreme Court made it up. So if the right to abortion can be found lurking around in the secondary shadows of the Bill of Rights, how many more are lurking around out there? Scary isn’t it?
The Roe decision has troubled many of our greatest legal minds on both the right and the left. Shortly before his retirement in 1986, Chief Justice Warren Burger, who joined Harry Blackmun in that decision, suggested that Roe be “reexamined.” Continue reading “The Issue that Divides the Nation”