What it
Would Mean to Overturn Roe
by Carl R.
Trueman
reprinted
from
First Things August 26,
2021
The Supreme Court decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health
Organization, a case that directly challenges our country's
abortion regime, will have repercussions far beyond the confines of abortion
law. Should the Court's decision in Dobbs overturn Roe v. Wade and Planned Parenthood v. Casey,
then the future of legal abortion in America will truly be transformed. Should Roe and Casey stand, not
only will it be business-as-usual for the culture of death; it will also likely
change the nature of partisan politics in the United States. The pro-life
cause, particularly in Christian circles, has made support for the GOP a
virtual Kantian moral imperative for many years. And the one area in which
Donald Trump can be said to have exceeded expectations was that of federal
judicial appointments, especially to the Supreme Court.
In
the past, Republican appointees to the Supreme Court have consistently
delivered very little. David Souter, Sandra Day O’Connor, and everyone’s
favorite anthropological mystic Anthony Kennedy all proved catastrophically
weak in this area. Indeed, it was a Reagan appointee—Kennedy—who came up with
the definition of personhood as pure autonomy and mystical subjectivity in Casey. At some point the
failings of GOP appointees must surely cease to be regarded as anomalies and
instead be seen as a pattern. With six Republican appointees on the Roberts
court, a failure to overturn Roe in Dobbs would reveal a hard
truth. It would confirm suspicions that many of us have harbored for many
years: Pro-life rhetoric is great for votes, and for energizing the religious
base, but not much else. In the future, a vote for the GOP on the basis that it
will change abortion laws would seem vulnerable to Dr. Johnson’s comment on
second marriages: the triumph of hope over experience.
A
ruling in Dobbs that overturns Roe will not only dispense
with badly reasoned law and protect at least some of the innocent. Laws do not
simply provide the legal terms by which society is organized; they also reflect
the kind of society we aspire to be. When evidence emerged that the United
States had tortured prisoners in Abu Ghraib, some called for the legalization
of such methods on the grounds that they could then be regulated. Yet it seemed
obvious that for the United States to do so would be to abandon any aspiration
to the moral high ground in such matters. It is true that a state’s hypocrisy
and ethical inconsistency are bad; but they are not as bad as the
institutionalization of evil. The same applies to abortion: Its
institutionalization is an evil, both for the lives it destroys and for the subhuman
notion of adult humanity that it presupposes and, by codifying in law,
promotes. It is part of a culture of death, for sure; but it is also part of a
culture that rejects the idea that the dependent status of the weak carries
with it moral obligations for the strong—indeed, that dependency and obligation
to one another are what make us truly human.
Using Dobbs to overturn Roe will therefore move
our society slightly closer to a more accurate understanding of what it means
to be human. Abortion is couched in the language of choice and liberty,
something that strikes an obvious—and cynical—rhetorical chord with the
American soul; but in reality it reflects a profoundly defective anthropology,
according to which every individual is sovereign and everybody else we
encounter, even our own children, are to be considered first and foremost a
threat to that sovereignty.
As
both Carter Snead and Erika Bachiochi have
recently argued, this defective anthropology has perverted both bioethics and
feminism, turning them into the very opposite of what they claim to be. Human
beings are not primarily independent sovereign agents with rights; rather, we
are dependent rational creatures. We have obligations to those dependent upon
us because we too were dependent as children and will be dependent again in our
dotage. Abortion is simply one way in which a fictional notion of what it means
to be human is reflected in our culture and enabled by law. In denying the
obligation of the mother and father to the child, legal abortion denies not
simply the personhood of the child in the womb, but also the humanity of the
mother and the father.
And
so repealing such law would not only protect the innocent, but also affirm the
truth about humanity and remind us of our innate obligations to others. The
Supreme Court should overturn Roe and Casey in Dobbs. This would be a strike
against Kennedy’s bizarre definition of personhood in Casey and push society
toward a proper concept of what it means to be an adult human person: one who
understands obligations toward dependents. Republican-appointed justices who do
not understand that are no friends to conservatism—or to humanity.
Carl Trueman is a professor of biblical and religious studies at Grove City College and a fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center.
No comments:
Post a Comment