Ramifications of Roe V. Wade

Today’s quote is quite lengthy, but entirely necessary if the reader is to get the full depth of understanding of the subject.

[The Supreme Court ruling on abortion] is not only arbitrary medically but legally.  The ruling set up an arbitrary absolute by disregarding the intent of the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Amendments of the Constitution.  Quoting Professor [Joseph P.] Witherspoon:

Thus, the failure of the Court in Roe v. Wade to have examined into the actual purpose and intent of the legislature in framing the fourteenth amendment and the thirteenth amendment to which it was so closely related and supplementary thereof when it was considering the meaning to be assigned to the concept of “person” was a failure to be faithful to the law or to respect the legislature which framed it.  Careful research of the history of these two amendments will demonstrate to any impartial investigator that there is overwhelming evidence supporting the proposition that the principal, actual purpose of their framers was to prevent any court, and especially the Supreme Court of the United States, because of its earlier performance in the Dred Scott case, or any other institution of government, whether legislative or executive, from ever again defining the concept of person so as to exclude any class of human beings from the protection of the Constitution and the safeguards it established for the fundamental rights of human beings, including slaves, peons, Indians, aliens, women, the poor, the aged, criminals, the mentally ill or retarded, and children, including the unborn, from the time of their conception.

Supreme Court Justice White in his dissent to the Court’s action stated, “As an exercise of raw judicial power, the Court perhaps has authority to do what it does today; but in my view its judgment is an improvident and extravagant exercise of the power of judicial review that the Constitution extends to this Court.”  Upon this arbitrary ruling medically and legally, the Supreme Court invalidated the law on this subject of abortion of almost every one of the states in the union.

Further, this arbitrary decision is at complete variance with the past Christian consensus.  In the pagan Roman Empire, abortion was freely practiced, but Christians took a stand against it.  In 314 the Council of Ancyra barred from taking of the Lord’s Supper for ten years all who procured abortions or made drugs to further abortions.  Previously the Synod of Elvira (305-306) had specified excommunication till the deathbed for these offenses.  The arbitrary absolutes of the Supreme Court are accepted against the previous consensus of centuries, as well as against past law.  And (taking abortion as an example) if this arbitrary absolute by law is accepted by most modern people, bred with the concept of no absolutes but rather relativity, why wouldn’t arbitrary absolutes in regard to such matters as authoritarian limitations on freedom be equally accepted as long as they were thought to be sociologically helpful?  We are left with sociological law without any certainty of limitation.  

By the ruling of the Supreme Court, the unborn baby is not counted as a person.  In our day, quite rightly, there has been a hue and cry against some of our ancestors’ cruel viewing of the black slave as a non-person.  This was horrible indeed—an act of hypocrisy as well as cruelty.  But now, by an arbitrary absolute brought in on the humanist flow, millions of unborn babies of every color of skin are equally by law declared non-persons.  Surely this, too, must be seen as an act of hypocrisy.

The door is open.  In regard to the fetus, the courts have arbitrarily separated “aliveness” from “personhood,” and if this is so, why not arbitrarily do the same with the aged?  So the steps move along, and euthanasia may well become increasingly acceptable.  And if so, why not keep alive the bodies of the so-called neo-morts (persons in whom the brain wave is flat) to harvest from them body parts and blood, when the polls show that this has become acceptable to the majority?  Dr. Willard Gaylin (1925- ) discussed this possibility in Harper’s (September 1974) under the title, “Harvesting the Dead.”  Law has become a matter of averages, just as the culture’s sexual mores have become only a matter of averages.  

As the Christian consensus dies, there are not many sociological alternatives.  One possibility is hedonism, in which every man does his own thing.  Trying to build a society on hedonism leads to chaos.  One man can live on a desert island and do as he wishes within the limits of the form of the universe, but as soon as two men live on the island, if they are to live in peace, they cannot both do simply as they please.  …

A second possibility is the absoluteness of the 51-percent vote.  In the days of a more Christian culture, a lone individual with the Bible could judge and warn society, regardless of the majority vote, because there was an absolute by which to judge.  There was an absolute for both morals and law.  Bu to the extent that the Christian consensus is gone, this absolute is gone as a social force.  Let us remember that on the basis of the absoluteness of the 51-percent vote, Hitler was perfectly entitled to do as he wished if he had the popular support.  On this basis, law and morals become a matter of averages.  And on this basis, if the majority vote supported it, it would become “right” to kill the old, the incurably ill, the insane—and other groups could be declared non-persons.  No voice could be raised against it. . . .

Here is a simple but profound rule:  If there are no absolutes by which to judge society, then society is absolute.

Francis A. Schaeffer, How Should We Then Live?, p.221-224 (1976) (emphasis in the original)